I am continuing to enjoy John Banville’s detective novels. They number more than 10 now and I find them a pleasure to delve into. 

Blending the mystery story with his distinctive literary sensibility, he provides plenty of drama, fresh perspectives and challenges with each book; there are playful interconnections between novels, and a realistic, often disturbing look at the historical problems of Ireland, his home country. This year I have checked off two more, “Snow” (2020) and his most recent offering, “The Drowned” (2025). There was less Quirke than I expected but they remained gripping and engaging.

They made excellent bedtime reading — a chapter or two at a sitting (I am usually pillow-prone, of course) promotes a good sleep for me even though I am usually alert enough to appreciate Banville’s verbal flourishes, his interesting characterizations, and his plotting strategies.

Readers often consume their books in intense gobbles, perhaps in a single reading. Certainly, all approaches are at play, but I am fairly deliberate in my methods. I like a book that unfolds its magic unhurriedly, allowing me to ponder over what the author provides. With Banville one finds many striking details about Irish life — the weather, the politics, local ways of speaking, and the rural habits and urban doings of folks in and around Dublin. Then there are the personal outlooks of his characters and the slow revelation of the circumstances affecting the central situation. His novels move at an unhurried pace appropriate to the mystery itself, the setting, and the characters. The back story of the investigator and his relations to those close to him shares centre stage. With Banville one is always aware of his adept use of language and his control of rhythm and mood.

Let me begin with “Snow,” a murder mystery set in the winter of 1957 at Ballyglass House in County Wexford. The great house is in Northern Ireland but close by the Catholic Republic and the city of Dublin.   The police are called to the estate where a popular priest named Father Tom Lawless has been found dead on the main floor of the big house. It had been snowing for two days when Det. Insp. St. John (Sinjun) Strafford arrives at Ballyglass House under orders from headquarters. Colonel Geoffrey Osborne, the estate’s crusty owner, greets him with these words, “The body is in the library. Come this way.”

Agatha Christie tradition

Thus begins a fully Irish mystery set in the Agatha Christie tradition. Banville has great fun throughout playing with Christie’s revered status in the mystery genre. “Everyone seemed to be in costume … dressed for a part … waiting to go on.” But within the genre, Banville has much larger fish to fry. Father Tom has not only been murdered, but he has been castrated. This is no simple murder plot of narrow-minded vengeance or ambition, but one that probes the complexities of viewpoints in the cultural borderland between the Protestant and Catholic points of view. At play is the very culture of the Catholic priesthood and its social power in Ireland. Central to that aspect is the role played by the clever and autocratic Catholic Archbishop Dr. McQuaid. Overseeing what he calls the “innocence” of his vast flock, he insists that the castration detail be dropped from both the newspaper coverage and the investigation itself.

As in a typical Agatha Christie plot, we have a murder in the big house and the usual round of suspects among those who were there the night that Father Tom was murdered. There is the haughty patrician father figure in Colonel Osborne; his fragile and younger second wife, Sylvia; his edgy and precocious teenage daughter Lettie with her trenchant ability to imitate those around her; Dominic, the quiet and sensitive son; and Forsey, an oafish horse attendant. 

The family is rounded out by Dr. Havner, Mrs. Osborne’s ever-present caregiver, Mrs. Duffy, the busybody housemaker, and Freddy Harbison, the ne’er-do-well and unwelcome son of the second Mrs. Osborne. Because the self-effacing Detective Strafford is himself the offspring of a once prominent Protestant family in the area, he is familiar with the aristocratic trappings of Ballyglass House and is neither impressed nor influenced by them. Well-mannered but uncertain about his professional work and his own situation, he leads readers through a wintry investigation and proves an interesting challenge for the formidable Archbishop. Strafford’s personal responses become central to the experience of “Snow.”

As the title indicates. the mood is relentlessly wintry, stormy, and cold. Strafford is joined by a fellow officer, Det. Jenkins, whose main purpose seems to be to disappear and then be found dead in the process of the investigation, thus allowing Strafford to complete his interviews in his personable way. Banville lessens the darkness, formality, and decay of Ballyglass House environment by taking the reader to the local pub and inn, the Sheaf of Barley, where Strafford mixes with a wide range of Irish characters and finds a temporary partner in an attractive and perceptive chambermaid.

In late twists of the plot, Banville takes us back to 1947 where, at the Carricklea Reformatory and Industrial School, we learn more about Father Tom’s education and subsequent behaviour; then he takes us forward to 1967 where in Dublin, Strafford has a chance meeting with Lettie Osborne on the eve of her marriage. Each section adds depth and resonance to the central narrative.

“The Drowned” also features Insp. Strafford, again struggling to make headway with his personal life as he is assigned to another unusual crime scene in the Irish countryside. The location is a quiet but rugged coastal part of County Wicklow, south of Dublin. As in “Snow,” chief pathologist Quirke (Banville’s most popular detective figure) remains at a distance in Dublin, but his influence is daily felt by Strafford who has now split from his wife and begun an affair with Quirke’s estranged daughter Phoebe. Complicating matters further for Strafford, Phoebe reports to him that she thinks she is pregnant.

Facing new-found levels of uncertainty, Strafford reminds Quirke of “a crawler” at Carricklea, the school in which Quirke, as an orphan child, had first been educated. The school with its ugly reputation for prowling priests and mean-spirited boy-gangs haunts many of Banville’s novels, as it does Quirke’s own imagination. In his eyes Strafford has become an inscrutable “flop-haired long drink of water” who is increasingly difficult to work with.

The prime suspect in this Wicklow case is a Trinity College history professor named Armitage whose wife vanished near the coast after she ran away hysterically from her car and husband in a remote field. Things are never simple in a Banville novel. A local hermit figure named Wymes who has reported the abandoned Mercedes SL is a pedophile with a prison record while Armitage is a flighty high-spirited fellow who has a somewhat sleazy connection to a previous Dublin murder case. Charles and Charlotte Ruddock who are renting the nearby oceanfront house have their personal agendas vis-a-vis Armitage and his wife.

With many twists and turns, “The Drowned” keeps bringing the reader back to the craggy Irish coast and features three deaths by or near the water; first, the vanished Mrs. Deirdre Armitage and second the delicate Beverly, son of the Ruddocks, who falls to his death from the coastal rocks. You will have to read “The Drowned” to find out who was the third figure to die.

In the end Banville leaves us with several unsettling situations. Will poor Denton Wymes be unfairly victimized by the vengeful locals? What lies ahead for the Strafford-Phoebe relationship and for the struggling St. John Strafford in particular? And how will Quirke move forward with his relationship with his daughter? While I fully enjoyed these two fine mysteries, I feel pretty confident that John Banville has another related mystery in the works.

© Peterborough Examiner