Benjamin Black is the pen name of acclaimed author John Banville, who was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He is the author of fifteen novels, including The Sea, which won the 2005 Man Booker Prize. In 2013 he was awarded the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Achievement in Irish Literature, and in 2014 the Quirke novels were adapted into a major BBC TV series. This is the seventh book in the acclaimed Quirke series.
Quirke is an endearing hero and the Dublin of the 1950s - wet, cold, foggy, sinister - is evoked with harsh realism and nostalgia The Times Addiction, morbid sexual obsession, blackmail and murder, as well as prose as crisp as a winter's morning by the Liffey ... Quirke is human enough to swell the hardest of hearts GQ With Quirke, Banville has made a fascinating addition to the ranks of the defective detective in books that combine respectful reading of the genre with brightly original writing Guardian A requiem for a cursed city, its inhabitants' inner lives doomed to remain as locked away, unhappy and unknowable as whatever lies buried Metro It is doubtful that anyone can write as well as Benjamin Black when it comes to a psychological mystery Washington Times Even the Dead offers pleasures one doesn't always associate with the crime thriller. Like subtle characterisation and a calm, elegant prose style. What makes the novel stand out is the warm, sensitive, psychologically acute characterisation. When I reached the end of the novel, I had a sense of having been nourished, rather than manipulated. It just goes to show that it isn't the genre that counts, but the talent that a writer brings to it Independent on Sunday In Even the Dead, Black goes beyond the atmospheric stage and scene setting, delving deeper than in any previous novel into the soul of his pathologist hero Quirke, an enigmatic loner whose voice colours every page as if staining it with nicotine Sunday Herald