A Death In Summer

For those of us who tend to read lighter at this time of year, summer can only mean  a plethora of mystery books is at hand. Ben­jamin Black, the author of A Death in Summer, was my first pick because I so admire his lit­erary fiction written under his real name, John Banville.

Now, having just put the book down after an almost marathon read, I’d point out that although A Death in Summer — story about a mur­dered man and the search for the person who took his life – cer­tainly qual­ifies as mystery, it is not a light read. Seek out a bright com­fortable spot to settle into and prepare to lose yourself in a mystery that will res­onate on several levels.

The setting is post-​​WWII Ireland, the city is Dublin coming back from the weight of war, and the murder takes place in a summer of nearly inescapable heat. Detective Inspector Hackett is taken away from his Sunday dinner and driven to Brook­lands, a horse farm in Kildare County, where a certain wealthy Canadian émigré has appar­ently blown his own head off by a shotgun blast. Hackett finds the weapon still resting in the lap of the now headless body. The author, with a deft touch for mixing the hor­rific with the bucolic, writes: “It added to the shock of the event that it had taken place on a drowsy Sunday  afternoon in summer, while the beeches along the drive at Brook­lands swel­tered in the sun and the mingled smell of hay and horses lay heavy on the summer air.”

This is not the fast-​​paced who-​​done-​​it of today’s high tech forensic science, or of the police with storm trooper SWAT teams to back them up. This is rural Dublin in the early 1950s, and even after Hackett deter­mines that the death was not by the decedent’s own hand, the body is buried and mourned before the real detecting begins. It is a bit weird, but you will read the book much faster than the crime is solved. And even then, the solution is pre­sented almost as an epi­logue, with an ending as dis­turbing as it is humane.

Inspector Hackett, under­stated and slow moving, is assisted by his ever-​​present pathol­ogist, Dr. Quirke, who unex­pectedly becomes intimate with the dead man’s widow: “He knew the perils of the sit­u­ation he had blun­dered into .… what was passion without risk, without trans­gression.” All of Black’s char­acters are complex and care­fully drawn and, as a result, the reader’s sym­pa­thies are painfully torn. The imperfect sons and daughters of both the good and the bad guys are no less guilty, but a lot more under­standable. Some of the issues sur­rounding the death of this wealthy and obses­sively pas­sionate man are lin­gering shadows left over from WWII, like anti­semitism, and some are as base as any that have come to light in the present. Ben­jamin Black writes of places in our souls just as dark as that one summer was hot.

Buy A Death in Summer: A Novel (Quirke) locally or look online at Amazon​.com, Powell’s Books, through an IndieBound book­store. Thanks.