Book Review: Even The Dead - Benjamin Black

John Banville, writing under the pen name Benjamin Black, returns with his seventh Quirke novel Even the Dead.

Even the Dead once more follows John Banville's pathologist creation Quirke through a journey into the seedy underground world of murder in 1950s Dublin. Although the Quirke series is essentially in the crime fiction drama, Even the Dead is much more than a page-turning thriller. By this seventh book in the Quirke series Banville has made the pathologist, and the life he lives and people he is close to, the prime focus of the novel with the whodunit taking a lesser focus by far.

Quirke really is a fascinating creation. Full of flaws and haunted by his history he makes for a very intriguing protagonist. This is the first Benjamin Black book I've read and within a couple of chapters I realised I really wanted to go back and read the previous six to know a lot more about Quirke, his daughter Phoebe, his step-brother and wife Malachy and Rose, and what has led them to the behave the way they do in this novel. It's soaked in history, dysfunction and regret.The most intriguing aspect of the whole novel is Quirke's relationship with his daughter, who quickly becomes embroiled in the mystery.

Having taken an extended break due to illness - which is alluded to be related to whatever happened in the previous novel - Quirke is called in by his assistant, his daughter's fiance David Sinclair, after what originally looked like a drunken accident begins to look much more sinister. What is made to look like the death of a young man who crashed into a tree in the Phoenix Park appears to be in fact murder.

As this information becomes clear and Quirke returns to his pathologist job Phoebe is approached by a young woman she vaguely knows from a secretarial course who begs her to help her as she is carrying the baby of the murder victim. From there the mystery becomes very much entangled with Quirke's personal life as he, alongside Detective Hackett, and Phoebe, attempt to make sense of the murder and figure out who is responsible.

1950s Dublin is a character in itself in Even the Dead and creates a wonderful backdrop for novel which took me by surprise coming from reading so many crime novels set in modern times and it's one of the features that makes the Quirke series stand out in quite an otherwise over-saturated genre. Another is how much the character of Quirke takes precedence more so that the murder that has to be solved. In this, Banville has created something quite special and the character of Quirke is the reason why these Benjamin Black novels have done so well and why readers keep coming back for more.

Even the Dead is available from June 29th, published by Penguin.