Set in the buttoned-up Ireland of his 1950s boyhood, the crime series that Banville began under the alias Benjamin Black (dropped in 2020) now reaches its tenth installment with his latest book, The Drowned. This is another absorbing outing for the widowed Dublin pathologist, Quirke, and his reluctant sidekick, Detective Inspector Stafford, last seen in 2023’s The Lock-Up.
In the seventeen years of writing this column, I have probably reviewed 6-10 of Banville’s books in the series. The Drowned is probably the final volume in the Quirke/ Strafford series.
Banville’s latest 1950s-set crime novel opens with Denton Wymes, a recluse who lives in a caravan in rural Ireland with his dog, stumbling upon an unusual site: a Mercedes SL idling in a field, its headlamps on and no driver in sight. A man named Armitage accosts Wymes, saying that his wife, who had been driving the car, has gone missing and may have “drowned herself.”
Wymes is suspicious of Armitage, whose affect seems off; “It seemed a piece of bad acting, but then Wymes told himself that’s mostly how people behave when there’s a crisis and they’re distraught.” DI St. John Strafford arrives from Dublin to investigate, quickly sussing out that nothing about the case will be straightforward.
Armitage is slippery and unpredictable. Wymes is a convicted child molester, and something seems amiss about the couple whose rental house Armitage and Wymes go for help. Charlotte and Charles Ruddock, the new parents holidaying on the Wicklow coast, appear to be strangers to Armitage. But their exchanges bear a whiff of prior antipathy, at least that’s how it seems to the unlucky bystander, Denton Wymes, once jailed, now living as a hermit.
Into this triangle comes DI Stratford, blindsided by his estranged wife’s desire for a divorce (good job they got married in England), just as his girlfriend, Phoebe, Quirke’s daughter, reveals she’s pregnant. The unhurried pace of the novel ratchets into gear after a second disappearance, this time of a toddler, which plunges the reader into a heart-rending dilemma that threatens to destroy the protagonist in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The actions finally boil over in the company of a master criminal seduced by his own villainy. While its ultimately evil not good, that gives The Drowned its crackling denouement, the novel takes care to part on a more cheerful note. This is yet another fine thriller by an author at the top of his game. A TOP SHELF read.
