A noir writer's quiet life in Dublin

In today's modern Dublin, John Banville keeps himself occupied by tending to his garden and spending time with his grandson.

It is a far cry from the city of corruption, sleaze and murder that he depicts in his series of crime fictions starring the lonely pathologist, Quirke. In Banville's latest novel, Elegy for April, a young girl with a wild reputation has disappeared. Her friends and family have not heard from her in weeks and a thick fog has shrouded 1950s Dublin in an eerie, ghostly blanket.

Banville, writing under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, describes Dublin in the mid-20th century as the ideal place to "write noir fiction".

"Irish society was a closed society back then, very like East European societies under communism. They had the Communist Party, we had the Catholic Church. Both had the same kind of control over every level of our lives. It was a ghastly time but as usual we did not know how ghastly it was until afterwards. It was just a time we were living through. All that fog and cigarette smoke and all those deep dark secrets — it was a dark time but an absolutely fascinating time," he said.

Confronted with scandals

"Of course, some things never change but we have had to learn certain unpalatable truths. In 1992 it was revealed that a very important bishop had an American mistress and a 17-year-old son. He paid off the woman and then the floodgates opened and all these scandals started to tumble out.

Since then we have had blow after blow to our national self-esteem. We had to realise that never again could we say about the Germans: ‘How can it happen there?' What we had was not the Holocaust but we had the same attitude. We knew what was going on, we knew about child abuse and we knew about the appalling treatment of young women and we did nothing about it. We have to wrestle with our consciences."

The novel's main protagonist, Quirke, in many ways defines the troubled period he lives in. In Elegy for April we first encounter him leaving rehab at the House of St John of the Cross where he admitted himself after a six-month alcoholic bender. Quirke is a man with deep, dark secrets in his past and he is yet to find a way of escaping them.

Banville, who was born in Wexford, added: "In Ireland we don't have many alcoholics. We just have people who are heavy drinkers. Quirke has a lot of dark things in his past. For instance when his wife died, he gave his infant daughter away to his brother-in-law and his wife, who brought her up as their own. Quirke denied his daughter this knowledge for the first 19 years of her life, which is a dark burden to carry. He is terribly selfish.

"Quirke has had many adventures. This is his third and I am in the midst of writing his fourth. He would have been a prominent figure on the landscape back in those days. He is a powerful man who is quite well off but he is also a troubled man. He is an orphan and his early years are a blank. He is also a widower as his wife died during childbirth about 20 years ago. He does not know what his origins were so he has a lost past, which is one of the reasons for his curiosity and insatiable inquisitiveness.

"He is constantly trying to find out about other people and their secrets. I love making up a plot for these books. They amuse me and there is a childish kind of pleasure in putting together a mystery. I hope that is communicated to the reader. I always shy away from the word inspiration."

The disappearance of his daughter's close friend, April Latimer, gives Quirke something to worry about other than his dependence on alcohol. He gets involved in the investigation of her whereabouts, which apparently remain a mystery even to her close family.

Missing in action

Banville said: "April Latimer has a wild reputation but that was an easy thing for a girl to acquire in 1950s Dublin. You did not have to do very much to be labelled as wild. April is an interesting character because she pervades the book. Every-body talks about her, misses her and wants to know what has happened to her. Quirke, a pathologist, and his friend, Inspector Hackett, begin to investigate and they uncover many murky family secrets along the way. I found it very interesting to conjure up a character without actually bringing her into the action."

Banville was awarded the Man Booker Prize in 2005 for one of his earlier novels The Sea and was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize in 2007. He is already working on the next instalment of the Benjamin Black series.

He said: "I felt a great childish pleasure [at winning the Man Booker Prize], like I had been given the largest toy in the shop for Christmas. You would be very foolish to take prizes seriously but they sell books and they are good for publishers. They are generally a good thing. I don't scoff at the prize because they are good for the book business and good for literature.

"The next Quirke novel is a convoluted mystery of family and individual secrets. It is high summer and they are experiencing a heatwave, when an apparent suicide in the city very quickly begins to look like a murder. Quirke has a connection with the family, a very prominent family, and he begins to investigate.

"I am too old to set a novel in modern times. I do not know enough about contemporary life. I am getting to that age where I reread stuff, tend to my garden and enjoy spending time with my grandson. I will leave it to younger writers to write about the contemporary world."