One evening in rural Ireland a loner comes across an abandoned car in a field. There he encounters an Englishman who claims his wife has fled the car, and thrown herself into the sea. The police are called and Detective Inspector Strafford is dispatched from Dublin to investigate the woman’s disappearance. But there is something clearly amiss. Several of the characters appear to be hiding something, and Strafford has to call on his old ally, pathologist Quirke, to help unravel the tight knot of complexities and buried resentments.

The Quirke series of crime novels first began in 2006 with Christine Falls, published under the pseudonym Benjamin Black. Six further books followed, after which Banville dropped the pseudonym and published April in Spain using the name John Banville, which also featured (alongside Quirke) the younger police detective St John Strafford. Since then there has been The Lock Up and Snow. The Drowned is the fourth entry in the Quirke & Strafford series.

I adore these books. Sometimes I come across reviews of them, clearly written by fans of historical detective fiction, and they generally criticise the melancholy tone and the glacial pacing of the plot. Which is to miss the point by a long chalk. These novels are literary character studies featuring unsatisfied and deeply flawed men, with 1950s Ireland – and all the political and religious complexities that come with that – as its backdrop. They are snippets of life from a bygone time. They’re superbly written character examinations of what makes us human. The detective aspect is almost always secondary. Sometimes the mystery isn’t at all that compelling. It’s certainly not the thing that drives the storyline.

In this particular novel there’s a character whose past would generally make him deeply unsympathetic. And yet Banville’s skill as a writer allow us to feel for him, to see the world through his eyes, and to realise that things are not just black and white; there are shades of darkness in all of us. Strafford’s relationship to Quirke’s daughter Phoebe evolves, and we are taken into uncomfortable territory with the novel’s progression. I admire Quirke, even if I find him a little too curmudgeonly, and yet I really like St John Strafford and enjoy their uneasy relationship.

John Banville’s prose is an absolute delight. He writes with a deeply satisfying style, precise and yet unpretentious. This is what real storytelling is, when the author demands we follow him on the journey not because we’re curious about what might happen in the story, but by the fact that we care about what will happen to his characters. The Drowned is yet another masterpiece of historic fiction and comes highly recommended.