When John Banville decided to write a straightforward mystery novel he adopted the pen name of Benjamin Black. This gave him permission to write faster, and be more interested in a plot driven story. "Christine Falls" is the first of these novels, and despite the different approach, the old Banville is, thankfully, still evident.

Banville's signature attention to the details of weather - passing clouds, changing light, the effect of mist, sleet, and cold weather - makes the book worth reading on its own. Set largely in 1950's Dublin, there is a conviviality in the indoor scenes which comes largely from the contrast to the weather outdoors. The main character, Quirke, is a pathologist who stumbles onto a plot involving the distribution of unwanted orphans to Boston. The scheme involves his close family, and he must decide whether or not to proceed, as he is warned off at all levels.

While the story is indeed plot driven, it it not at the expense of Banville's exquisite attention to descriptive detail, his evocation of place, his uncanny ability to conjure up a scene and a mood through description of smells. The ending of the story is frenetic, and somewhat improbable, but this is still a book to be savored and enjoyed.

Widower, moody, broody, drunken Garret Quirke is in charge of the pathology department in the basement of Dublin's Holy Family Hospital. It's the 1950's, Ireland is steeped in Catholic tradition, but when Quirke wanders downstairs from a going away party and finds his step-brother/brother-in-law Dr. Malachy Griffin (they married sisters) messing around with the cause of death of Christine Falls, he is curious.

It turns out Mal altered the cause of death, so that it didn't say she died in child birth. Quirke thinks this is more than his brother protecting the reputation of a fallen woman and though he has no authority and is warned off, he investigates anyway. He is an obstinate bulldog who will get at the truth, no matter what is done to him, no matter how it will affect his family. If they are destroyed, so be it, truth will out.

I liked Quirke and I liked this dark book where nobody really comes out a winner. Many, myself included, will compare this with the works of Black's alter ego, John Banville. Okay, Banville's his real name, everybody knows this, but Black's the real writer. Yes, yes, I know Banville's won the Man Booker Prize. But Black is the one winning the readers, because Black's a better writer. I read this book in one night, it took me a week to get through The Sea. Yes, I know it's beautifully written and only a couple hundred pages, but I just kept setting it down. I simply didn't care for the characters or the story the way I did that of Quirke and crew. But, of course, I had no choice, because this book grabbed me by the throat and wouldn't let go till I finished.

Inspired by the Inspector Maigret novels of French author Georges Simenon, Irish novelist and Booker Prize winner ("The Sea") John Banville took up crime writing as he was approaching 60, adopting a new name, Benjamin Black, and a new approach to writing.

Black, he says, is more of a storyteller than Banville and a lot faster as a writer. Like Simenon, Black aims for a direct, pared-down style. Readers may find his noirish books more reminiscent of Ian Rankin and Ken Bruen than Simenon, but the characters share a certain enigmatic mystery.

Black's first two crime novels are set in 1950s Dublin. His protagonist is consultant pathologist Quirke, a determined loner, alcoholic and stubborn contrarian ("...in secret Quirke prized his loneliness as a mark of some distinction."). He lives in the apartment Banville himself had lived in the 1960s as a struggling writer. Though Quirke is not struggling, the dingy apartment suits his bleak outlook. An orphan, scarred by his years in a regimented, brutal Catholic orphanage, he had been eventually rescued and taken in by Judge Garret Griffin, still a prominent Dublin figure.

Quirke is a widower who enjoys a certain guilty relief in a continuing grief for his wife, who died 20 years before in childbirth. She was a lively, compelling woman but he had always preferred her sister, Sarah, who had married the Judge's son, Mal, now a prominent obstetrician. Quirke enjoys an indulgent-uncle relationship with their mildly rebellious daughter Phoebe, 20.

As "Christine Falls" begins, Quirke, very drunk, stumbles upon Mal in Quirke's office in the morgue, writing in a file. It's the file of a young woman, said to have died of an embolism, unusual in one so young. Quirke soon discovers she had worked in the judge's household and she died, not of an embolism, but in childbirth.

Unwed motherhood in deeply conservative, Catholic 1950s Dublin was a catastrophe, a shame from which there was no recovery. Secrecy was the only recourse. Quirke, unsure of his own motives, doggedly traces the life and death of Christine Falls, disregarding Mal's warnings, unearthing secrets that shock even him.

