Christine Falls

In her 1929 introduction to The Omnibus of Crime, Dorothy L. Sayers wrote that the detective story "does not, and by hypothesis never can, attain the loftiest level of literary achievement." An indifferent denouncement that fifteen years later surged to life from its bloodless slab in Raymond Chandler's manifesto "The Simple Art of Murder." With the sang-froid of the new, unchallenged breed - the hard-boiled, or Black Mask, school of detective fiction - he rebutted coolly: "I think what was really gnawing at her mind was the slow realization that her kind of detective story was an arid formula which could not even satisfy its own implications. It was second-grade literature because it was not about the things that could make first-grade literature. If it started out to be about real people… they must very soon do unreal things in order to form the artificial pattern required by the plot… They became puppets and cardboard lovers and papier mâché villains and detectives of exquisite and impossible gentility. The only kind of writer who could be happy with these properties was the one who did not know what reality was."

Zing!

But the wound healed, and sixty years later, with rare exceptions (James Ellroy and Elmore Leonard immediately come to mind), the American detective form has forsaken the kind of cutting reality Chandler passionately wrote about, replacing it with the franchise writer; while in the UK, the formula remains cozily rooted in W.H Auden's "guilty vicarage," with its emissaries of exposition and Ladies laying pipe. With this dry state of affairs it's no wonder that the Man Booker Prize-winning novelist John Banville (The Sea) has created a literary tabula rasa in the form of Benjamin Black, releasing his "debut" novel Christine Falls.

While Christine Falls may be categorically labeled a crime novel (there is a dead body and a missing baby, after all), its better blood is the study of contrasts between Malachy and Quirke, high and low, light and dark. Each is the son of the powerful though seemingly affable Judge Griffin: Malachy by blood; Quirke via a brutal orphanage. Each are doctors: easily irritated Malachy works with the living and the soon-to-be living as an obstetrician, while easily drunk Quirke keeps it quiet in the basement morgue as a pathologist. Malachy, with his "smooth seal's head of oiled black hair, scrupulously combed and parted," values social ranking and austere esteem, while the burly, frayed blonde Quirke "prized his loneliness as a mark of some distinction."

Each married one of tycoon's Josh Crawford's girls: Malachy to Sarah; Quirke to Delia. Quirke's wife is dead; Malachy's alive - but Quirke has always harbored a love for Sarah, a secret everyone knows, including his niece, the charming and reckless Phoebe. We meet the brothers in Quirke's morgue: Quirke, drunk from a farewell hospital party, finds stone sober Malachy (after his attending own diametrically-opposed gathering, a Knights of St. Patrick's dinner), sitting in his chair, fooling with a file labeled Christine Falls. Malachy explains he "had a thing to check." Quirke examines the body on the trolley: "The corpse of a young woman, slim and yellow haired, but death had robbed her of her features, and now she might be a carving in soapstone, primitive and bland." Malachy exits. Quirke then passes out, awakes on the cold morgue floor, slightly confused, then legs it home, and the next morning back in the morgue, the body is gone. So begins the unraveling of these two brothers, the tensions coming to bear, the loyalties - familial, filial, spousal, social, personal, sacramental - tested to their very marrow.

At least that's what you would expect. Instead, Christine Falls sacrifices its human potential for plot. This is an incredibly tight novel. The tension never lets up. Everything is at stake. And for this reader, those are the qualities that keep it from breathing outside its hermetically sealed structure. So contained, the novel cuts itself off from heated engagement, proposing nothing more than the visceral zoink of its charted course of events - Quirke's brooding obsession over Christine Falls' misdiagnosis (too young to die of a pulmonary embolism), and the whereabouts of her missing baby; Malachy's subversion of the truth; the Johnny No Marks thugs, the cackhanded upper-echelon sociopaths, the toughie charitable broads sacrificing all, and the guilty nuns confessing nothing - because after all, it's only a crime novel, and can never - remember - "attain the loftiest level of literary achievement."