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In 2005, when John Banville heard his name called as the winner of the Booker Prize for his novel The Sea, he looked around the hall and thought, Imagine how many people hate me right now. In the 38 years he's spent writing fiction, Banville has certainly acquired a few enemies—many of them stung by his waspish, acute reviews in The Irish Times and The New York Review of Books. He's also obtained a loyal coterie of readers, who celebrate his baroque prose and ambitious structures. But in the Irish writer's latest books, a series of noir novels published under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, he has has let slip some of his stylistic and structural opulence. In 2007's Christine Falls and the just-released The Silver Swan, Banville—or, shall we say, Black—has crafted a set of detective novels set amid the mist-swathed Dublin of the 1950s, both featuring the pathologist-cum-detective Quirke.

On a recent weekday morning, Banville sat in a small conference room at his New York publishers, Henry Holt, surrounded by signed and to-be-signed stacks of The Silver Swan. A demure, handsome man dressed in a checked jacket, striped shirt, and patterned tie, he spoke to the Voice about his literary career, his foray into genre fiction, and his mysterious alter ego.

How did it feel to finally win the Booker Prize after such a long career as a writer? The Booker Prize is still amazingly influential: A book which would sell 5,000 or 6,000 copies in hardback, like The Sea, sold 75,000, 100,000. Of course, one doesn't take it as an indication of the worth of one's work. If there had been five different judges, there would have been six different books on the short list. But it was very gratifying to win it. It was a great surprise. Greatly amusing. . . . I said some things that really annoyed the London literary people. In an interview immediately after the prize-giving, I said I was glad to see a work of art winning the Booker Prize for a change.

A work of art as opposed to a work of craft? Yes, the Booker Prize and literary prizes in general are for middle-ground, middlebrow work, which is as it should be. The Booker Prize is a prize to keep people interested in fiction, in buying fiction. If they gave it to my kind of book every year, it would rapidly die. So it's better that it goes to big books by big names that will sell vast quantities.

Was there some surprise that it was The Sea that you won it for and not The Book of Evidence [short-listed for the prize in 1989]? Oh, yeah, The Book of Evidence should have won. The Untouchable [1997] should have won. That was a real Booker book. But that wasn't even short-listed.

Is it coincidental that you immediately started writing under a different name once the Booker had been won? Well, I didn't, you see. The timing was that I finished The Sea in September 2004. In March 2005, I began to write Christine Falls, and on the day the short list was announced in September 2005, my agent was able to hand over the completed manuscript to my extremely surprised publisher.