Death Becomes Him

“I’ve come to realise that my readers would prefer if it I died rather than if Charlie Parker died. They would mourn me, but they would not be angry, whereas if I killed off Parker, they would be angry. Readers’ affection isn’t for the writer, it’s for the character.”

John Connolly offers a wry chuckle to accompany his knowing admission that Charlie Parker, his beleaguered private detective and most successful creation, has somewhat outgrown him. The Dublin native and Parker have been almost inseparable since Connolly’s debut novel Every Dead Thing emerged in 1999. From the outset it was clear that Connolly wasn’t going to play by the stringent rules set down by genre fiction, opting to pepper his prose with a supernatural element.
Over a decade later and the Parker series continues to provide thrills for fans and bestsellers for Connolly. 2011’s The Burning Soul marked the tenth outing for Parker and found Connolly once again drawing on real life events. Where 2010’s The Whisperers dealt with army veterans and post-traumatic stress disorder, The Burning Soul delves into identity, focusing on a child killer and his struggle to adapt to society after being given a new life. The allusions to the James Bulger case are quite deliberate. Has Connolly’s writing become more informed by the world around him?
“The metaphor I’ve always used is that writers are like magpies,” he offers. “They steal things. They’re always looking for shiny things. Writers, that’s what they do. And a shiny thing will attract your attention and suddenly that becomes the core of a book, and because I’m always reading and looking at newspapers, you pick up things. I’m quite interested in the criminal justice system, particularly in America because it’s so dysfunctional. I find it quite astonishing, as somebody who believes that people can change, that this is a country that routinely jails children and tries them as adults and can jail them indefinitely.
“The great thing about mystery fiction,” he continues, “is that people read it to be entertained, so you can swat in a lot of this stuff under the wire, and they don’t feel [like you’re preaching]. If you say ‘I’m going to write a 400-page non-fiction book about children in the criminal justice system’, I’m not sure how many people would want to read it, but if you put it into the context of a crime novel where there are only occasionally glancing references but each one of those references matters, you achieve something. It’s not that you’re a campaigner, but crime fiction can matter. Mystery fiction can matter. They’re not completely inconsequential.”
While The Burning Soul sensibly avoids didactic hand-wringing, it is also something of a bold move for Connolly and the Parker series. His trademark paranormal signature is sparingly employed while the grotesque villains that Connolly has shown such flair for conjuring are conspicuous by their absence, replaced instead by something much more contained. Crucially, the book also pauses Parker’s overall story arc as he engages in an almost standalone tale. The noose continues to tighten but the reader is given time to breathe. Why the detour?
“It’s quite nice to write a book where the reader doesn’t have to have read the nine books that came before it, where you can provide an entry point,” he considers. “People get a bit intimidated when they see ten or 12 books from a series on a shelf, they think, ‘Oh god, do I have to read all those books?’. I’m trying to work my way through George RR Martin’s Game Of Thrones books at the moment. I’m about to start the fourth book and a lot of people have said it’s not very good, so you go, ‘What? Do you mean I have to get through the fourth book to get to the fifth book and it’s 800 pages and not very good?’ So it is quite nice to occasionally step out of it.
“I remember somebody asked me at a signing, ‘Do you worry about becoming season eight of The X-Files?’ which is when The X-Files just became about itself. It became so self-referential that it kind of got lost. And Lost got lost at one point, it became a kind of meta-series about being a series and I was very anxious to avoid doing that. The difficulty, the bind, with writing a series is that essentially, readers kind of want the same but different each time. It’s quite a complex relationship when you’re writing a series novel and you have to be careful not to fall into the trap of doing the same book every year and just tweaking one or two things in it. That’s how you’ll end up getting a yacht. Don’t get me wrong, you’ll make an awful lot of money. Your soul will atrophy and die, but you’ll make a lot of money and your readers will be quite tolerant because they have this affection for the character.”
Parker has survived numerous altercations with otherworldly foes and escaped certain death on more than one occasion, not because he is superhuman but because a resilient protagonist is key to any lasting series. Is his vulnerability what resonates so deeply with Connolly’s audience?
Connolly is keen to play up the relationship between the reader and the character, the importance of identifying with what’s on the page – though he is not claiming that this is the only potential source of literary power. He cites John Banville as a proponent of what he refers to as “cerebral fiction”.
“There always seems to be a distance between him and the narrator of the book, and frequently there is a distance between the reader and the characters but that’s a very cultivated distance, and that’s the kind of fiction he’s trying to do. That doesn’t mean it can’t be effective.”
I remind Connolly of Banville’s comments in a recent edition of Hot Press, where the sometime Benjamin Black poured cold water on the notion of methodical research as being important to writing credible crime fiction (something Connolly insists upon).
“Oh I think John just says these things to wind people up!” he laughs. “It’s like elderly high court judges claiming not to have heard of The Beatles. It just becomes a kind of absurdity and I think he just likes saying these things to see what happens. I know he’s a big fan of James Lee Burke and has been for a long time and Burke hasn’t always been a hugely well-known writer, so Banville is knowledgeable. I think he just likes annoying people and getting his name in the papers.”
At time of writing, Connolly is currently sequestered in a Maine condominium, recuperating from a grueling month-long American tour in support of both The Burning Soul and The Infernals (Hell’s Bells in the UK and Ireland), the follow-up to 2009’s young adult novel The Gates. His preferred method of relaxation is to keep working. While he swears he’ll keep his family happy by putting the pen down over Christmas, he reveasl that he’s made inroads into the next Parker book. Tentatively scheduled for release in September 2012, with a working title of The Wrath Of Angels, Connolly promises a return to more supernatural fare and a sequel of sorts to 2005’s The Black Angel. There are other projects on the horizon too, and you can expect further adventures of Samuel Johnson, hero of Connolly’s newest franchise, albeit one aimed at a younger audience. But this is no mere cash cow for the prolific writer.
“You need to go into children’s writing for the right reasons,” he stresses. “In the surge of JK Rowling and Stephenie Meyer there was a certain degree of cynicism that crept in, in certain writers. They’re out, people know who they are, they clearly went into it as an extra way to make money, and often these people are not writing their own books, they’ve effectively licensed them to other people to write and just lent their name.
“I very much set out to write for kids. I want to write the kind of books that would have made me laugh when I was 11 and 12. They are little labours of love, but I think the main focus will always be Parker.”

The Burning Soul and Hell’s Bells are available now via Hodder & Stoughton. John’s radio show ‘ABC to XTC’ airs Tuesdays and Saturdays on RTÉ 2XM.