Available in this UK edition

When a serious writer attempts a crime novel, the danger is that he will yield to the temptation to make it literary – either because habits are hard to break, or because he thinks he can write a thriller that is also a work of art. John Banville, to his credit, understands that crime fiction is only crime fiction. The Lemur, his third book under the pen name Benjamin Black, is a slim, efficient novel, elegantly done as such things go, in which literary pretensions are largely resisted and the proper conventions observed. There is the murder. There is the Beretta. There are multiple suspects. There is the CIA connection. There is sinister big money. There is the hard-boiled New York cop. There is another mysterious death – a suicide, or was it? – twenty years earlier. There are family secrets. There is a beautiful wife and a beautiful mistress. There are colourful minor characters. There is whisky before noon. There are cigarettes, lots of them, but times have changed even in the world of noir. After the protagonist, John Glass, sneaks a smoke in his 39th-floor Manhattan office, he then spends a paragraph trying to dispose of the butt; when he lights up on the street he gets a lecture from the cop: ‘“You should quit,” he said. “Believe me, it makes a difference. Even in the sack – you got more breath.”’

(LRB 3 July 2008)

Picador | paperback 114 pp. |ISBN: 9780312428082