After winning the coveted Man Booker prize in 2005 for his novel The Sea, John Banville made a mysterious move. Eschewing the elaborate style that brought him fame — and that routinely garners comparisons to Nabokov, Beckett, and Proust — he instead churned out a trio of hard-boiled crime novels under the pen name Benjamin Black. Recently, Banville answered some questions from Boldtype's Michael Romano, discussing his latest stylistic excursion, his love of pulp fiction, and his career-long fascination with mystery.

Boldtype: Who is Benjamin Black, and why did you become him?

John Banville: Benjamin Black does not exist. In 2004, when I had finished writing The Sea, I began to read Georges Simenon for the first time — not the Maigret books, which I don't much care for, but what Simenon called his romans durs, his hard novels — and I was tremendously impressed by the effects he could achieve with such spare materials. I had a television script, which was not going to be made into a film, so I decided instead to turn it into a novel. I took the pen name merely to alert my readers to the fact that Christine Falls was not an elaborate postmodernist literary joke, but a straightforward crime novel in which "what you see is what you get." At the time, Benjamin Black seemed no more than a jeu d'esprit, but looking back now, I think John Banville needed to be shaken up a little, in order to break the long trail of first-person novels I have been writing since the early '80s.

BT: What are the differences between Black and Banville?

JB: Speed, for a start. Banville writes very slowly indeed; Black is scandalously fluent. On the morning when I sat down to begin Christine Falls, I was not at all sure that I could do it, but by lunchtime, I had written 1,500 words, to my amazement. Banville would be pleased to get 150 words done in a morning. Of course, there are profounder differences. Black is a craftsman and proud to be so; Banville tries to be an artist, whatever that is.

BT: You say you began writing the first Black novel, Christine Falls, shortly after finishing The Sea. Did The Sea mark the end of something?

JB: Yes, I think so. In fact, I had thought my previous book, Shroud, was the end of my first-person novels, but then, in The Sea, Max Morden began to speak in my head, and I was stuck with him. The new book, the one I'm working on now, is mostly in the third person, though there is one narrative voice — that of the god Hermes. When one of my publishers heard this, he swallowed hard and said with sad irony, "Ah, another crowd-pleaser, then."

BT: It's hard not to think of you now as one of your own Banvillean heroes. So many of them have multiple identities, assumed names, divided or reinvented selves; the narrator of Shroud, under an assumed identity, even writes a book called The Alias as Salient Fact. Are you living a John Banville novel?

JB: Yes, of course — aren't we all? Each individual is a congeries of selves. Consider a man who rises from his lover's bed, walks out into the street, and encounters his deadliest enemy — is the man in the street the same as the man in the bedroom? I think not.

BT: You've written about your appreciation of Simenon, the Belgian noir master, as well classic American pulp-fiction writers, such as James M. Cain and Richard Stark. How have these writers influenced you?

JB: No writer "influences" another, except at the beginning, so that a great number of one's apprentice years are given over to the effort of ridding one's style of echoes, or, worse still, parrotings. I like and admire crime fiction, the pulpier the better. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice is an astonishing masterpiece, reputedly dashed off in a weekend. I wish Benjamin B. could work that fast, that cheaply, and that nastily. Stark, on the other hand, is up there with Simenon for elegance of style and spareness of material. There are half a dozen novels in Stark's Parker series that are simply masterpieces, entirely transcending genre.

BT: Even before the Black novels, you were preoccupied with evidence, most obviously in The Book of Evidence. In a recent interview, you made the interesting claim that "all art is just evidence." Could you explain what you mean?

JB: It seems to me a work of art is the evidence offered by a fantastically observant witness — and I intend the pun here on religious witness. We know nothing of the world other than what we take in through the senses, and all the artist can give back is that sensory evidence. The art is in the presentation, of course.

BT: You've been equally preoccupied with mystery throughout your career, not merely as a genre or plot device, but as a core fact of existence. In both your Banville and Black novels, the universe, the past, our motives, our selves, everything is fundamentally mysterious. What attracts you to mystery?

JB: Well, the essential mystery is the mystery of being, or Being, if we want to adopt the Heideggerian mode. How would an artist not be deeply preoccupied with that enigma?

BT: There seems to be a relationship, in all your writing, between language and mystery. What is it?

JB: The second most mysterious thing, after being, is language, in its ability both to express and to conceal. If I were asked to name humankind's greatest invention, I would answer, "The sentence." Yet, in inventing language, we also invented a kind of subtle monster that is as much in control of us as we are in control of it. The poet writing a poem or a worker writing a job application has the same eerie feeling on completion — "This isn't really what I meant to say." Who speaks? Language speaks, and it speaks us.

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