Latest Quirke story of the 1950s pathologist
Or rather Quirke plays Docter Watson to the Garda’s Strafford and Hackett. This time there a body is found in a garage lock-up in Banville’s favourite part of Dublin – the streets around Bagot Street and the Grand Canal. The alcoholic Quirke we are told is solitary not lonely, although he is in mourning for his wife Evelyn, killed in a shoot out in ‘April in Spain’. He has the ague, is faded and in his twilight years. He is now staying with daughter Phoebe, both careful not to intrude too much on each other’s lives. That is until he finds she is ‘seeing’ his colleague Strafford.
This is a more prickly Quirke. His ‘blood resentment’ of the ‘Big House’ people is given full vent. He even re-tells the old Brendan Behan tale, once told in Mc Daid’s, about ‘Horse Prods’. Other pubs frequented include Neary’s and the Brazen Head. In the latter ‘he hadn’t drunk much , three or four whiskeys, and a couple of small bottles of barley wine’.
Convinced the lock-up death was murder and not a suicide, Quirke finds others are interested in the activities of a young Jewish woman. Hackett gets a call from Drumcondra ( euphemism for the Bishop’s Palace) and arranges to meet Bishop McEvoy in Wynn’s Hotel,one-time haunt of James Joyce and Nora. ‘Don’t you know that is where the clergy go?’ In the hotel he is met by the ‘faint mustiness of the clergy’ – and another of the author’s hates ‘the lingering smell of generations of bacon and cabbage.‘ Amid the damp and the ‘fog of cigarette smoke and melancholia’ we find another former nemesis is still at large, the well-meaning but sinister Knights of St. Patrick.
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