The Two Mr. Banvilles

Sherlock Holmes he's not.

"What I like about Quirke is that he's kind of dumb, like the rest of us," Banville says. "He cannot figure out what's going on. He misses the clues. People tell him the truth, he thinks it's lies; people tell him lies, he thinks it's the truth."

Banville also likes the fact that, because his doctor-detective is working half a century ago, "I don't have to do all that science they do nowadays." His research consisted of "a half-hour drink with a pathologist friend," who later told him: "You got everything wrong."

Plunking Quirke down in the repressed, provincial Ireland of the '50s had another advantage. It meant that readers wouldn't expect the amped-up mayhem so common in today's thrillers -- most of which, Banville says, are "written by people who've never seen more violence than somebody bumping into their car in the street."

He grew up repressed and provincial himself, in Wexford, in southeast Ireland. When he was 12, his brother gave him a copy of James Joyce's "Dubliners," which astonished him with its portraits of lives both "squalid" and "illuminated."

Bad imitations ensued.

One began: "The white May blossom swooped slowly into the open mouth of the grave."

"A 12-year-old!" the author says, laughing. Then: "You know, artists don't really have all that much experience of life. We make a huge amount out of the small experience that we do have."

Banville's experience includes forgoing a university education for the chance to see the world beyond Ireland. He got a job with Aer Lingus, flew all over the globe, met the woman he would marry in Berkeley in 1968. A year later he was back in Ireland, working as a sub-editor -- "what you call a copy editor" -- at the Irish Press.

"I loved that tinkering with language," he says. Then he quotes, with relish, a boss's definition of copy editors as "people who change other people's words and go home in the dark."

Lured by Hollywood, he tried to quit once.

"I wrote a little book called 'The Newton Letter,' " he says. "I remember being paid 500 pounds for it; it took me two years to write. I did the script for it in three days and I was paid 15,000 pounds." He took a risk, sold his house and soon discovered that "the movies are a much harder business to get into than one imagines."