THE LOCK-UP. By John Banville. Faber & Faber
John Banville has published four novels in two and a half years, including three thrillers featuring detective St John Strafford. Two of these also feature pathologist Garret Quirke, a familiar figure to readers of the 1950-set thrillers written by Banville under the nom de plume Benjamin Black.
By the time this latest splendid addition to the series opens,Strafford (whom we first encountered in the 2020 Snow) and Quirke are reluctant, not to say inimical, colleagues, Quirke unfairly blaming Strafford for what he saw as a slow response to a murderous attack that left Quirke’s life in ruins at the end of 2021’s April in Spain. And he’s even less kindly disposed towards Strafford in the new book.
Indeed, “there was little love lost between these two. Strafford knew well that Quirke resented him for his Big House origins, while Quirke wondered if this languid fellow with his waistcoat and watch chain and drooping lock of hair could be the same person whom he had witnessed shooting an assassin to death on the floor of a restaurant in Spain not half a year ago, seemingly without turning a hair of that drooping lock”.
Quirke is also battling his alcoholic demons, not always with success, and is given to outbursts of rage, unlike Strafford, who “didn’t go in much for friendship” but “rarely gave way to anger, and when he did, he made sure not to show it”. However, the more he saw of Quirke, the less he cared for him. What was he but a boor in a Savile Row suit?” And as for Quirke, there was in Strafford’s demeanour and personality “something that always sparked his ire”.
Add to that Strafford’s growing closeness to Quirke’s beloved daughter Phoebe, in whose Mount Street flat her father currently resides, and the stage is set for even more hostility. But meanwhile there’s a death to be solved in a lockup garage adjacent to Baggot Street, with Quirke determining that murder rather than a supposed suicide was behind the demise of young Jewish woman Rosa Jacobs.
This leads Quirke into a relationship with Rosa’s journalist sister Molly, over from London for the funeral. It also leads to a German businessman with a hidden Nazi past who’s selling components for a nuclear weapon to the Israelis, and to various other subsidiary characters, all of them vividly realised.
Not the least of these is chief inspector Hackett’s old schoolmate, Tommy McEvoy, who’s now a bumptious bishop and who warns him off pursuing the lines of inquiry being undertaken by Strafford and Quirke. The German businessman, he tells Hackett, is “a great friend of the Church, a great benefactor”.
This encounter takes place in Wynn’s hotel on lower Abbey Street and Banville delights in evoking the clerical atmosphere of the hotel’s bar, with so many priests frequenting the place that, as McEvoy gleefully puts it, “On a Saturday night you’d think you were in the penguin house up at the zoo”.
There are vivid evocations, too, of such other Dublin landmarks as the Hibernian hotel on Dawson Street, Jammet’s restaurant on Nassau Street, the Stephen’s Green Club, Neary’s and the Brazen Head pubs, the Kylemore Bakeries, Mespil Road and the Number 10 bus.
The novel’s opening pages take place at a monastery in the Dolomite alps in the mid-1940s and, much later on, there’s a telling and chillingly resonant chapter set in Bavaria, but at the book’s heart is the Ireland of the 1950s. This is a country where, Strafford reflects, people had long and bitter memories of their former oppressors and had “only to hear him speak to know him for a Protestant, and therefore, inevitably, to know he was not one of them. What was he doing in the Garda force, they would ask, in their Garda force?”
The book is expertly plotted and beautifully paced, while at the very end there’s a twist that seemingly comes out of nowhere but adds an extra dimension to an engrossing and unpredictable story that’s been masterfully assembled and arranged by its author.
