Maureen Corrigan

It's a particularly bleak January, reason enough for literary escape.

But while some readers opt for sunshine, maybe a romance or historical novel—

Others are drawn to a genre that transports us deeper into darkness, while also affirming the power of reason to arrive at some clarity.

I'm talking, of course, about noir fiction.

And turning up just in time to accompany us through the gloom, here comes Quirk again.

Quirk is the antihero of a series of mysteries set in 1950s Dublin, written by Irish novelist John Banville.

A coroner and pathologist, Quirk, who goes by one name only, dwells, as he's put it, down among the dead men in the basement morgue of a hospital.

Banville, who won the Booker Prize for his 2005 literary novel The Sea, published his first quirk mystery in 2006 under the pseudonym Benjamin Black.

Holt Paperbacks has been reissuing the novels under Banville's name.

The seventh and last reprint has just come out.

Even the Dead affirms what we quirk admirers already know—

namely that there never was much distinction between Banville's so-called literary novels and his mysteries.

Both are graced with Banville's signature pensive atmosphere and a subdued beauty of language.

Even the Dead finds Quirk recovering from traumatic brain injuries he sustained in a previous investigation.

He's suffering from absence seizures, which Quirk describes as the odd moment of separation from myself.

We're told early on that he had pills to make him sleep and other pills to keep him calm when he was awake.

And so the days trickled past, each one much the same as all the others.

He felt like Robinson Crusoe, grown old on his island.

Back at the morgue, Quirk's assistant, David Sinclair, is unsympathetically hoping his nasty boss never returns.

But when examining the charred corpse of a young man, an apparent suicide who crashed his car into a tree, Sinclair finds a suspicious indentation of the skull.