Systemic Crime and Social Disaffection in Benjamin Black's Quirke Series: A Struggle for Difference

Abstract

Under the pen name of Benjamin Black, the acclaimed Irish writer John Banville has published seven crime fiction novels, known as ‘the Quirke series’, set against the backdrop of 1950s Dublin and featuring Quirke, a middle- aged pathologist who works at the Holy Family Hospital. Taken together, the books tackle some of the crimes that stemmed from the strict religious repression prevalent in mid- twentieth- century Ireland, like illegal adoption (Christine Falls and Even the Dead), sexual exploitation and drug dealing (The Silver Swan), incest (Elegy for April), paedophilia (A Death in Summer) or clerical abuse (Holy Orders). It is my contention in this chapter that the existence of systemic crime is suggested along the series, as the stories portray the interconnection of the different agents of hegemonic power that controlled the social order of Ireland’s capital city. Similarly, I will attempt to demonstrate that Black’s narrative articulation of atrocities that had been absent from public discourse for a long time reveals his critique of the transhistorical indifference to socio- structural victimization that has dominated the Irish milieu. Thus, these crime novels, whose publication coincides with the wave of academic studies, survivor memoirs and artistic productions that have made public some of the hidden intricacies of that era in the island, can be said to demand urgent action over the ongoing effects of such ethos of dominance, as accountability has not been sufficiently purged in the present yet.