Snow by John Banville

Snow is officially a mystery novel, by a literary writer. To add a wrinkle, author John Banville has written mysteries before - has written mysteries in what I think is this exact same milieu - under the name Benjamin Black. But I think this is the first novel to both be called "a mystery" and published as by Banville.

I suspect that means this was an offshoot of the Black series - about a pathologist in 1950s Dublin called Quirke, who is mentioned but never appears in Snow - and that Banville, or his agent, or his publisher, decided somewhere along the lines that it was different enough that it would be a Banville book rather than a Black book, but that they would also call it a "mystery."

The main character is a detective, as is tradition for the form: St. John Strafford. (Pronounced "Sinjin," as he has to repeatedly note. With an "r" in the last name, ditto.) We are mostly in his head, in a limited third person narration, with a few literary-novel eruptions into other viewpoints that work but made me wonder if they were necessary. (Literary novelists sometimes err in the direction of expansiveness, trying to show all the world and make clear all the issues. And sometimes they err in the direction of hermeticism, leaving only clues and breadcrumbs to be as pure to their concept of the story as possible. Banville leans towards the former pole here.)

Strafford has been sent to a big manor house in the Irish countryside - Ballyglass House, in County Wexford (Banville's own birthplace). A priest, Father Tom Lawless, has been murdered there in the night. It is a few days before Christmas. (To the title: it has been snowing, and it continues to snow, off and on, throughout the novel. As Strafford literarily puts it "Snow was general all over Ireland.")

There are two kinds of mystery novel: the ones in which a good person was murdered, and ones in which a bad person was murdered. Tom Lawless was a priest in Ireland in 1957, and is the murder victim in a novel that came out in 2020. I'd say I'll let you guess what kind of victim he was, but a Catholic priest in a 2020 novel is 99% certain to be a villain. And he was, as we eventually learn.

Banville's deviations from his focus on Strafford - an opening two pages, detailing the murder, and a coda about three-quarters of the way through the novel, flashing back to Lawless a decade earlier (though, somewhat inconsistently, pretending to be a document he wrote sometime soon before his death) - are largely to make that villainy more obvious, especially that heavy-handed coda.

So we the readers start off with one question: why was Lawless murdered? If we are as cynical as I am, we quickly figure he was diddling someone, and then move on to the next obvious question: boys or girls?

Fairly early on, we learn that Lawless spent some years at a "school," and I'll avoid giving details to leave the previous question somewhat open. But Lawless, we eventually learn, was a piece of work, the kind of murder victim we are happy to see put in his grave.

But Strafford still has the job of finding out who and why, which he pursues through the aristocratic Catholic Osbourne family, Father Tom's hosts the night before, and through the local town. Neither group is particularly forthcoming, as is to be expected of a small town and an aristocratic family in a mystery novel. And Strafford declares himself not to be all that good at this detecting thing, as well - perhaps false modesty, since he does figure it all out by the end of this short novel.

Banville is a fine writer as always, but Snow has some deeply obvious things at its core that are somewhat unfortunate. His style keeps it from being the kind of thumping dullness that another writer might inflict, and the question of who actually killed Father Tom - in best mystery-novel fashion, nearly every character has a decent reason to have wanted to - is solidly mysterious until Banville reveals all at the end. But I thought Banville was trickier than this: the story of the murder of a sexually deviant Catholic priest in 1950s Ireland is the kind of thing I thought he'd leave to the more sensationalist crew.