John Connolly: Cemetery Dance's Interview With the Author

C E M E T E R Y D A N C E
by Rick Koster, 2005
http://johnconnolly.co.uk

This is another in a series of periodic columns that explore early and/or seminal works by established authors in the genre - focusing not just on the book itself but what the publishing climate was like at the time, what the writer learned from the whole experience, and other sagacious thoughts bubbling thereof. John Connolly is the Irish crime novelist whose Maine-based private eye series, featuring Charlie Parker, comprises some of the darkest yet most empathetic work in the genre. Too, as with fellow literary thrillerist James Lee Burke, Connolly has not, over the course of such classic Parker efforts as Every Dead Thing, Dark Hollow and White Road, been afraid to venture into the supernatural - whether these events are the imaginings of the tragic Parker or actual paranormal phenomena. In his recent stand-alone novel, Bad Men, Connolly made no efforts to stay away from decidedly haunted terrain, and the newly-out Nocturnes, his first collection of short fiction, embraces ghost stories, horror, and supernatural folktales warmly. Great stuff. It was with the third Parker novel, The Killing Kind, that Connolly perhaps blew the door open in the marriage between PI fiction and the supernatural. Featuring the slimy Pudd, whose affection for spiders-as-weaponry is a high point in villainy, The Killing Kind addresses Good versus Evil in a truly religious context - and all these elements mesh to create a true work of brilliance. Connolly, whose next Parker novel, The Black Angel, will be published in June, recently spoke with Cemetery Dance about The Killing Kind, Pudd, and that aspect of publishing that would differentiate between mystery and horror - and perhaps punish those who would try to work one rather than the other.

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Cemetery Dance: To me, there's always been a supernatural presence to your work, but it seems like it took a trampoline-jump forward with Elias Pudd and The Killing Kind which is the third in a series starring Maine private detective Charlie Parker. Do you agree with that, or does Pudd simply represent another aspect or personification of Evil that can be found in all your books?

Connolly: Most writers never expect to get published, really, and the ones who do should probably be avoided like the plague. I was kind of taken aback when Every Dead Thing was accepted, and suddenly I had the sort of panic attack that a lot of writers probably get: "Hey, wait a minute, there's all sorts of stuff in there that maybe I should look at again, now that we're being serious and all!" I got over it, though, and by the time the book was accepted I was already well into the writing of Dark Hollow, and I knew the path that book was taking. But I suppose that acceptance of Every Dead Thing changed the way that I approached the writing of the books, and I became, well, not more ambitious, but I realized there were elements in the novels that I found particularly interesting, and I became determined that I was going to write, not a series, but a sequence, in which each novel would follow on from the next, and in which each would offer a number of revelations about the character, and perhaps make some implications about the universe in which he lived. It's a moral universe, and one in which the idea of reparation for one's sins and the possibility of salvation are not just interesting religious or philosophical speculations, but are crucial to the way in which one lives one's life. But the hope of salvation must be predicated on a belief in a life beyond this one, and in faith in a divine presence of some form. If there is a presence or force for good outside of human affairs, then equally there must be a force for evil. So Pudd, in the end, represents the first step towards Parker's recognition of that presence, and The Killing Kind represents a kind of sea change in the nature of the books.

CD: For the reader maybe just getting to know John Connolly through your latest, the stand-alone Bad Men,or perhaps because they're starting at the beginning of the Charlie Parker series with Every Dead Thing,"explain in a few sentences what The Killing Kind is about.

Connolly: The Killing Kind deals with religious obsession, or rather with religion being used as a flag of convenience under which one can inflict harm on others. Parker begins investigating the disappearance of an obscure religious group, the Aroostook Baptists, from their community in northern Maine in the 1960s. I tend to do a lot of historical research for the books, and to base the plots as much in the reality of a time and place as I possibly can. Maine, curiously, was a hotbed of religious lunacy for a very long time, so I hardly had to make up anything at all. Actually, shortly after the book was published in the US in 2003, a Lutheran congregation in New Sweden, Maine, was poisoned by a disaffected member who put arsenic in the post-service coffee, killing one old man. It's horrible, but in a strange way I felt vindicated...

