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The Drowned

By John Banville

I’ve long been amused by John Banville’s grumpy comments about how easy it is for him to write crime fiction, while he sometimes labors for years over his prizewinning literary novels. He even adopted a pseudonym, Benjamin Black, to distinguish between brows high and low. But Black vanished in 2021, and now Banville’s real name is on all his books. Banville told The Times that in rereading the Black books, he “was surprised and highly gratified to discover that they weren’t bad at all, and in fact might even be quite good. … I said to myself, ‘Why do I need this rascal anyway?’ So I shut him in a room with a pistol, a phial of sleeping pills and a bottle of Scotch, and that was the end of him.”

THE DROWNED (Hanover Square Press, 299 pp., $28.99), Banville’s latest, returns readers to 1950s-era Ireland and to the mercurial pathologist Quirke and his frenemy, Detective Inspector Strafford. The latter is summoned to a rural patch where a professor claims his wife has drowned herself. The trouble, as Strafford soon discovers, is that another young woman in the professor’s orbit disappeared, and it seems once again that justice may slip away.

Banville has a lot of sour fun watching Strafford cluelessly bumble through his relationships, be they with Quirke (adversary, mentor) or Quirke’s daughter Phoebe (paramour), who happens to be connected to the case in surprising ways.

Banville puts care into crafting his mysteries, and it shows.

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The Arizona Triangle

By Sydney Graves

I adore some of Kate Christensen’s early novels, especially “In the Drink” and “The Great Man,” so I was delighted to hear she was publishing a crime novel under the pseudonym Sydney Graves. I’m even more delighted to report that THE ARIZONA TRIANGLE (Harper, 292 pp., paperback, $18.99), the first in a new detective series, is a juicy, propulsive mystery that explores urban and rural Arizona’s darkest corners.

Justine Bailen, better known as Jo, fled her hometown, and the smoking crater of her longtime relationships with her childhood pal, Rose, and high school boyfriend, Tyler. She’s working for an all-female detective agency in Tucson, living as carefree, queer and independent a life as she can. But when Rose goes missing and her mother hires Jo to find her, dormant demons re-emerge, forcing Jo to face the life she left behind square-on, even if it kills her.

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