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Overview
One of The Chicago Tribune's Best Reads of 2011.
One of Dublin's most powerful men meets a violent end—and an acknowledged master of crime fiction delivers his most gripping novel yet.
On a sweltering summer afternoon, newspaper tycoon Richard Jewell—known to his many enemies as Diamond Dick—is discovered with his head blown off by a shotgun blast. But is it suicide or murder? For help with the investigation, Detective Inspector Hackett calls in his old friend Quirke, who has unusual access to Dublin's elite.
Jewell's coolly elegant French wife, Françoise, seems less than shocked by her husband's death. But Dannie, Jewell's high-strung sister, is devastated, and Quirke is surprised to learn that in her grief she has turned to an unexpected friend: David Sinclair, Quirke's ambitious assistant in the pathology lab at the Hospital of the Holy Family. Further, Sinclair has been seeing Quirke's fractious daughter Phoebe, and an unlikely romance is blossoming between the two. As a record heat wave envelops the city and the secret deals underpinning Diamond Dick's empire begin to be revealed, Quirke and Hackett find themselves caught up in a dark web of intrigue and violence that threatens to end in disaster.
Tightly plotted and gorgeously written, A Death in Summer proves to the brilliant but sometimes reckless Quirke that in a city where old money and the right bloodlines rule, he is by no means safe from mortal danger.
Synopsis
One of The Chicago Tribune's Best Reads of 2011.
One of Dublin's most powerful men meets a violent end—and an acknowledged master of crime fiction delivers his most gripping novel yet.
On a sweltering summer afternoon, newspaper tycoon Richard Jewell—known to his many enemies as Diamond Dick—is discovered with his head blown off by a shotgun blast. But is it suicide or murder? For help with the investigation, Detective Inspector Hackett calls in his old friend Quirke, who has unusual access to Dublin's elite.
Jewell's coolly elegant French wife, Françoise, seems less than shocked by her husband's death. But Dannie, Jewell's high-strung sister, is devastated, and Quirke is surprised to learn that in her grief she has turned to an unexpected friend: David Sinclair, Quirke's ambitious assistant in the pathology lab at the Hospital of the Holy Family. Further, Sinclair has been seeing Quirke's fractious daughter Phoebe, and an unlikely romance is blossoming between the two. As a record heat wave envelops the city and the secret deals underpinning Diamond Dick's empire begin to be revealed, Quirke and Hackett find themselves caught up in a dark web of intrigue and violence that threatens to end in disaster.
Tightly plotted and gorgeously written, A Death in Summer proves to the brilliant but sometimes reckless Quirke that in a city where old money and the right bloodlines rule, he is by no means safe from mortal danger.
Editorials
From the Publisher
"[Benjamin Black’s] books about the dour Irish pathologist named Quirke have effortless flair, with their period-piece cinematic ambience and their sultry romance. The Black books are much more like Alan Furst’s elegant, doom-infused World War II spy books than like standard crime tales."—Janet Maslin, The New York Times
"Black’s drab Dublin streets are full of perplexing figures, archetypes, as if the characters were stalking through some Jungian map of the unconscious: weakened, dying fathers, good mothers, bad mothers, twins, ‘dark doubles,’ ghosts surging up from the past… His narratives are loaded with poetic devices."—The New Yorker
"Black has improved with every book, and the latest, A Death in Summer, is his best yet… [Black] knows how to create a first-rate sleuth—the ungainly, middle-aged Dublin pathologist Quirke, a man who can never seem to keep his nose out of trouble."—Malcolm Jones, The Daily Beast
"The author of the Booker Prize-winning The Sea, Banville is a literary artist, whereas Black is a craftsman who churns out page-turning crime tales… Banville’s latest Benjamin Black novel is another complex character study disguised as a plot-driven work of genre fiction."—The Kansas City Star
"[A Death in Summer] is an elegant novel, well-paced with dramatic twists, disturbing surprises and richly drawn characters whose actions and motives have a tangible psychological depth.
Mr. Black/Banville is well in form here... It can be either plunged into without any need to reference the previous three or else taken as a welcome new installment of a sequential quartet by one of Ireland’s leading contemporary novelists."—New York Journal of Books
The Barnes & Noble Review
A Death in Summer is the fourth crime novel by Benjamin Black to revolve around the troubled character of Quirke, a pathologist living in Dublin in the bleak 1950s. This latest installment is also Black's leanest. Indeed, the novel's pace is almost brisk. A corpse materializes promptly and—Benjamin Black being the pen name of John Banville—exquisitely framed. "On the big picture window in front of the desk," Black writes, "there was a great splatter of blood and brains, like a giant peony blossom, with a gaping hole in the middle of it giving a view of rolling grasslands stretching off to the horizon." This is what remains of Richard Jewell, a newspaper tycoon who once "?had a bland sheen to him, like all rich men..." and eyes "set like rivets in a smiling mask."Jewell's chilly French widow, his unstable half sister, his groom and housekeeper are suspiciously reserved about the apparent suicide and the sense of intrigue and emotional intensity thickens when Quirke arrives on the scene, his keen intuition and his weakness for tempestuous women firmly intact.
Later, attending Jewell's memorial party, "?tipsy on the dead man's champagne and overflowing at the brim with infatuation for the man's enchanting and dangerous widow," Quirke acknowledges "?his taste for the hazard of sin" and is soon erotically entangled. Meanwhile, darker sexual impulses in Jewell's past gradually emerge as possible motives for his murder. Or was he simply the victim of a lethal business rivalry?
The answer is obvious in a plot that is plain and even predictable at times. Broad hints are punctually delivered. We learn that Jewell's half sister's depression is rooted in a childhood trauma and that his widow's steeliness was forged by her brother's death in the French Resistance. We notice that Jewell's child, a daughter, is disturbingly calm and manipulative.
Subterranean themes of child abuse, betrayal, and retribution surface as Black develops, somewhat cursorily, a romance between Quirke's daughter and his morgue assistant, who is Jewish, as was the murdered Jewell. Unifying these often distracting elements is Black's language, which, for all its noir flourishes, is recognizably Banville's: dark, sumptuous, and enveloping. There is more sunshine here than in Quirke's previous outings—Dublin bakes in summer heat—but the mood is familiarly somber and it darkens further when Quirke discovers that Jewell was a generous patron of the Catholic orphanage in which he, Quirke, spent part of his childhood. He remembers "?the particular smell of the place, a complex blend of damp stone, wet wool, tale urine, boiled cabbage, and another odor, thin and sharp and acidic, that seemed to the survivors of St. Christopher's the stink of misery itself."
As in previous Black (and some Banville) novels, the fictional horror here is based on real events and the city of Dublin is evoked with Joycean clarity. When it comes to action and resolution, however, Black prefers to hint at an outcome or to leave matters unresolved, reinforcing the sense that in his refined brand of noir mood trumps mayhem.
Anna Mundow writes "The Interview" and the "Historical Novels" columns for The Boston Globe and is a contributor to The Irish Times.