What in the world is one to make of John Banville, whose new novel, “Christine Falls” (Henry Holt, 340 pages, $25), was published under the pseudonym Benjamin Black?

Famously abstruse and difficult, heavily influenced by Beckett, Joyce, Pinter, Proust, and assorted Russians, Mr. Banville was nominated for the most prestigious literary prize in England, the Man Booker, not once but twice, and won it for “The Sea” in 2005.

On the cusp of finally selling some books, which his dark, heavy works, in spite of critical accolades, never have done, he and his publishers presumably would want to capitalize on the glory of the award. Yet here is his next book, released under a pseudonym.

There are many reasons for books to be issued pseudonymously, the most common of which is to hide the true identity of the writer. Gore Vidal wrote his three mystery novels coyly using the Edgar Box byline to avoid sullying his literary reputation with mere detective stories, as did a British poet laureate, C. Day Lewis, when he produced mysteries as Nicholas Blake.

This subterfuge is not in evidence here, as the dust jacket clearly identifies “Benjamin Black” as the pen name of John Banville.

A pseudonym may be used to separate one type of literature from another: literary novels from mystery novels, for example. Yet that cannot be the case here, as Mr. Banville has made other forays into crime fiction. Notably, they were “The Book of Evidence,” the first-person narrative of a thief who has committed the brutal murder of an innocent maid, and “The Untouchable,” England’s great spy scandal fictionalized as a memoir by Victor Maskell, who is based on Anthony Blount, the disgraced art historian and curator of the queen’s pictures.

“Christine Falls” is the most accessible of Mr. Banville’s novels, though it’s still not a book you would want to read with a lot of distractions. It begins slowly, never breaking into a dash, but picking up pace as it progresses, like a miler 200 yards from the finish line going all out and making headway more breathlessly.

In spite of a large cast of family members and servants, and a fair sprinkling of soap opera shenanigans and revelations, “Christine Falls” is structured like a detective novel.

The author slips from his famously lush prose style on several occasions, twice having characters “hiss” sentences that lack sibilants; repetitively and gratingly using “tipsy” to connote excessive imbibing; and, shockingly, sinking to the trite “he was not the sharpest tool in the box” to describe a young man. Not very Booker-ish.

The lonely, cynical, world-weary, hard-drinking Garret Quirke, a pathologist in a 1950s Dublin hospital, happens upon the city’s most beloved obstetrician, Malachy Griffin, altering the file of Christine Falls, a young woman who has just been admitted to the morgue room.

Mal is the son of the prominent judge who took in the orphaned Quirke as a young boy and raised him as Mal’s brother. Their sibling rivalry reached its summit when Mal married Sarah, the beautiful American with whom Quirke was in love, leaving him to marry her sister Delia, who died in childbirth.

Curious about what Mal was doing with the dead girl’s file, Quirke investigates, hoping to learn who she was and what relationship she had to his family. Again and again, Mal asks his brother-in-law to stop snooping, which, of course, only spurs him to be more relentless.

When the action moves to Boston, dark family secrets are revealed that perhaps should have been expected but caught me off guard. The characters are finely drawn, fully fleshed out, and, as characters are wont to do, behave in ways that are shocking, even if predictable in retrospect.

There is a sense that Quirke is meant to be a series detective. This would be a misstep on the part of the gifted Mr. Banville. Quirke is not a character with whom I would relish spending much more time. He strikes me as not entirely unlike the description of the author himself, as provided by his first wife. When Mr. Banville is writing, she said, his demeanor is like that of “a murderer who’s just come back from a particularly bloody killing.”

Quirke is a joyless, self-pitying drunk who, more than once, contemplates his own death with an uncaring acceptance. While his dog-on-a-bone relentless search for the truth is commendable, he radiates no warmth, offers no humor, and parcels out kindness as generously as an IRS agent.

Mr. Penzler is the proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan and the series editor of the annual “Best American Mystery Stories.” He can be reached at ottopenzler@mysteriousbookshop.com.