"Elegy for April" by Benjamin Black
Well, I'm always on the lookout for a good mystery and this was a new author for me. I didn't know that John Banville of Booker winner fame wrote these. It was fairly good even though it did have a cranked out quality. I'm usually quite interested in meeting authors through their public readings and seeing what they're like. This Banville seems like he'd be a thoroughly nasty character.
From Wikipedia:
Banville is highly scathing of all of his work, stating of his books "I hate them all ... I loathe them. They're all a standing embarrassment."[4] Instead of dwelling on the past Banville is continually looking forward; "You have to crank yourself up every morning and think about all the awful stuff you did yesterday, and how how you can compensate for that by doing better today".[5] He writes only about a hundred words a day for his literary novels, versus several thousand words a day for his Benjamin Black crime fiction.[12] He appreciates his work as Black as a craft while as Banville he is an artist, though he does consider crime-writing, in his own words, as being "cheap fiction".
