John Banville is so far staying true to his suggestion in 2022 that The Singularities would be his final “non-crime” novel, preferring in late life to concentrate instead on books that take him five months to write rather than five years – not the painstaking high-art endeavour of Joyce and Henry James so much as the prolific pragmatism of another of his masters, Georges Simenon. Set in the buttoned-up Ireland of his 1950s boyhood, the crime series that Banville began under the alias Benjamin Black (dropped in 2020) now reaches its 10th instalment with his latest book, The Drowned, another absorbing outing for the widowed Dublin pathologist Quirke and his reluctant sidekick DI Strafford, last seen in 2023’s The Lock-Up.
