Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm very pleased to have as my guest, John Banville, who has begun a new enterprise.

He has invented a investigator, who is a pathologist named Quirk.

He is writing under the name Benjamin Black, and the first of the Quirk novels is Christine

Falls, which has recently been published by Henry Halt.

John Banville, of course, won the man Booker Prize for the Sea,

and he has written, well, many previous novels.

I started reading him very early on with Dr. Copernicus,

and I think I've read all of his books now,

and I wanted to ask you, what led you to

want a new name for these books, a new pseudonym?

Well, I was never, I mean, it was always going to be an open pseudonym.

I was never going to hide behind it.

I simply wanted to indicate to readers that this was a different direction that I was taking.

I was also worried that people would read it as an elaborate literary joke

that there was more to this than meets the eye.

My friend Richard Ford was in Dublin at the time the book was published

...