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CRIME:The Lemurby Benjamin BlackPicador, 185pp. £12.99
THE ART TO giving a good speech, we are told, is to have a very strong beginning and a very strong ending, and to ensure that the interval between the two is as brief as possible. John Banville, writing as Benjamin Black, seems to have taken this advice and applied it to his new novella, The Lemur, which indeed has a beginning and an ending but a marked lack of what writers and readers alike call "a middle". As a result, despite its brevity - it runs to little more than 20,000 words or so - there are stretches during which nothing much of any kind happens, at length. Ostensibly set in a present-day New York by Dominck Dunne out of Vanity Fair, it all seems to unfold in a strange overheated 1950s dreamworld, like a post-war HM Tennent drawing-room drama, replete with doting mothers and closeted sons, where tightly wound characters reprove each other in brittle tones for their use of slang:
