The city's becoming a magnet for prize-winning Irish writers.

Following Anne Enright, the winner of last year's Man Booker Prize who spoke here last month, will be John Banville, the Dubliner who won the United Kingdom's best fiction award in 2005.

Mystery Lovers Bookshop in Oakmont will greet the writer Saturday at 10 a.m. for its Coffee and Crime series. It's a stop on Banville's cross-country tour promoting "The Silver Swan" (Holt, $25), the second novel in a series that's taken him in a new direction.

Banville, who's written these books under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, is now producing hard-boiled crime fiction, a departure from his 2005 Man Booker winner, "The Sea," a novel about a man's struggle with his past.

The "fog, guilt and cigarette smoke" of 1950s Dublin is "an absolutely fascinating setting for a book," said Banville over the phone from his Dublin home last week.

"It was also a place of dark secrets, family secrets, things kept hidden for appearance's sake," he said in explaining the appeal of that genre for a novelist.

A reader of "crime noir," Banville sought to create a real world with real people, "not a jigsaw puzzle to be solved."

His protagonist, Quirke, is a burly alcoholic medical examiner and widower who perversely pries lids off those secrets even though he knows better.

Banville calls him the "anti-Sherlock Holmes. He's kind of dopey, a little stupid and he tends to get things wrong, like most people."

In the first book, "Christine Falls," Quirke is badly beaten for his curiosity. This time, he and his daughter, Phoebe, become estranged as Quirke pushes ahead with a death inquiry that involves her lover.

Their relationship is full of complications, a thread Banville said he wants to explore when writing the third installment in this well-received series.

Quirke's perversity is pushed further along in "The Silver Swan" by his decision to quit drinking:

"For nearly two years he had been falling steadily into the abyss of drink ... and now the fall was broken."

Quirke, though, is "full of that anger and irritation of a dry drunk, a bit like your president," said Banville, "and there's nobody more dangerous and more determined than a dry drunk."

His sobriety is tested, of course, in the damp chill and shuttered buildings of Dublin where the Catholic Church kept a tight rein on public morality even in the daily press, said Banville.

"Those were the days when, if a newspaper was denounced from the pulpit on Sunday, it would lose readers, so everybody in the press was careful. In fact, most of the papers were completely cowed by the church. And, there's no better censorship than self-censorship."

Banville, 62, himself is a longtime newspaper staffer, starting with a Dublin newspaper in 1968 as an editor of reporters' stories, called a copy editor, and retiring as the Irish Times' literary editor in 1999.

"Working on the copy desk was wonderful training for a writer of fiction," he believes. "First, you learned the language, even to the importance of a comma. Second, you were involved in shaping the stories, making sure they read properly."

He published his first piece of fiction, "Long Lankin," a short-story collection, in 1970. He followed that title with 15 novels and several more short story collections.

Banville said his visit here will include a stop at the Carnegie Museum of Art to view one of his favorite paintings, Pierre Bonnard's "Nude in Bathtub."

Mystery Lovers Bookshop is at 514 Allegheny River Blvd., Oakland. Tickets for Banville are $5. To order, call 412-828-4877.