It's not so much a "whodunnit", as a "whydunnit". John Banville created quite a stir in the publishing world when his novel The Sea won the Man Booker Prize.
Now he's making headlines with the news that his next book, Quirke, will be a thriller, that it will appear next year under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, and that it has taken the Frankfurt book fair by storm.
Banville's agent, Ed Victor, has just returned from Frankfurt - the world's top marketplace for new books - where, he says, the book caused "a feeding frenzy". "Everybody who has read Quirke has adored it," Victor says. The novel will be published by Picador in the UK in autumn 2006, and negotiations for the German, French, Italian and Spanish rights are already under way.
Banville, who has always been hailed as the ultimate literary stylist, is unfazed by all the fuss. The new book, he says, started out as a television script which didn't go anywhere, so he decided to rework it as a novel; and he is publishing it under another name to let people know that it's in a different mode from his other books.
"It's not that I'm ashamed of it, or hiding behind the pseudonym, or trying to play some sort of complex postmodern literary trick," he says. "I've always enjoyed reading thrillers; Richard Stark is a particular favourite. And recently I came across Georges Simenon for the first time - not his Maigret books, but what he called his "romans durs", or "hard books", which have just been republished by the New York Review of Books.
"I was enthralled by his ability to conjure a scene in a sentence. I don't have his facility, but I must say I enjoyed writing in this spare, lean, fictional form."
The story is set in the early 1950s, when Irish babies were secretly being exported to Catholic families in the US. The eponymous hero is a pathologist who discovers some very dark deeds and gets caught between two families, one in Dublin, one in Boston. But does it spell the end of John Banville, literary novelist?
"Absolutely not," says Banville. He has never, he adds, subscribed to the view that there's literary fiction, and then there's fiction. "There's just good fiction and bad fiction. That's all."
