Holy Orders, by Benjamin Black – review

It’s always a little disconcerting for the rest of us when literary novelists turn to crime. Have they become different writers? John Banville, winner of the 2005 Man Booker Prize with The Sea, has published seven crime thrillers. He writes as Benjamin Black. He certainly looks different — Black has a matching author photo that shows a sinister figure resembling a melancholy Mafia hitman with half his face in shadow.

Quirke, Black’s series protagonist, is a Dublin pathologist in the 1950s, not that there’s a great deal of medical detail in the novels. He refers to himself as ‘a consultant to the dead’ and, like Colin Dexter’s Morse, is known only by his surname. He has a taste for handmade shoes. He is an alcoholic with misanthropic tendencies. He is attractive to women. His family life is not so much dysfunctional as rampantly gothic, with tendrils of illegitimacy, adultery, cruelty, confusions about parentage and plain old-fashioned nastiness shooting off in all directions.