Dr. Banville and Mr. Black

John Banville is an Irish writer of austere, erudite, literary novels. A Booker winner, he’s famous for being relentlessly highbrow. Benjamin Black writes mystery novels; his slender, nasty The Lemur (Picador; 132 pages) appears this month. The funny thing about Black is that he and Banville are the same person.

It’s currently chic for fancy novelists to slum it in the lower genres, the way Marie Antoinette used to dress up as a peasant and milk cows. Sebastian Faulks just wrote a James Bond novel; Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union was a noir mystery set in an alternate universe. Some writers find the discipline invigorating: look at The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s fling with apocalyptic science fiction. Some don’t: Martin Amis’ Night Train was an undercooked attempt at hard-boiled detective fiction. It turns out that trashy books are as hard to write as good ones.

Which brings us to The Lemur. It’s the story of John Glass, a formerly crusading journalist who has been reduced, by ennui and a rich marriage, to writing the biography of his father-in-law, a plutocrat with a sketchy past. Glass hires a hacker to rake up some muck. The hacker rakes up so much muck that he gets himself shot neatly through the left eye. As Black tells us (at least four times, in different ways), “Everybody has secrets, mostly guilty ones.”

Black is a powerfully atmospheric writer–he is, after all, John Banville–and a champion noticer of details like a “flock of lacquered, dark brown birds” and the tanned ankles of his father-in-law. But watching him try to do what a mystery writer does shows you what’s so tough about it. Good genre writers know how to express ideas and emotions through events–plot–rather than dialogue or evocative descriptions. Precious little happens in The Lemur other than Glass trading icy quips with his wife. If Benjamin Black is John Banville’s guilty secret, he needs to find a much, much guiltier one.