Moonlighting in murder.

Irish author John Banville may very well deserve a break. His work has twice been short-listed for the Booker Prize (his 2005 novel The Sea took top honors), he is a long time contributor to The New York Review of Books, and formerly edited the literary section of The Irish Times. He's earned the respect of literary critics and his work seems bound for the Everyman's Library or Penguin Modern Classics treatment and literary survey courses.

But Banville is taking a different tack, perhaps a little surprising for an author so estabilished in literary circles. The Silver Swan marks Banville's second foray into mystery/suspense/noir fiction, under the pseudonym Benjamin Black. His first novel, Christine Falls, introduced Quirke, a pathologist obscurely laboring (and drinking) away in post-war Dublin. In that novel, Quirke stumbled into a mystery when a particular young woman turned up on his autopsy table, and he reluctantly pursued the cause of her death to the very core of his own haunted story. That novel was marked by Banville's masterful depiction of a brooding Dublin, matched by the delicate shifting family relationships. I actually wound up buying my own copy of Christine Falls, probably the highest recommendation my cheapsake self could give to a book.

The Silver Swan picks up a few years after the events of Christine Falls. Quirke is on the wagon, and he's making an effort to mend his relationship with his newly acknowledged daughter, Phoebe. He wants nothing more to do with detective work. But another young woman, this time an apparent suicide, piques his interest--especially after her grieving husband requests that Quirke forego the autopsy. He discovers that Deirde Hunt died by another's hand, but this time, Quirke isn't sure he wants to see justice done--something tells him Deirdre would rest better as a suicide. But when one of Deirdre's secrets, a con man who's beginning to dabble in more serious crimes. He's also pursuing Phoebe, leaving Quirke with no choice but to follow the clues of Deirdre's death to the answer.

Or rather, I should say, until Banville reveals the answer. Quirke isn't a typical private eye who follows the clues. Rather, most of the story is told in alternating perspectives, with the mystery unfolding alongside Quirke's deepening involvement. As such, traditional P.I. fans might not find Quirke to their liking. But Banville captures the noirish, suspenseful feel of the 1950s, so much so that I was partly expecting Lauren Bacall to sidle into some of the scenes. I did think a fault was the stereotyping of some characters. And I'm bothered by the terrible victimization of women both in Christine Falls and Silver Swan. Perhaps Banville is being true to the period, but in both books, women (albeit well developed as characters) are treated appallingly by the men in their lives. It bears watching if Banville does more with his women in future books.

It's sometimes tough to pigeonhole particular books, and Banville proves that it's getting harder to classify authors. But maybe we just need to get over putting books (and authors) into tidy catagories. Banville mixes the best of literary description and atmosphere with the mystery plotting to create a memorable character.

Princess, scholar, schemer, sleuth.

If there was ever a period in English history more conducive to committing murder without the prospect of getting caught, few can match the reign of Queen Mary. And if you're looking for a prospective victim whose death would be greeted by more approval than dismay by the people in power, then Princess Elizabeth Tudor would be a prime target. Elizabeth knows she's a target, she can trust few, if any, of her surrounding courtiers, and dreads the arrival of every messenger, who might come bearing word of her ascension to the throne--or her death summons. When word comes from her aunt Mary Boleyn, Elizabeth is overjoyed to see someone from the her disgraced mother's family. But an attack on a Boleyn cousin and her aunt's painful death from poison suggests a larger plot to remove all of Queen Anne's relations out of the picture.

Karen Harper's series centered on Elizabeth I adds a little twist to the typical historical mystery, starting out with The Poyson Garden. She's covering familiar ground here: Elizabeth's precarious position during her half-sister Queen Mary's reign is well-covered ground. Where Harper's take on establish historical fact includes vivid reimaging of real people and a pretty good realization of English life at the time. Elizabeth herself is lively and engaging. Less convincing is the inclusion of commoners into Elizabeth's household--it's hard to imagine the young princess taking in (and trusting) an actor from a travelling troupe. But suspending disbelief over that point, the inclusion of Ned Thompson, and the knowledgeable herbalist Meg (who's conveniently a dead ringer for Elizabeth) adds some color and offers all sorts of possibilities to move the action forward.

As far as plot goes, The Poyson Garden moves quickly like any good pleasure read should, but there's little in the way of actual mystery--the only real question of the book is who the poisoner should turn out to be, and that gets resolved about two-thirds of the way through. From then on, it's more a suspense novel, and I can't say that I entirely bought the characterization at the end--but then I don't want to give too much away. It's not a plot spoiler to say that the book concludes with Queen Mary's death and Elizabeth's ascension to the throne. There are at least eight more books to the series, but I'm not entirely sure I'll continue on with it. Respectable mysteries, Harper's Elizabeth whodunits would make a good alternative to readers of Phillipa Gregory's Tudor novels.

