Acclaimed Irish novelist and journalist – and Man Booker Prize winner – John Banville is better known to mystery fans as his noir writing alter-ego Benjamin Black.
His two mystery novels to date, Christine Falls and the recently released The Silver Swan are darkly set in 1950s Dublin and both feature pathologist-cum-detective Garret Quirke.
Christine Falls is one of this year’s Edgar nominees.
I thought Black cleverly chose his pseudonym because it is a print font, but in a Village Voice interview he explains that he was going to use Benjamin White after a character in some of his very early books, but chose Benjamin Black on the advice of his publisher who said, "We think Black looks better, sounds better . . . It'll get nearer the top of the librarians' purchase lists, which are all alphabetical.”
Sarah Dunant, author of many international literary fiction bestsellers, including The Birth of Venus and In the Company of the Courtesan, is also a writer of hard-boiled detective fiction.
Her character, Hannah Wolfe, is a private investigator in London.
There are three titles in the series, written in the early 1990s, the second of which, Fatlands, won the Silver Dagger Award for Crime Fiction in 1993.
In the first book, Birth Marks, Hannah sets out to investigate the death of a ballet dancer who is eight months pregnant, and is drawn into a gripping story involving the ethics of surrogate motherhood.
The ballet theme brought to mind a classic from the fifties, Death in the Fifth Position, by Edgar Box – a pseudonym of Gore Vidal.
All three of the Box mysteries sold well and actually garnered a few good reviews from unwitting critics who had earlier refused to review his literary novels written under Vidal's real name.