TV News: Quirke on BBC One

Benjamin Black's Quirke series has been made into a tv series starring Gabriel Byrne. The first of the three 90-minute episodes, is based on Christine Falls and is on Sunday 25 May at 9pm on BBC One. The cast also includes Michael Gambon:

Dublin, in the late autumn of 1956. City pathologist Quirke - we never get to know his Christian name - stumbles late one night from a party in the nurses' quarters with a view to sleeping off his hangover in his subterranean pathology lab. To his surprise his quiet refuge has been invaded by his adoptive brother, obstetric consultant Malachy Griffin, who is at Quirke's desk completing some paperwork for a recently deceased patient named Christine Falls.

When Quirke returns next morning to find Christine's body gone, he remembers his brother's odd behaviour, and, consumed by curiosity over what Mal was doing, recalls the body and performs a full post mortem.

As he investigates, all the time stirring up a hornets' nest of trouble for himself, Quirke uncovers the truth about a family secret that has remained buried for nearly twenty years, and begins to understand that there are some truths that may be better left untold.

Quirke has been shown in Ireland in February, on RTÉ One and will be available on DVD from 9 June 2014.

Crime Writers contribute to Imagined Lives

A new exhibition opens at the National Portrait Gallery this week called Imagined Lives, the accompanying book has been available for a couple of weeks. The authors involved in this imagining of lives for unknown portrait subjects include crime writers John Banville (aka Benjamin Black), Alexander McCall Smith and Minette Walters as well as non-crime writers Tracy Chevalier, Julian "Downton Abbey" Fellowes, Terry Pratchett, Sarah Singleton and Joanna Trollope.

You can read an extract from False Mary (which is the cover on the book below) written by Alexander McCall Smith on the NPG website.

Eight internationally acclaimed authors have invented imaginary biographies and character sketches based on fourteen unidentified portraits. Who are these men and women, why were they painted, and why do they now find themselves in the Collection of the National Portrait Gallery? With fictional letters, diaries, mini-biographies and memoirs, Imagined Lives creates vivid stories about these unknown sitters from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

A Death in Summer - Cover Opinions

This week's selection for "cover opinions" is the US and UK covers for Benjamin Black's A Death in Summer, the fourth in his Quirke series, which is set in 1950s Dublin.

The US editions are on the left, the hardback edition is out now, and the trade paperback (below) will be out in March; the UK edition (on the right) is also already available.

So what are your thoughts on the US (LHS, below), and UK (RHS) covers? Which would entice you to pick the book up if you were not familiar with the books of Benjamin Black?

If you have read it, how well do the covers match the story?

NB. Elergy for April was given the same cover opinions treatment last year.


















Blurb: When newspaper magnate Richard Jewell is found dead at his country estate, clutching a shotgun in his lifeless hands, few see his demise as cause for sorrow. But before long Doctor Quirke and Inspector Hackett realise that, rather than the suspected suicide, ‘Diamond Dick’ has in fact been murdered.

Jewell had made many enemies over the years and suspicion soon falls on one of his biggest rivals. But as Quirke and his assistant Sinclair get to know Jewell's beautiful, enigmatic wife Françoise d’Aubigny, and his fragile sister Dannie, as well as those who work for the family, it gradually becomes clear that all is not as it seems.

As Quirke’s investigations return him to the notorious orphanage of St Christopher’s, where he once resided, events begin to take a much darker turn. Quirke finds himself reunited with an old enemy and Sinclair receives sinister threats. But what have the shadowy benefactors of St Christopher’s to do with it all?

Against the backdrop of 1950s Dublin, Benjamin Black conjures another atmospheric, beguiling mystery.

Elegy for April - Cover Opinions

This week's selection for "cover opinions" is the two very different hardback editions of Benjamin Black's Elegy for April, the third in his Quirke series, which is set in 1950s Dublin.

Both editions are published in 2010. The US edition (on the left) came out in April, the UK edition (on the right) is to be published on 1 October.

So what are you thoughts on the US and UK covers? Which would entice you to pick the book up if you were not familiar with Benjamin Black?

Here is the Euro Crime review, by Laura, of Elegy for April.

New Reviews: B Black, S Black, Kelly, Mallo, Moss, Sherez

Two competitions for August and one is open internationally:
Win one of three sets of Lockdown and Deadlock by Sean Black (Worldwide)
Win one of five copies of Inspector Cataldo's Criminal Summer by Luigi Guicciardi, tr Iain Halliday (UK & Europe)

Here are this week's reviews, which this week aren't restricted to Europe!:

Laura Root reviews Benjamin Black's third Quirke book, Elegy for April concluding that it "is another slice of classy Emerald Noir";

Michelle Peckham reviews one of this month's competition prizes Deadlock by Sean Black, set in the US and is one for fans of fast, action thrillers;

Terry Halligan reviews the second in Jim Kelly's new Norfolk-based series, Death Watch writing that "detective fiction needs more books of this high quality";

I pop over to 1970s Argentina in Ernesto Mallo's Needle in a Haystack, tr. Jethro Soutar which is rather a bleak read;

Maxine Clarke reviews Australian author, Tara Moss's Hit which has its first UK publication

and Geoff Jones is in Greece in Stav Sherez's The Black Monastery.

Previous reviews can be found in the review archive and forthcoming titles can be found by author or date, here.