BBC Commissions Quirke, Adapted from the Crime Novels by Benjamin Black

BBC announced today that it has commissioned three 90-minute episodes of Quirke, each of which will be adapted from the first three mysteries in the series by Benjamin Black: Christine Falls (see below), The Silver Swan, and Elegy for April. (The number of titles now stands at five, with the most recent, Vengeance, published just this month here in the US.)

Gabriel Bryne will star as Quirke, the chief pathologist in the Dublin City Morgue. The setting for the series is the 1950s, "a time full of mystery, secrets and intrigue."

Andrew Davies and Conor McPherson will write the adapted screenplays.

"I am very excited by the prospect of seeing my character Quirke incarnated by Gabriel Byrne, a perfect choice for the part," said John Banville. "I know both Quirke and Benjamin Black will be wonderfully served by Andrew Davies and Conor McPherson, two masters of their craft." (Benjamin Black is a pen name used by John Banville.)

Filming begins later this year in Dublin. No indication of an air date was mentioned in the press release.

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Christine Falls
Benjamin Black
A Quirke Mystery (1st in series)

It's not the dead that seem strange to Quirke. It's the living. One night, after a few drinks at an office party, Quirke shuffles down into the morgue where he works and finds his brother-in-law, Malachy, altering a file he has no business even reading. Odd enough in itself to find Malachy there, but the next morning, when the haze has lifted, it looks an awful lot like his brother-in-law, the esteemed doctor, was in fact tampering with a corpse — and concealing the cause of death.

It turns out the body belonged to a young woman named Christine Falls. And as Quirke reluctantly presses on toward the true facts behind her death, he comes up against some insidious — and very well-guarded — secrets of Dublin's high Catholic society, among them members of his own family.

      

In our review of this book, we said it had "a mysterious, decidedly noir feel to it, evoking images of darkness and black-washed colors in the reader's mind. There's a persistent sense of intrigue in the story: who was Christine Falls, why are people trying to get Quirke to back off looking into her death, and how are Quirke's friends and family involved? Just as Quirke seems close to answering these questions, they drift further away, again out of reach." (Read our complete review of Christine Falls on Mysterious Reviews.)

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