Author of the week: John Banville

last updated 8 January 2015

The Irish author John Banville is leading a double life, said Mark Egan in Reuters.com. Half the time, he’s simply his old self—the creator of such “serious” literary works as The Sea and The Book of Evidence. Increasingly, however, he’s Benjamin Black, author of five crime novels. Banville created the literary persona and nom de plume in 2005 while entertaining the idea of writing a thriller. “I am in my 60s with a new lease on life,” says Banville of writing as his alter ego. “It’s fun.” When he begins writing as one author, the other can’t always stay silent. “Black was able to help Banville,” he says of writing the forthcoming Banville novel Ancient Light. “Sometimes, Black will lean over Banville’s shoulder and say, ‘Oh, just leave it and move on.’ I think Banville has learned a little bit about spontaneity by letting things happen, not worrying every sentence to death.”

The latest Black novel, A Death in Summer, likewise shows Banville’s influence, said Malcolm Jones in TheDailyBeast.com. Though Banville says Black is too stubborn to listen to his literary twin, in style and substance the book is a marked improvement over its predecessors. Set in the 1950s, the Black novels more closely resemble the noir fiction of Raymond Chandler than such violent contemporary thrillers as Stieg Larsson’s popular Millennium series. Banville disparages the crude artifice of Larsson’s work and says he prefers hard-edged realism. “I made a pact with myself that I would write books with plots that could actually happen in life. I’ve tried to stick with that.”