CD: Talk about Pudd, who is without question one of the creepiest people in fiction, for any reason, ever. Where did he come from? Were you gardening or playing pool or walking the dog when he popped into your head? Or did his nefarious character just evolve as you were writing?

Connolly: How characters emerge from my imagination and enter the books is a process that I don't really understand. I don't know where Pudd came from. I began writing, and suddenly he was just there, fully formed, with all of his quirks and obsessions. If I were to take a step back, I can see traces of him in Stritch in Dark Hollow, who represents a dry run for Pudd, in a way (just as Pudd is a step on the way to Brightwell in The Black Angel, I think.) Stritch is foul, but he is perhaps less well-defined than Pudd, and more of an ogre. When I was growing up, the first series of novels I ever devoured was Ian Fleming's James Bond series. I loved those books. I read them at a very young and very impressionable age. I think I was about nine, which is, come to think of it, maybe a little young. (I kept wondering why all the women had limps, or scars, or club feet. I don't think I was fully up to speed with Fleming's odd notions about the female sex.) What particularly appealed to me was the quality of the villains. They were real, honest-to-nastiness, larger than life monsters, and perhaps some of that leached into my own writing. In addition, all of the novels have been influenced, to some degree, by folk tales and the idea - based on something the Brothers Grimm once said - that perhaps the darker type of mystery novel represents the latest incarnation of the folk tale for our age.

CD: Did you fixate on spiders because of a personal aversion to them - or just because you know most of the rest of us hate them?

Connolly: Strangely, I don't have a problem with spiders at all. I have a problem with their cobwebs in the corners of my house, because they make it look like I never clean the place, but spiders themselves I rather like. Having said that, I read a book called The Red Hourglass a year or two before I wrote The Killing Kind, and that book deals with predation in nature, particularly insect/ arachnid predation. It was a big influence on The Killing Kind, and it kind of put me off wanting to form lifelong bonds with things that have more legs than seem strictly necessary. Recluse spiders are particularly nasty, and that gave me the idea for the opening sequence of the book. When Pudd arrived on the scene, he just naturally took on the characteristics of his pets. He is a spider in human form.

CD: Pudd surfaces again, briefly, in the coda to The White Road, which is the sequel to The Killing Kind. Without giving too much away, are you suggesting that hell is real and tailored to the individual?

Connolly: The books continually throw out ideas and images, and that's certainly one of them. In The Black Angel, the new book, it's suggested that hell is simply an existence eternally cut off from the presence of divine. If you're not saved, then you're left to wander with the knowledge of all that you've lost. If there is a hell, I think that's maybe closer to its nature. Mind you, the Bosch depictions of the torture of sinners look pretty rotten too, so I'm not sure which is the better deal...

CD: To my mind, you and James Lee Burke are by far the finest and most literary examples of writers crossing what might be called "thrillerdom" with the supernatural. Obviously, the two styles can mutually coexist. Are you both successful in spite of an increasingly ordered and narrowly-focused publishing industry - or are you early examples of what might be an emerging trend?

Connolly: I love Burke's work. I went on a little pilgrimage to Montana to interview him when my first book came out. I just took time out in the middle of the tour and spent a couple of days talking to him, and came back feeling better for the experience. He's a lovely, decent human being, and certainly the best prose writer in mystery fiction. He and Ross Macdonald were huge influences on me. I don't think I'd be writing what I write if I hadn't encountered their work (and the novels of Ed McBain, which were the first mystery stories I ever read.) Anyway, I could feel myself almost spasm as I considered your question. It's one of my pet peeves, this urge to pigeonhole writers and their work. I know that books have to be filed in some kind of order, but it raises larger questions about the limitations imposed on writers and what they do. For that reason, I tend to like the use of the term "mystery" to describe my books, instead of "crime" or "detective fiction." If you go right back to the roots of the word, a mystery is a revelation from God that can't be understood by human reasoning alone. From the very beginning, it has its origins in the divine and the supernatural. The funny thing is that most mystery novels are not very mysterious at all: what seems complex and beyond understanding at the beginning is often actually presented as being (relatively) simple and straightforward once the solution is revealed.

