Somebody, somewhere, must be writing a PhD exploring why authors of literary fiction so often try their hands at a crime novel and why some of them come a cropper in the process. The latest author to hear the siren call of crime is John Banville, winner of last year’s Man Booker Prize. Christine Falls is set in the 1950s. Written under the pen name of Benjamin Black, it is billed as the first of a series and takes place in Dublin and the environs of Boston, Massachusetts. Its lumbering protagonist, Quirke, practises as a pathologist — ‘a consultant to the dead’ — at the Holy Family Hospital in Dublin. Grim and lethargic, sustained by a diet consisting principally of whisky and cigarettes, he is a childless widower known only by his surname even to his nearest and dearest.

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