Is it a truth universally acknowledged that a literary novelist in possession of a good career must be in want of a genre pseudonym? Julian Barnes wanted it, as crime writer Dan Kavanagh. So did Joyce Carol Oates, a.k.a. potboiler Rosamund Smith, and the Gore Vidal who published police procedurals under the name Edgar Box. Kingsley Amis even took a crack at a Bond novel after the death of Ian Fleming. He called himself Robert Markham for that walk around the block.

At first glance, John Banville might not seem a likely addition to the list. The winner of the 2005 Man Booker Prize for The Sea, a plot-thin meditation on identity and memory, Banville writes fiction of such lofty sensibility, and such exacting standards, he would appear to be to the genre book business what classical music is to Britney Spears. This is, after all, a man who, on reaching the podium to receive his Booker, told the assembled: "It is good to see a work of art being recognized."

And yet Christine Falls, Banville's debut in popular fiction, where art goes not so much unrecognized as happily ignored, is comfortable in its skin. Craft, equally exacting and no easier to achieve, is everything in genre writing, and here is where the Banville pseudonym, Benjamin Black, might be expected to show either novice jitters or high-art incompetence.

He shows neither. A natural-born crime writer at 62, Benjamin Black unfolds his tale of dirty 1950s Dublin and dark Catholic crimes with poise and surety. If the attention to language and character, and the spacing of the plot twists, smacks of the high end, consider John le Carré or Elmore Leonard. No form has an embargo on quality prose.

There is certainly plenty of story in this Black/Banville novel. Quirke is a hard-drinking bachelor pathologist. An orphan, he was saved from the permanent damage of an Irish orphanage when the country's chief justice, Garret Griffin, took a liking to him. Raised in the Griffin house, Quirke is "brother" to Malachy, now a leading gynecologist. He is also, by default, adjunct member of Ireland's small Catholic ascendancy class.

After a prologue in which a baby is smuggled offshore, the story opens with a thematic declarative – "It was not the dead that seemed to Quirke uncanny but the living" – followed by the proverbial shot ringing out in the dark. The sloshed pathologist chances upon his own brother altering a file in the hospital morgue. The file belongs to a young woman named Christine Falls, and the cause of her death, it is soon obvious, is being hushed up.

With his life immediately and forever destabilized, Quirke quickly drinks more whisky. It isn't only the Dublin of the mid-century, with its pub snugs and feeds of porter and furiously smoked Woodbines, that is powerfully evoked. Equally evocative are the denizens of the city where oppression by poverty and weather is compounded by the backroom rule of men in black. "Always so many priests," Quirk complains.

Priests and nuns, babies spirited from unwed, or dead, mothers, to be raised and trained as next-generation Catholic foot soldiers, comprise the shadowy conspiracy that the anti-hero must uncover. The task draws him across the ocean to Boston, where as a younger man he wooed and wed a privileged daughter of the diaspora. Boston Irish murk is just as thick as the stuff back home.

Quirke's disappointment with his own character, and his puzzlement with life in general, renders him a quirky guide through the forest of obligatory plot contrivances. Likewise his heightened awareness of the sensory and sensual. In Christine Falls, for instance, as in possibly no thriller before it, a nylon sheet has "a human feel, like a loose, chill cowl of bloodless skin." An evening sun, having found a chink in a painted-over pub window, "was depositing a fat, trembling gold lozenge of light on the floor carpet beside where they sat."

Admirers of John Banville, having listened quietly while he proclaimed in interviews that the Benjamin Black novels – Christine Falls is the first in a proposed series – would be exercises in pure craft, should by now have heard enough. Every page, every paragraph, and nearly every sentence of this so-called exercise in craft betrays itself.

In Annie Hall, a woman famously describes having sex with the Woody Allen character as "Kafkaesque." Noticing his shock, she adds: "I meant that as a compliment." If dubbing Christine Falls a "Proustian" crime novel sounds likewise ambivalent, be assured that it, too, is all compliment.

Benjamin Black, it is true, can't quite escape genre dictates, especially a lame ending designed to usher in the sequel, and Banville, once or twice, can't quite help being his lofty self. (A mouth feels like it is "lined with a gossamer-thin integument of warm, smooth, seared meat.") But this is a lovely novel, elegant and haunted and beautifully told.