A.N. Wilson is dazzled, intoxicated and oddly comforted by autumn crime
The first time we encountered Inspector Strafford was a year ago in John Banville’s almost peaceful rework of the country-house Christmas murder, Snow. Now, in April in Spain (Faber & Faber, £14.99; Tablet price £13.49) the three-piece-suited, understated, Prod Anglo-Irish detective comes to Franco’s Spain to follow the hunch of Banville’s other sleuth, Dublin pathologist Dr Quirke, that a local doctor in the northern seaside resort of San Sebastián is actually the (presumed dead) niece of a distinguished government minister in Ireland. Strafford and Quirke, who dislike one another, make an intoxicating mix – an inevitable metaphor when alcoholic, miserable Quirke is in evidence. For the first 40 pages or so of this gripping story, you think that Banville has lost the plot. Quirke is happy and, even harder to believe, happily married to an Austrian psychiatrist. Don’t worry, all is catastrophically sad by the end. As one of the nuns who helped rear Quirke in his orphanage used to say, “Laughing will end crying”. Banville writes like an angel. I took to copying down such sentences as “the lamps shining along the seafront glowed greyly, like dandelion heads”. And the villains in this well paced book are satisfyingly atrocious: the politician, the civil servant and, especially, the hit man who discovers Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock by chance and has some amusing ideas about it. Needless to say, the seaside action in San Sebastián all connects up with the most dreadful skulduggery in Dublin’s fair city – but read it for yourself. It is the best crime book yet from this master storyteller.
