His novels Athena and Ghosts concern a character who is arrested for killing a servant girl while trying to recover some of his family's paintings.
One novel by this author opens each chapter with a catalogue entry for a fictional painting of a scene from Ovid's Metamorphosis. He drew on the life of Anthony Blunt to create the character Victor Maskell, who serves as a World War II spy and an advisor for Elizabeth II. This author wrote an open letter in 1981 asking for the Booker Prize to be awarded to him so he could use the cash to buy books for libraries. His novels Athena and Ghosts concern a character who is arrested for killing a servant girl while trying to recover some of his family's paintings. That character, Freddy Montgomery, first appears in his novel The Book of Evidence. He was commissioned to write the 2014 Philip Marlow novel The Black Eyed Blonde because of his experience writing detective novels under the alias Benjamin Black. In his best known novel, the protagonist responds to the death of his wife Anna by returning to his childhood home and remembering the drowning of the twins Chloe and her mute twin brother Myles. For 10 points, name this Irish author who wrote about Max Morden in The Sea.
One novel by this author opens each chapter with a catalogue entry for a fictional painting of a scene from Ovid's Metamorphosis.
John Banville