Perhaps I wanted to restore some of that old sense of mystery to my books, and that seemed to gel naturally with my own faith. I'm a bad, lapsed Catholic, but the tenets don't shake off so easily. Through those concepts of sin, reparation, forgiveness, and redemption, the books are suffused with Catholicism, even if God is never mentioned. Nevertheless, I find increasingly that more conservative mystery readers and reviewers are uncomfortable with what I do (while apparently being quite willing to accept self-aware cats that investigate crimes, mystery-solving ghosts of old ladies and, may the saints preserve us all, even bloody Beatrix Potter and her animals sticking their noses into nastiness.) It's infinitely depressing. For so long, mystery writers and readers had to contend with the belief among more "literary" types that their fiction was somehow inferior, or less worthy of notice. Judgment was passed upon them, and they were found wanting. It makes me want to bang my head against a wall when I see members of the mystery community being equally, if not more, judgmental now. Have they learned nothing? Their reluctance to countenance experimentation, the cross-fertilization of genres, even social commentary -- in fact anything that would allow the mystery field to grow and generate new and interesting forms -- is one of the great obstacles that the genre faces. (I read a piece on George Pelecanos in a respected crime magazine which criticized him for using crime fiction to explore issues arising out of poverty and racism in Washington DC, as if a) they had no part to play in mystery fiction and just distracted from the plot and b) as if poverty and crime were not, at some level, connected.)

It pains me to say it, but for all the great quantity of material being produced, mystery fiction in recent years has rarely come up with anything worthy to stand alongside the best of literary fiction in the same period. Even in the last twelve months, has there been a mystery novel that explored the possibilities of writing and storytelling in the way that, say, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas did? The most interesting attempts to explore the possibilities of crime writing have often come from outside the genre: Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49 and Eco's The Name of the Rose spring to mind. So: do I think that there's an emerging trend? No, not really. There are some very good writers in the genre, and a number of them are trying to do things that are a little different, but the mainstream isn't called that for nothing, and those who experiment with the form will always run into difficulties.

CD: Is the supernatural something you've wanted to integrate from the word go in your writing career, or did you consciously think that, from a commercial context, at least starting out, the supernatural or horror elements would have to be sneaked through the back door, so to speak?

Connolly: I don't think that, commercially, the supernatural elements are helpful, and they're always going to provoke unease among some readers, even if, in the Parker novels, there is always the suspicion that they are not real, and that this is a man so overcome by grief and anger that he is really in the midst of an extended nervous breakdown. Bad Men and Nocturnes are more explicit, and I was really surprised by how well Bad Men was received. It was great, just great. I've loved ghost stories ever since I was a child, particularly the classic English form epitomized by M.R. James. Combined with my interest in folk tales, it didn't seem unnatural for me to try to fuse those elements together in my work.

CD: Here in the states, Nocturnes, a collection of shorter fiction, has just been published - all of which is concerned with hauntings and demon-ness and the supernatural. Are you comfortable with the phrase "horror fiction," and if so is would Nocturnes in fact be a horror release? And, in your opinion, as someone who lives in Ireland and has written extensively about the states, is the publishing climate in the UK and Ireland more receptive to writers breaking in to the horror field than America?

Connolly: Unfortunately, "horror" remains a dirty word. There are some chains that won't stock supernatural fiction, and there are readers and critics who instantly dismiss it. Perhaps it could be argued that some of the more gruesome, schlocky stuff hasn't helped the genre's image, but it is desperately unfair on many of those who continue to explore it, whether through reading, writing, or both. Nevertheless, no, I don't think Europe is more receptive to horror writing. By this point, I don't even think that "horror" is a helpful description, as the best of the genre is often about much more than that. Maybe we need to find an alternative, one that both encompasses the variety in the genre while at the same time avoiding the negative image that has become associated with it. Frankly, I like the phrase "supernatural fiction". I'd even opt for "mystery", except the mystery readers would probably want me pilloried for it.