"It's a particularly bleak January reason enough for literary escape. But, while some readers opt for sunshine (maybe a romance or historical novel) others are drawn to a genre that transports us deeper into darkness, while also affirming the power of reason to arrive at some clarity. I'm talking of course about noir fiction. And turning up just in time to accompany us through the gloom, here comes Quirke, again."
"Quirke is the anti-hero of a series of mysteries set in 1950s Dublin written by Irish novelist John Banville. A coroner and pathologist, Quirke who goes by one name only dwells, as he's put it, "Down among the dead men" in the basement morgue of a hospital. Banville, who won the Booker Prize for his 2005 literary novel, The Sea, published his first Quirke mystery in 2006, under the pseudonym Benjamin Black."
"Even the Dead finds Quirke recovering from traumatic brain injuries he sustained in a previous investigation. He's suffering from "absence seizures," which Quirke describes as: "the odd moment of separation from myself." We're told early on that: He had pills to make him sleep, and other pills to keep him calm when he was awake. And so the days trickled past, each one much the same as all the others. He felt like Robinson Crusoe, grown old on his island."
The Quirke series centers on a coroner-pathologist in 1950s Dublin who inhabits the hospital morgue and confronts death and moral ambiguity. Quirke endures traumatic brain injuries and 'absence seizures,' relies on medication, and experiences dissociation and routine. The novels blur the boundary between literary prose and detective plot, featuring a pensive atmosphere and subdued beauty of language. In Even the Dead, Quirke's assistant discovers a suspicious skull indentation in a supposedly suicidal, charred corpse, suggesting foul play and prompting renewed investigation. The stories pair noir darkness with forensic reason to uncover hidden secrets beneath respectable surfaces.
Read at www.npr.org
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]