mploying the silly "Benjamin Black" nom de noir, the kind of name that sounds like the kinds of books such a name would write, undermines everything the crime novel can be and has been, from Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye to Boris Vian's I Spit on your Graves to Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy to Josef Svkorecky's Two Murders in My Double Life: Each a crime novel, and each not just a crime novel, doing that wonderful thing that great literature does, and that is positioning a reader in a kind of marriage - a seduction of talking back, arguing, debating, fretting, disagreeing, pummeling, enlightening. Odd, too, since his The Book of Evidence and The Sea, seduced me so; afternoons I can clearly remember, sitting at the very desk where I write this review today, where I denied the reality of my hands caressing the material pages for the metaphysical vows beyond. So what is this Benjamin Black person all about?
No writer is better qualified to speak about the author/pseudonym duality than Donald Westlake, contemporary crime fiction's King Pseud, with more than a half-a-dozen personas to his credit (the most famed being that of Richard Stark), as he did in his essay "A Pseudonym Returns from an Alter-Ego Trip, with New Tales to Tell," for the New York Times: "Writing begins with language, and it is in that initial choosing, that choice of vocabulary and grammar and tone… that determines who's sitting at that desk. Language creates the writer's attitude toward the particular story he's decided to tell."
And that's all the difference in the world. Benjamin Black uses language on a fulcrum tilt descending earthbound compared to cool, prose mist of John Banville's. The clichés ("Mal went a whiter shade of white;" "(Quirke) was three sheets over."); the tired movie simile ("It was like one of those scenes in a movie when the whole audience knows exactly what is going to happen yet holds its breath in suspense."); the submissive repetition ("'Whatever you say, darling,' she said with a sigh, 'whatever you say.'") With these mounting offenders, you sense that Benjamin Black would roll his eyes at the meditative serenity of The Book of Evidence or the temptations of memory in The Sea, while remaining satisfied at its own approximation of reality and grim conclusions. And everything - everything - in Christine Falls is resolved. In that sense it achieves something very interesting. Just after Dorothy L. Sayers hollows the possibilities of the crime novel in her introduction, she offers this compensation:
"There is one respect, at least, in which the detective-story has an advantage over every other kind of novel. It possesses an Aristotelian perfection of beginning, middle, and end. A definite problem is set, worked out, and solved."
"There is one respect, at least, in which the detective-story has an advantage over every other kind of novel. It possesses an Aristotelian perfection of beginning, middle, and end. A definite problem is set, worked out, and solved."
