Mystery man

Irish crime writer John Connolly recently got into a taxi in Dublin, and, going against his better judgment, admitted to the driver that he was a writer. The driver was very interested – since he was “a bit of a writer himself”. What he wanted to know from Connolly was how did he keep all those words in his head? Connolly explained that he had dictionaries and a thesaurus. The driver appeared shocked. Wasn’t that cheating...?

Well, if that’s cheating, would that more writers could do it as well. Connolly writes clever, chilling, but gory thrillers in a manner that might give literary fiction a run for its money, except for the fact there’s not a shred of pomposity to be found in his work.

In his most recent book, Bad Men, Connolly has gone away from the character Charlie Parker who was the cornerstone of the previous books – Every Dead Thing, Dark Hollow, The Killing Kind and The White Road. “I was afraid if I wrote another Parker book after White Road that it would be a bad Parker book,” the writer explains.

Indeed, be grateful that Connolly is simply just taking a break from Parker, and hasn’t decided to do something more drastic. “I nearly killed off everybody at the end of Killing Kind,”he says surprisingly. “I didn’t want to get caught by the tyranny of readers who would demand regular Parker books, but in the end I decided it would cynical to shock them like that.”

Connolly describes writing Bad Men, a non-series book, as open season on his characters.

“There is no safety catch,” he observes, “but a kind of James Bond wish-fulfilment in the psyche. Imagine the delicate shading of tension in High Noon entwined with the Magnificent Seven.” Some of that analogy is obvious, a remote island’s lone sheriff waiting the arrival of a brutal gang made up of seven disparate and desperate characters – led by the unrelentingly vicious Moloch. “You learn nothing about these people,” John points out, “they are defined by their actions,” he explained.

He is also taking the paranormal idea as far as it could go. “All my bad guys in the previous books have been named after low-level demons,” he says. “With Moloch in Bad Men, I just took it that step further. I am curious about dark things.”

Yet, even with supernatural thrillers creating their own niche, people will still find Bad Men hard to define. “Supernatural writers like Stephen King and especially Dean Koontz have been drifting into thriller writing for years, but it is unusual for the traffic to go the other way,” he acknowledges.

For his own part, Connolly never refers to what he writes as crime novels or even thrillers, but rather as mysteries, as if what he creates is an unknown thing even to himself. His goal, he says, is to push the boundaries of crime fiction and write intelligently for his readers. “I don’t want to write a dumb book, I want the reader to feel that their emotions have been jolted. I want to write more difficult books, that are slightly off kilter.”

His slightly ‘off kilter’ perspective has gained him the admiration of his peers right from the outset, winning the Shamus Award for his first book, Every Dead Thing. The award normally goes only to American authors. “I was thrilled when that happened, this was other mystery writers, saying ‘yeah this is pretty good’. But I don’t write books like I’m an American writer – my view is different, I get a different perspective, which I think is an advantage.”

Setting his books in America – mostly around the state of Maine – might seem a strange thing for an Irish writer to do. But Connolly has blurred the edges of culture, concentrating on universal emotion instead. That is not to say that he does not spend time meticulously researching his locations and the people who inhabit them. Sometimes his scrupulous study turns up a fascinating anecdote or observance that makes its way into the books.

For example, talking to a real-life sheriff who spends time on a similar island to that in Bad Men, Connolly discovered that the last time the sheriff had fired a shot was to kill a rabid raccoon. The shotgun hadn’t been fired for some time and the sheriff’s main concern was that the weapon would blow up in his face.

Connolly’s quiet, dry wit also manifests itself in his writing. Early on in Bad Men an insurance salesman gets lost in the wilds of one of the southern states where he has the misfortune to cross paths with one of those bad men. The question is how long will he last.

“This has the blackest humour of all the books,” Connolly agrees. He even turns his own savage humour on himself, “I was imagining the reviews, I could have written them myself: ‘Bad Men – Worse Book’. I keep asking myself would I read this book if I was stuck in an airport. I don’t want people to say that’s €15 I could have spent on beer.”