The Lock-Up by John Banville: A book that no discerning crime fan should miss – book review –

What you might not expect is that this extraordinary author – with a gift for words that raises crime writing to dizzy heights of literary excellence – is producing some of his best work yet.

The evidence is there to see in Wexford-born John Banville’s brilliant Strafford and Quirke Mystery series which is set in Dublin in the 1950s and features the uneasy double act between two flawed, fallible and fascinating men... pathologist Dr Quirke and Detective Inspector St John Strafford.

The series is mired in dirty politics, religious tensions between Catholics and Protestants, and crimes that perfectly reflect the debates and concerns of this post-war period in Ireland... all brought to vivid and visceral life by an assortment of exquisitely imagined characters, perfectly nuanced stories, and dark, intriguing mysteries.

In The Lock-Up – the follow-up to the excellent Snow and April in Spain which were both shortlisted for the CWA Historical Dagger – Quirke and Strafford return for their most disturbing case yet at a time when their already strained relationship is threatening to become untenable.

In 1950s Dublin, Rosa Jacobs, a young Jewish history scholar at Trinity College, is found dead in her car in a rented lock-up garage in the city. It would be appear to be a suicide but renowned pathologist Dr Quirke suspects foul play because there is evidence that a rag soaked in chloroform had been put over her face and then removed before she died.

Also on the case is DI St John Strafford, a man whose Protestant religion makes him ‘an anomaly’ in the Garda, a police force now operating in a free and independent Ireland which is very much controlled by the Catholic Church and has Rome as ‘the Republic’s second, ultra-montane, capital. Or the first, as some would say.’

The two men are barely on speaking terms after Quirke’s wife Evelyn was shot during a recent case, a situation made worse by the pathologist’s belief that Strafford – whose own wife has walked out on him – could have saved her.

With no option but to work together, they start investigating Rosa’s death as a murder but it’s Rosa’s older sister Molly – a newspaper reporter in London who has returned to Dublin to join the two men in their quest to uncover the truth – who discovers a lead that could crack open the case.

It turns out that one of Rosa’s friends is Franz (Frank) Kessler, a man from a powerful German family that arrived in Ireland under mysterious circumstances shortly after the war and is now living in County Wicklow.

As they explore her links to the wealthy Germans and the investigative work that Rosa may have been doing in Israel, they are confronted with an ever-deepening mystery. But as Quirke and Strafford close in, and their investigation takes them back to the final days of the Second World War, their personal lives may put the case, and the lives of everyone involved, in peril, including Quirke’s own daughter.

The Lock-up can easily be read as a standalone but it would enhance the reading pleasure to have already made acquaintance with these two lonely, introspective detectives from opposite sides of the religious divide... Strafford who relishes his solitude, and Quirke, a driven man whose restless loneliness can give him a resentful and ‘savage edge.’

As always, Banville’s classy crime mystery plays out slowly and tantalisingly against a multi-layered and authentic backdrop in which plot lines merge and separate, memories have an important role, and the reader’s carefully considered whodunit guesswork may well be rent asunder by the final, shocking revelation.

But this is also very much a tale of people in a certain time and place... what makes them tick, their hopes, their fears, the causes that drive them and, in the case of Quirke, how he handles a bereavement that consumes his everyday thoughts. ‘The thing about grief was that you could press upon its sharpest points and blunt them, only for the bluntness to spread throughout the system and make it ache like a vast bruise.’

Filled with Banville’s rich and descriptive power, his masterful storytelling which provides an unflinching glimpse of the Catholic Church in Europe’s shameful role in helping fleeing Nazis, this is a story that spans Italy’s mountaintops, the front lines of wartime Bavaria, and the gritty streets of 1950s Dublin.

A book that no discerning crime fan should miss...

(Faber & Faber, hardback, £16.99)