Feature: Benjamin Black on Crime Fiction and the City

Benjamin Black’s latest novel, PRAGUE NIGHTS (Viking), was published last month, a historical mystery set in – spoiler alert! – Prague, and sufficient reason for said Benny Blanco to wax lyrical in the Daily Telegraph on the topic of the city being God’s gift to the crime writer, said waxy lyricism encompassing the work of Raymond Chandler, Margery Allingham, Martin Cruz Smith, Michael Dibdin and Dostoevsky. To wit:

“The city is God’s gift to the crime writer. Yes, there is just as much scope, if not more, for blood-letting, skulduggery and devilment in the countryside as there is in town. However, the urban wilderness lends itself with particular aptness to noir fiction, whether it be Maigret’s Paris, Philip Marlowe’s Bay City, a lightly fictionalised version of Santa Monica, or Dostoevsky’s St Petersburg.
  “Of course, it used to be more congenial in the old days, before the coming of Clean Air Acts and the general frowning upon and legislation against the cigarette, that essential prop of the spinner of tales of stylish mayhem. The classic crime novel reeks of tobacco smoke, is touched with the wistful fragrance of sooty rain on shiny pavements and coughs its lungs out in peasouper fogs.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

Publication: PRAGUE NIGHTS by Benjamin Black

Benjamin Black (aka John Banville) has published seven novels in the Quirke series, which are set in Dublin in the 1950s, but recently Black’s been wandering into the realms of the standalone. The Raymond Chandler-inspired Philip Marlowe novel THE BLACK-EYED BLONDE (2014) is now followed by PRAGUE NIGHTS (Viking), with the blurb elves wittering thusly:

“The emperor’s mistress had been murdered, and the world had been taken hold of and turned upon its head.’
  Prague, 1599. Christian Stern, a young doctor, has just arrived in the city. On his first evening, he finds a young woman’s body half-buried in the snow.
  The dead woman is none other than the emperor’s mistress, and there’s no shortage of suspects. Stern is employed by the emperor himself to investigate the murder. In the search to find the culprit, Stern finds himself drawn into the shadowy world of the emperor’s court - unspoken affairs, letters written in code, and bitter rivalries. But there’s no turning back now ...

  PRAGUE NIGHTS was published on June 1st. For a review, clickety-click here …