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That was very fast. You don't always work so fast. Benjamin Black writes very quickly indeed. . . . I'd never written like this before. March of 2005, I went to Italy to stay with a friend of mine. She gave me a room, and I sat down at nine one Monday morning and I thought: I don't know whether I'll be able to do this or not. But by lunchtime I'd written 1,500 words, which for John Banville would have been absolutely unheard of. If I write 1,500 in a week as John Banville, I'm doing very well. I discovered in myself a facility for this kind of writing.

In Italy, on that day when you wrote 1,500 words, were you aware that you were writing not as John Banville? Well, when I write as John Banville, I write with a fountain pen on paper, and then I transfer it onto the screen. I started writing Christine Falls like that, but it was too slow, so I just gave it up. Writing as Benjamin Black, it's halfway between doing long reviews for The New York Review of Books and doing a John Banville book. It's craft work, which I'm quite proud of. It gives me a lot of fun—well, some fun; a lot of satisfaction. I'm quite proud of these books—proud as a craftsman. Whereas I loathe and despise all my John Banville books. I really hate them. They're better than anybody else's; they're just not good enough for me.

When did you decide on a pseudonym? I knew from the start that I would use a pseudonym. It would be an open pseudonym—I wouldn't hide behind it. I simply wanted the reader to know this was something different, that this wasn't an elaborate postmodernist literary joke.

How did you fix on Benjamin Black? My very early books—which nobody reads anymore, thank God—they have a character called Benjamin White. So I was going to use Benjamin White, but my publisher said, "We think Black looks better, sounds better . . . It'll get nearer the top of the librarians' purchase lists, which are all alphabetical." It's funny—the other day, I got a consignment of these from the publishers, and they were addressed to Benjamin Black, and I had to sign the UPS receipt as Benjamin Black. That was a very odd sensation. . . . I'm having much too much fun as Benjamin Black. I'll have to pay for it. I'm Irish. This is what we do—guilt.

You have written, in an essay on your process, that you start with a form, a shape. Is that still true of these Benjamin Black novels? They seem to start with an atmosphere. Yes, I think that's true: They do start with an atmosphere, a sense of time and place. A John Banville book does start with a kind of tension in my mind, then I feel it out and give it characters and plot. But these start from an atmosphere, as you said. That's good—I must remember that.

You've professed to have "little or no interest in characters, plot, motivation, manners, politics, morality, or social issues . . ." John Banville hasn't.

But Benjamin Black has. Yes, he has.

So in writing as Benjamin Black, you can take up themes or issues that may not have been of interest before, you can write much more quickly. Are there other attendant freedoms? Well, looking back, I realized that becoming Benjamin Black wasn't quite the jeu d'esprit that I thought it was at the time. It was a kind of frolic, but I see too that John Banville needed a change—he needed something to shake him out of the first-person novel. Christine Falls was the real transition book. So the book I'm writing now—the John Banville book—the new one I'm working on is mostly in the third person, and it's a very different book. It's a kind of bittersweet erotic comedy. It's set in a house in the countryside on Midsummer's Day. The only first-person voice in it is the god Hermes. My publishers heard this and said: "Oh, yes, John. Another crowd-pleaser."