Assault and murder punctuate the course of his careening, often drunken pursuit of truth, which, we all know, will lead to nothing good.

Black brings a gritty, repressed, downtrodden Dublin to claustrophobic life. Quirke's fear and loathing of Mother Church is palpable. When he first confronts Mal with all he has learned it's in the hospital chapel, a place he generally avoids. "The Holy Family chapel was small, without pillars or side alcoves, so that there was no avoiding the beady eye of the little oil lamp with the ruby-red globe that burned perpetually before the tabernacle."

While the novel is character rather than plot driven, Black manages to contain plenty of suspense in a tale that exposes the underbelly of power and social constructs as well as personal conflicts. The characters, while intensely explored, retain their essential privacy. Beautifully written and evocative of a bygone Dublin, Black's debut fully satisfies. Readers will wish Quirke a long career.

I rarely open a mystery, but I've enjoyed most of Banville's fiction (see my reviews on Amazon), so I came to this with high expectations. I wasn't disappointed but I wasn't elevated. Given that this is priest-ridden, dreary 1950s Dublin, I expected the gloomy mood would infuse the prose. However, it also permeates the plot. Now, while Banville-as-Black certainly knows how to create powerful studies of characters caught in their own manipulations and machinations, the plodding pace of this novel, staying mainly upon Quirke, too often drifts into sameness and thickens into dullness.

Not for nothing does our protagonist feel that he's trudging along, so resigned to the weary beat he follows that he lures himself into acting like he's found rest in the long march itself, rather than its respite. While the eerie atmosphere of the autopsy room and the lambent light in McGonagle's pub show the author's ability to conjure up mid-century Dublin at best (or worst) in its somber moments, the orphanage scenes and those with the Scituate moss mansion's dwellers pale by comparison.

You feel as if Banville-Black's trying on an American setting and gingerly imagining it, rather than conveying it to us as a lived-in place. The American scenes with hard-bitten Cora (who reminds me of a figure from a James M. Cain thriller), timid Claire, and louche Andy-- while necessary to the intricate if fussy plotting-- also jar with much of the Irish texture of the story. The appearance of a key if minor figure from early in the narrative later in the Crawford household does appear too neat even in an Irish-faithful milieu where everyone knows everyone else, whether in Dublin or Boston.

That being said, the storyline-- however melancholy and rather under-imagined (I wanted more on the Knights, Costigan's thugs, and the whole rationale barely glimpsed of "the forcing school" that underlay the grand sinister scheme)-- does feature, as with all of Banville, moments of artistry that few writers can keep producing, at a quality level one book after another, and so long into their careers. Whether a simple contrast between time sharpening what space blurs at a distance, or the mindset of a man trapped in his own limbo, or the passage of light across the floor, Banville notes with precision what many authors would scatter.

My reviews of Banville always excerpt my favorite passage from each novel, so here's a sample from this "entertainment." Decay and deceit invade every page of this novel. Describing a character's uneasiness as Quirke teases out what Quirke believes early on would be the "hidden truth," we see how the fidgeting, the mannerisms, and the hesitations find a correlative in the fading atmosphere that tries to penetrate into the closed environs of the sheltering, hermetic pub. The author conjures up the feel of the place, and this corresponds to the interior within the man under observation by Quirke.

"Mal was kneading the knees of his trousers. He kept his eyes fixed unseeing on the table and the newspaper. The evening sun had found a chink somewhere at the top of the painted-over window at the front of the bar and was depositing a faint, trembling gold lozenge of light on the floor carpet beside where they sat." (50)

I immediately began "The Silver Swan," the sequel, moments after concluding my stint with Quirke's début appearance. I might add, so far, that Quirke and companions appear more vigorous, more three-dimensional, and more varied in their next evocation. The plot's livelier and the pace quickens considerably; I estimate that having worked out Quirke's reticence in "Christine Falls," the author's able to let Quirke and his established characters loose to expand into their roles and backstories. I hope that the energy and more complex narrative shifts in the latter book fulfill their promise. (Check back for my review!) Like Graham Greene, Banville may divide his serious novels from his whodunits, but they share a fascination with this moral: "We all have our own kinds of sin."

It is impossible to adequately evaluate Black's writing due to Timothy Dalton's narration, which varies from "over the top" silly to soporific.