The lady herself; or Jane fix part III

More than any other author in English literature, it seems, Jane Austen stymies her biographers.* There really shouldn't be any reason for this: we have letters and some manuscripts in her hand, numerous family recollections have been passed down, and she lived in a family and an age with an almost obsessive need to record their experiences for posterity. Yet it's always so tempting to ascribe the experiences of her heroines to the author. It's hard to imagine someone who wrote so convincingly about relationship battles having nothing in her own life that came close. Claire Tomalin's 1997 bio of Austen avoids the temptation to depict Austen as a real life version of her various characters, but she does do an excellent job portraying how Austen's life, both the tragic and comic phases, constantly influenced her writing. Jane Austen: A Life may not be revolutionary in its conclusions, but I can honestly say that it read as easily as any of Austen's novels, and with more than a few figures that could be directly drawn from Emma, Persuasion or any of the other novels.

Austen herself is always at the center of the bio, obviously, but Tomalin gives considerable attention to the figures surrounding Austen (and, mercifully, a complete family tree to keep all of the similarly named Austens straight). Other than Cassandra, Austen's sister and confidante, no one gets more attention than her colorful cousin, Eliza. Born in India of indeterminate parentage, Eliza married a supposed French count, only to see him go to the guillotine. Eliza later married Austen's brother, the charming but flighty Henry. Another brother, Edward, was adopted into a wealthy landowning family, not unlike many of Austen's heroes. The eldest of the Austen brood, James, and his pushy wife are portrayed as an inspiration for Emma's Mr. Elton and the odious Augusta Elton.

This oblique portrait of Austen only underscores how little is actually known about her, in spite of her letters. Much of what has been assumed about Austen is due to memoirs left behind by her family, flavored by their Victorian-era censorship. There are hints, here and there, of Austen's alienation from the social scene (Tomalin notes the sharp satire of Austen's letters regarding Edward's Kentish relations, whom she considered snobs and only found companionship there with the governess). And there is the undercurrent sense that many of Austen's contemporaries didn't quite know what to make of the author. Austen's obvious cleverness sometimes rankled friends and relations, especially if that barbed wit were directed towards them. We can only assume that sharp wit was the reason Austen's niece, Fanny, burned many of her aunt's surviving letters.

Tomalin doesn't go into great detail in critizing each of the novels, which was my only complaint about the book. She must assume that her audience is more familiar with the films (which do not receive much comment, and that limited to notes) than the books, as she provides plot summaries for Mansfield Park and Persuasion. Coupled with the fluid writing, the well-written endnotes and generous images, Jane Austen: A Life is a good starting point for those interested in the author but aren't ready to delve into more scholarly works.

*With the exception of Shakespeare, of course. At least there's no debate over who wrote Austen's novels.

The tourney is on.

Not a review per se this time, but something much more entertaining. The online Morning News is currently in the throes of its fourth annual Tournament of Books and like previous years, this year promises to be a bloody battle to the end. In round 1, Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke smoked Ovenman by Jeff Parker to take the first victory. Personally, I see the final pairing as Tree of Smoke versus wonderkid Junot Diaz's Oscar Wao, but it's anyone's guess what the zombie round will do this year's brackets. Will What the Dead Know carry the banner for honest-to-goodness genre fiction? Or will the witty Then We Came to the End take on its stiff competition to emerge victorious and claim the (real live) Rooster? Obviously, I'm probably getting more excited about this than it actually warrants, but it's still a highly recommended diversion from the workday grind.

The Buddhist and his AK-47.

I saw this odd little collection of portraits when it came across the desk recently. Not surprisingly, its arresting cover stuck in my mind. In a sense, it's an ingenious idea: take a massively decisive issue and actually go into people's houses and talk to them. Photographer Kyle Cassidy did just that for Armed America: Portraits of Gun Owners in Their Homes. In addition to the portraits, Cassidy includes each gun owner's answer to the question, 'Why do you own a gun?'

I have to admit, I'm conflicted about the whole gun control issue. On the one hand, I can understand people's appreciation of guns for recreation--I have, and still do, go target shooting on occassion. But I've also seen the damage these same firearms can do when in the hands of even the most careful marksman. Cassidy, to his credit, does a pretty good job of portraying people neutrally (and as an aside, I loved the humorous touch of including the family pets in the family portraits). There are plenty of people here who own guns for the pleasures that hunting and target practice bring to them. There are some surprising gun owners (a chef who wanted to shoot a wild turkey to get a sense of where food really comes from, the artist who needed a shotgun for a bronze casting, the collector with his 12 lb cannon) and some that make a lot of sense (law enforcement officers, fomer military and engineers of all sorts intrigued by a gun's mechanics). But when I read phrases like 'since the bad guys had guns, I should have one, too' or 'I refuse to become prey,' I can't help but wonder how much gun proliferation has turned into a circular argument: since most everyone can have a gun, I should have one too to protect myself from all those people with guns.

The argument has often been made that many nations (especially in Europe) with stringent gun laws have nowhere near as many instances of accidental shootings or the type of rampages that occurred at Virginia Tech or the Omaha mall. On the other hand, the lawlessness following Hurricane Katrina is cited repeatedly as an example of government breaking down, and citizens needing to defend themselves. Perhaps. With the right to bear arms so deeply entrenched in culture (and the Constitution), it's hard to see where (or if) the line should be drawn. As Cassidy's portraits demonstrate, the distinction between who own a gun and why is nowhere near black and white.