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Not the Usual SuspectsThree detective novels that restore pleasure to reading.

By Ron RosenbaumPosted Monday, March 2, 2009, at 1:55 PM ET

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But while I was finishing the utterly disorienting but uniquely pleasurable Kerr book, Henry Chang's Year of the Dog arrived in the mail from Soho Crime, and I found The Silver Swan just out in paperback at Barnes & Noble—in each case the second novel in what are so far just two in a series. And suddenly my life became an orgy of reading pleasure as I switched between three compellingly seductive and pleasurably sinister works.

Chang owned a world I'd lived a few blocks from for years but had known really nothing about, and he makes the subtle distinctions among its inhabitants utterly riveting. He paints, in miniature, a harsh world of neon and shadows but doesn't slight the Big Questions. But the Banville/Black Swan may be the best novel of any kind I'd read in years.

You may know Banville for the work he does under his own name, which has won him the Booker Prize (for The Sea). I've always admired his Anthony Blunt-based fiction, such as The Untouchable. The Silver Swan opens with the apparent suicide of the proprietress of a Dublin beauty parlor called the Silver Swan, and the investigation of her death by Banville's troubled pathologist (known only as Mr.—no first name—Quirke). Following Quirke's inquiries and the interlinked lives of the victim and her troubled relationships was like falling into a dizzying whirlpool with no bottom. I kept asking myself, "What? What kind of novel is this? What is happening to them (the characters)? What is happening to me? OK, did I hear you say you want to play the game of "it's a cross between"? It's a cross between Wilkie Collins at his most sinisterly sinuous (The Woman in White, for instance) and Edith Wharton's most erotically inflamed sublimations (The Custom of the Country, for one).

You'll see what I mean when you read it. Nothing is what it seems, and yet the solid furniture of the world, the flash and filigree of human feeling, is rendered with astonishing precision.

I don't know if I want to tell you anything more than this: Don't disappoint me and pass these three books up. Go on, get them all at once. The world is collapsing around us. You deserve the pleasure. I have prepared for you a three-course feast. I could have kept them to myself.

But I'll close with a word about Banville/Black. What is it about The Silver Swan? In part it's what makes all great detective novels cosmic inquiries: The real mystery is the mystery of human nature. The unsolved crime is not the death under investigation but why we die in the first place—the mystery of mortality—and since we do, the question of how we make such a homicidal hash of living, with the exceptions of a few flashes of stoic nobility most often found in the detective, however corrupt he is, his sense of his own failings his greatest asset.

I also never tire of the questions these novels ask about human nature, how many secrets we hide from one another, how hard it is to figure other people out, how hard it is to figure ourselves out. The traditional simple-minded detective story, your Agatha Christie mystery, is about the puzzle of plot and exists at the level of parlor tricks. But Banville, Kerr, and Chang take genre fiction to a deeper level, focusing on the mysteries of the human mind that a murder brings to light in those with some connection to the deceased. Mysteries, quirks, that might otherwise lie buried, but that subtly define who we are.

And to bring it back home, to the failings of the postmodern project, here's Banville, in an amazing quote from an LA Weekly interview, being way too modest but revealingly so about the difference between his detective novels and his "serious" ones, a difference he discovered when he happened upon the detective novels of Simenon:

I was really blown away by this extraordinary writer. I had never known this kind of thing was possible, to create such work in that kind of simple—well, apparently simple—direct style. ... Looking back, I think it was very much a transition. It was a way of breaking free from the books I had been writing for the last 20 years, these first-person narratives of obsessed, half-demented men going on and on and on and on.
I had to break out of that. And I see now in retrospect that Christine Falls [his first "Benjamin Black" novel] was part of that process. Because it's a completely different process than writing as John Banville. It's completely action-driven, and it's dialogue-driven, and it's character-driven. Which none of my Banville books are.

And, he could have added, it's immensely pleasurable and far more profound than the typical postmodern effort he describes so (unfairly) self-deprecatingly well: "these first person narratives of obsessed, half-demented men going on and on and on and on."

Yes! That's what I've been trying to get at. Where's the pleasure in "on and on and on and on." It's on-anism, you might say, pleasuring only the writer, not the reader. Thank you, Mr. Banville, for The Silver Swan. Thank you, Mr. Kerr and Mr. Chang. Get their books, and you'll thank me.