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612 ratings, 3.33 average rating, 185 reviews
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published
January 22nd 2008
by Picador USA
binding
Paperback, 384 pages
isbn
0312426321
(isbn13: 9780312426323)
description
Set in Dublin and Boston in the 1950s, the story of a surly, hard-drinking pathologist named Quirke who uncovers a conspiracy that begins with his bro...more
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other reviews (showing 1-20 of 933)
Read in February, 2008
recommends it for:
no-one!
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Read in March, 2008
I sort of enjoyed this book as I was reading it, but when I got to the end I felt let down. Not well written, and sort of boring, this book could have and should have been better. The descriptions of the protagonist as a bear-like man were totally overdone -- I think the words "lumbering", "big," "massive" etc. appeared every time he did. Tiresome.
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Read in September, 2008
This is a hard book for me to rate. Christine Falls, written by Benjamin Black (Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea, John Banville in psuedonym), is marketed as a mystery-thriller - a more erudite Da Vinci code. In truth, it's much closer to the noir genre - ultimately acting as a character novel, built on a mystery, and surrounded by deathly overtones. It's Banville, so of course the writing is strong - elegant, descriptive, and engaging. The character development is the central trope of the...more
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Read in May, 2008
Filled with atmosphere, but not much else, opening Christine Falls evokes the kind of dark noir atmosphere of the early fifties, step into the book and you step back into smoky drawing rooms and corner bars, squat henchmen, sleek cars, and swirling gowns wrapping around the legs of elegant woman. Black (Banville) is expert at creating this sultry mood. I don’t read mysteries often, but when I do, it’s because I want to sink into a book where the many leads spin tighter and tighter, strands...more
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Read in April, 2008
A joke from the 1970s : A stranger walks into a Belfast pub and orders a beer. The man next to him at the bar eyes him suspiciously for a few minutes, then leans over and says "what religion are you, then?". "I'm atheist.". "We're all atheist, but are you Catholic atheist or Protestant atheist?"
Mr. Quirke, consulting pathologist, is a Catholic atheist. He spent his early years in an orphanage until he was adopted by Judge Griffin, then a barrister. Griffin had a...more
Mr. Quirke, consulting pathologist, is a Catholic atheist. He spent his early years in an orphanage until he was adopted by Judge Griffin, then a barrister. Griffin had a...more
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Read in April, 2008
recommended to Aaron by:
metacritic.com/booksrecommends it for: People who really love Law and Order
So if The Night Gardener manages to be sort of like The Wire, only not as good, Christine Falls manages to be sort of like Murder She Wrote. Only not as good. And maybe a little darker.
Cars ooze up the road. Tulips are the flesh of dead men. The rise of moon is full of grim portent. All stares are baleful. Even the most minor characters insist on visually apprehending the world in a way that is grimly portentous and darkly baleful.
This is a paraphrase, but I remember the archetyp...more
Cars ooze up the road. Tulips are the flesh of dead men. The rise of moon is full of grim portent. All stares are baleful. Even the most minor characters insist on visually apprehending the world in a way that is grimly portentous and darkly baleful.
This is a paraphrase, but I remember the archetyp...more
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Read in March, 2007
Downloaded from Audible.com
Narrator: Timothy Dalton
Publisher: Audio Renaissance, 2007
Length: 9 hours and 31 min.
Publisher's Summary
It's not the dead that seem strange to Quirke. It's the living. One night, after a few drinks at an office party, Quirke shuffles down into the morgue where he works and finds his brother-in-law, Malachy, altering a file he has no business even reading. Odd enough in itself to find Malachy there, but the next morning, when the haze has lifted, ...more
Narrator: Timothy Dalton
Publisher: Audio Renaissance, 2007
Length: 9 hours and 31 min.
Publisher's Summary
It's not the dead that seem strange to Quirke. It's the living. One night, after a few drinks at an office party, Quirke shuffles down into the morgue where he works and finds his brother-in-law, Malachy, altering a file he has no business even reading. Odd enough in itself to find Malachy there, but the next morning, when the haze has lifted, ...more
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Read in October, 2007
Not as much a who-done-it as a peel-back-the-layers mystery, set in Ireland and Boston. There's a mention (veiled) to the Magdalene Laundries, and morality in the 1950s in both countries. I liked that the "detective" was an insider and an outsider at the same time, and that his personal history was interwoven with the mystery, but that it wasn't banged over our heads (in other words, I guessed things that came out later, but didn't mind so much).
