I looked up this review, the book cover of which Typepad chose to illustrate my review of Great Short Books. It sounds like it was pretty good. He has written a second St John Strafford mystery, The Lock-Up, to be published, in paperback, 6 April 2023.
The first book I finished reading two years ago (2021) is one of the best contemporary mysteries I've read in this millennium. It's Snow by John Banville, the winner of the Booker Prize for his 2005 novel, The Sea.
This book begins a new mystery series set in 1957, with a detective named St John Strafford (mention is made in passing to Quirke, a previous Banville protagonist, found in books written pseudonymously by Benjamin Black.) He spends much of the novel sighing wearily each time he has to correction the pronunciation of his first name or the spelling of his last. I figured out about the third time it happened in the first 65 pages that the people in this story were not listening carefully or showing much respect to this detective and that perhaps I had better stay more alert.
Detective Inspector Strafford is a man of subtle charm who employs frequent irony and mild sarcasm that are lost on most of the people around him. He spends much of the book wandering about County Wexford seemingly clueless. He thinks at one point that he is falling in love with one of the suspects, a woman it is impossible for the reader to like.
The thing about this book is the prose. Banville, who has been mentioned as a possible Nobel laureate, certainly has a way with words. I have a bad habit of skimming over descriptive passages, but this paragraph about the old house in which the crime occurs woke me up:
The place in general was seriously in need of repair and renovation. The frames of the big windows were decayed and their putty was crumbling and there were cracks running up the walls where growths of buddleia were lodged, their branches leafless now. When he looked up, craning his neck, he saw how the gutters sagged, and the way the protruding edges of roof slates had been splintered and left jagged by countless winter storms. A warm wave of nostalgia washed over him. Only someone who had been born and brought up in a place like this, as he had, could know the particular, piercing fondness he felt before the sad spectacle of such decay and decrepitude. Hopeless nostalgia was the curse of his steadily dwindling caste.
It's time I tried some of Banville's Booker-worthy prose. (I haven't done it yet, but soon . . . )
Originally posted Jan 2021.