How a Great Crime Writer Came to Imitate Himself

“The appeal of the conventional crime novel,” the Irish writer John Banville once suggested, “is the sense of completion it offers.” Unlike life, bounded by the unremembered and—strictly speaking—unlived experiences of birth and death, “in an Agatha Christie whodunit or a Robert Ludlum thriller, we know with a certainty … that when the murderer is unmasked or the conspiracy foiled, everything will click into place, like a jigsaw puzzle assembling itself before our eyes.” Against this satisfaction, Banville proposed an alternative form of crime novel, one in which “if something can go wrong, it will”; for such stories, “it is the sense of awful and immediate reality that makes them so startling, so unsettling, and so convincing.”

That a crime novel might cater to a wish to touch “reality” has frequently suggested itself to commentators on the genre. For the great Canadian literary theorist Northrop Frye, the detective story stemmed from a combination of atavistic desire to identify and destroy a threat to the community, and an “intensification” of literary realism: “the sharpening of attention to details. We now find an echo of it in Banville’s latest novel, in a detective’s musing on his métier: “The dullest object could, for him, flare into sudden significance, could throb in the sudden awareness of itself. There clues, and he was their detector.”