Interesting factoid for those that...more
Interesting factoid for those that...more
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What I learned from this book? Don't insert "poetic", unlikely thoughts into the minds of my characters. Just as an example, do not write a rape scene in which the rapist, mid-thrust, looks up at the view of the ocean (he and his victim are in the back seat of a car parked by the beach), whose crashing waves are so dark and powerful or whatever that the sight of them makes him come. BECAUSE NO. This generally enjoyable and readable mystery was made considerably less enjoyable and reada...more
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Read in May, 2008
I ate up this novel in a day. It's crime noir, set in 1950's Dublin and Boston and deals with a baby smuggling ring endorsed by the church and supported by Irish aristocracy and Boston Brahmins. The protagonist is a coroner, an alcoholic anti-hero bruised and battered by his past and lonely present. The novel was unputdownable and I can't wait to read the next in the "Quirke" series, but I'll have to: it just came out in hardcover so I can't afford it and the wait list at the library i...more
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Read in April, 2007
Banville's employs his deft touch, but even his writing can't overcome the limitations of the genre, i.e. plot predictability, two-dimensional villain, etc. In parts, I thought I could even detect Banville's discomfort with the form, but maybe I'm just projecting. Remember the good old days of Wilkie Collins? Now *there* was some good genre literature!
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Do you remember that song 'This is the song that never ends...'
This was the book that never ends.
This was the book that never ends.
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Read in June, 2008
I wonder if John Banville is a dark soul, haunted by his past, or if this is just his favorite topic. "Christine Falls," written by Banville under nom de plume Benjamin Black, is a well plotted crime novel. It is also an unraveling of character psychology similar to his previous book, "The Sea".
The protagonist of "Christine Falls," quirky pathologist Dr. Quirke, stops by the morgue late one night, only to stagger into a cover-up in motion (perpetrated by his b...more
The protagonist of "Christine Falls," quirky pathologist Dr. Quirke, stops by the morgue late one night, only to stagger into a cover-up in motion (perpetrated by his b...more
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Read in June, 2008
"John Banville writing as Benjamin Black" - why do authors feel the need to do that? I'm being disingenuous; I know exactly why they do it. This is Banville wishing to distance his Man Booker winning name from the grubby genre of crime (note that he picks a really naff alias, "Benjamin Black" , as if to stress the fact that we are not to take this tangent too seriously). Of course he wants it to sell so we have a little sticky in the bottom corner reminding us whose hand is a...more
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Read in March, 2008
Benjamin Black is the pen name of John Banville, a Mann-Booker Prize winning author. He is doing a series of mystery fiction. Not much mystery here, you can figure out whodunnit well before the end of the book if you are paying any attention at all. What is interesting is that of all the alcoholic, dysfunctional, erratic, failures that populate the anti-hero role of investigator, Black's protagonist Quirke, has got to take the cake. He is a pathologist in a Dublin hospital in the 1950's. He...more
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Read in April, 2008
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Has a copy to sell/swap
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Read in June, 2008
Not a review - more of a response: I read this in very small chunks to make it last. The mood is deliciously chilly, and the familiar characters (the police inspector, the whore with a heart of gold) are given more dimension than is usual in noir. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book.
Still, like all the other male detective novelists, "Black" presents women in reference to sex, only - as givers or withholders of it. I like the women in this story, but the fact that all the plot...more
Still, like all the other male detective novelists, "Black" presents women in reference to sex, only - as givers or withholders of it. I like the women in this story, but the fact that all the plot...more
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Read in February, 2008
recommended to Nancy by:
amazon.comrecommends it for: fans of noir fiction
Set in the 1950s, the action in this novel takes place in Ireland and later in Boston. The main character is Quirke, a pathologist. Quirke is a hard-drinking gloomy character, haunted by the death of his wife years earlier. As a boy, he was taken out of an orphanage by the head of a very powerful family, the Griffins in Dublin. As the novel opens, it's Christmas and he's just coming to his office in the hospital's morgue, where he sees his brother-in-law, Malachy Griffin, an obstetrician, sittin...more
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Read in January, 2008
This novel is written under a pseudonym, Benjamin Black. The author is John Banville, writing under a different name presumably to avoid smirching his Literary Novel reputation. "Christing Falls" is crime mystery, albeit of a very different sort.
The story crosses the Atlantic, being cast in the author's native Ireland and in Boston. The protagonist, the crime solver, is a Dublin pathologist named Quirke; this is a refreshing variation on the usual theme in which the detective/polic...more
The story crosses the Atlantic, being cast in the author's native Ireland and in Boston. The protagonist, the crime solver, is a Dublin pathologist named Quirke; this is a refreshing variation on the usual theme in which the detective/polic...more
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There is a rather querulous essay by the classic detective fiction writer S.S. Van Dine (AKA Willard Huntington Wright) called Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories where the author lays out the dos and more importantly the don ts of the genre for aspiring detective novelists. Benjamin Black manages to break nearly all of them in his debut crime novel, Christine Falls. [return:][return:]One can t help seeing the quotation marks around the word debut since Benjamin Black is...more
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