DEATH AND NARRATIVE IN THE QUIRKE SERIES BY BENJAMIN BLACK
DEATH AND NARRATIVE IN THE QUIRKE SERIES BY BENJAMIN BLACK

Summary/Abstract: The acclaimed Irish writer John Banville has penned a series of ‘noir’ crime novels, whose main protagonist is Quirke, a forensic pathologist working for the Holy Family hospital in the Dublin of the 50s. Unanimously classified by its publishers as noir fiction, the Quirke series is and is not adhering to the requirements of its genre. My paper focuses on the analysis of the narrative in the Quirke series, revealing that the key to the interpretation of the novels can be found in the doubling of the plot: each individual novel consists at the same time of a detective story (the particular murder case which is solved according to the rules of the genre) and a private story, the story of Quirke, who unfolds throughout the seven novels in the series only to find its resolution in the last novel of the series, Even the Dead.

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