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The book that most strongly influenced the first decade of my life was the Catechism of the Catholic Church. This slim volume tells you everything you need to know about Heaven, Hell and the human realm, and usefully defines such matters as simony and concupiscence. It is laid out in a series of questions and answers, beginning with the easy ones – such as ‘who made the world?’ (God) ‘and why?’ (for Man’s use and benefit) – and moving unstoppably on through sin, penitence and prayer to ultimate redemption or, the more likely course, sin, sin and more sin, and damnation to the eternal fires. This was a lot for a seven year-old to take in, but I seemed to manage it with aplomb, shouldering as I did so that burden of moral guilt which has been a mainstay throughout my writing life.

PG Wodehouse was the perfect antidote to Catholic eschatology. A new sun swam into my firmament when at the age of nine or ten I read Uncle Dynamite. Grown-ups smile at Wodehouse but children laugh to the point of bursting. Since Catholics are discouraged from reading the Old Testament – leave that dangerous book to the Jews and the Protestants – Wodehouse was my first encounter with English prose at its most sonorous. What matter that these glorious tales of silly asses and impeccable butlers, of pig-loving peers and their plucky nieces, were not about anything. Time enough for the serious stuff.

Joyce’s Dubliners, for instance: here was seriousness of a high order. What a revelation these stories were for a child brought up in the 1950s in an Ireland that had changed hardly at all since Joyce had known it at the turn of the century. This was the book that let me think that I, too, might be a writer, and at once I set out to forge the uncreated conscience of my race.

As a child I devoured detective books, of course, mainly by those polite ladies with murder in their hearts – Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, Margery Allingham and the rest. From them it was a natural and smooth transition to Raymond Chandler, who brought the niceties of the English detective novel to hard-boiled California. In fact, Chandler I now find somewhat soft-boiled, and if I were to pick a truly influential noir thriller it would be James M Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice. Cain the man may have been a perfect gent, but Cain the writer had a filthy mind, and in this short novel it shows – gloriously.

However, the writer from whose brow Benjamin Black really sprang is Georges Simenon. I came late to ‘simenons’, and had read nothing by him until I came across the New York Review of Books reissue of Dirty Snow, and was astonished by its quality. Set in an unnamed Belgian city during the Occupation, it is a dark, tormented tale of moral and erotic obsession among petty criminals and collaborators. The Maigret books I do not care for, but I have read every one of the romans durs, as Simenon called them, that I could get my hands on. If I must choose one, it would have to be the sadly out-of-print Monsieur Monde Vanishes. Simply, a masterpiece.

Further reading...

The Lemur
by Benjamin Black
Picador
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