The Two Mr. Banvilles

The difference begins with the act of writing itself.

Banville writes with a fountain pen. "I have to have that resistance of the paper, because the computer is much too fast," he says. As Black, he types his stuff straight onto the screen.

Banville takes three to five years to finish a book. Black can do it in that many months. That's because "what you get with John Banville is an extreme of concentration. What you get with Benjamin Black is, I hope, spontaneity." He's writing "very quickly, very fluently, and not thinking about it."

Then, of course, there's the plotting.

Black novels, like all thrillers, are built around plot. Banville has a reputation for ignoring it -- though that reputation may not be entirely deserved.

"The Sea," for example, weaves together the story of narrator Max Morden's marriage and the trauma of his wife's death with the story of a life-changing childhood summer that builds to a jolting climax. "It seems to me to be packed with plot," Banville says. "I don't know what they want in the way of plot. I really don't."

It's clear, however, that its plot matters less to him than the ideas he's grappling with.

He's interested in how "the past becomes our legend," something "we think we remember" but manufacture instead. The subject of Max's intense, pre-adolescent love affair provokes a meditation on "what growing up consists of," which is "an increasing sense of the particularity of things." He observes that when we fall in love, "we fashion a mirror image to see ourselves. I always think of lovers as two mirrors clasped face to face." This, by the way, is "the same as making art. I think of art as an almost sexual process where you concentrate absolutely on the object."

It's hard to imagine Benjamin Black talking this way.

Black's plots resemble other thriller plots. Like just about every Dick Francis hero, Quirke gets beaten by thugs trying to warn him off the scent. Like countless investigators before him, he falls into passionate sexual connections that are certain to end badly.

"In that genre one has to work in cliches," Banville concedes. The best he can do is try to banish them from his sentences.

Something else that's hard to imagine is the author of "The Sea" writing serial fiction for an American newspaper. As Benjamin Black, however, Banville cranked out a 15-part mystery called "The Lemur" for the New York Times Magazine this year. (It came out in book form last month.)