The Drowned: A Strafford and Quirke Murder Mystery
County Wicklow, 1950s: in a field near the coast, the reclusive Denton Wymes finds a flashily expensive car with its engine running, the headlights on, and the door open, but empty. Every instinct tells Wymes not to get involved, for he fears anything that might return him to prison, but he is hailed by an Englishman who says that he thinks his wife may have thrown herself into the sea. Help is sought at a lone farmhouse of a tense couple with a peculiarly spoiled small son, but no-one seems to have any great urgency to look for the missing woman. The Gardaí are at last called, and Detective Inspector Strafford arrives from Dublin, only to intuit that none of these people are telling the entire truth, and that though they are ostensibly strangers, they are somehow connected.
In this latest atmospheric novel in Banville’s Strafford and Quirke series, the crime is not so much solved as resolved, sometimes by unorthodox methods; the tension is maintained for much of the narrative by the question as to whether a crime has occurred at all, and refreshingly, not all ends are tied. Strafford’s relationship with his longstanding colleague is increasingly strained, not least because the Detective Inspector (separated from his wife in pre-divorce Ireland) is sleeping with Quirke’s daughter, a liaison that could cost him his job. Banville evokes vividly the austere, smoke-stained Ireland of the 1950s, where ‘the jacks’ was in a rickety wooden build-on and the coffee undrinkable. Strafford himself stands at the end of a decayed Ascendancy line that had once seemed invincible. The Drowned is a recommended read, not so much for the complexity of its plot as for its nuances, and for the quiet empathy with which Banville treats the mess humans make of relationships.
