John Connolly: The Body Questioned
       An Interview by Bob Cornwell

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We meet in the appropriately named Heights Bar of the St.George's Hotel, just across from London's Broadcasting House. I've just bought a glass of rather indifferent wine at a price sufficient to purchase a decent bottle of Chardonnay at my local Tesco. The gap-toothed, engaging and, as I discover, loquacious Connolly is on coffee.

Until recently Connolly was an impecunious freelance journalist working on the Irish Times, sometimes conducting interviews like this one, so I ask him how he is taking to the role reversal. (Laughter) "Very self conscious. And I keep thinking to myself, if I was him, would I think that I was interesting." 

I assure him that anyone who is the subject of a £350,000 two-book deal, the highest ever for an Irish writer, not to mention a further $1m (" I keep apologising for it") from Simon & Schuster for the American rights to the first book, has a few things going for him. I enquire about film interest but he is purposely keeping away from the details of any possible deal. All this good news is clearly just too much. Besides, he's realistic about the process and realises that it will be a hard book to film. Neither are there screen writing ambitions, quoting David Mamet's axiom that " 'film-making is a collaborative process, now bend over' - and that doesn't sound like anything I want to do!."

Connolly was born in the Rialto district of Dublin which an Irish friend of mine has described as "tough". " Nice area,"contradicts Connolly "but probably with a bit of a reputation. I used to get the bus from there in the morning and the bus-stop would be jam-full. But I would be the only person actually getting on the bus."  Clearly I look puzzled because he adds hastily " if you were standing on the street corner, the police would pick you up, so the junkies would just sit at the bus-stop!"

Connolly is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin. "I went to Trinity when I was twenty. I'd worked for a couple of years and I just decided that I wanted to go back and study English. Then I went on to Dublin City University and did journalism there for a year, and eventually ended up on the Irish Times."  His journalistic experience was wide: "Four and a half years there and I never turned down a job."

So where did the urge for more literary expression come from? "I had always written. Even from when I was very, very young. I had a very nice teacher when I was six who used to pay me 5p to write Tarzan stories".

Also he had always read. Enid Blyton and Doctor Who books featured on the early reading lists. One or two of the weekend's reviews have speculated on the Connolly influences. "It's funny reading these reviews and the people that I am supposed to have read. I have never read Michael Connelly, I will now. I'd never even heard of the James Ellroy book mentioned in the Observer. You are influenced by those that came before you. There is nothing new on the face of the earth, there are only recombinations of older things, and the way you use conventions and the way you manipulate what would be cliches. The novel has its flaws, I'd be the first to admit. It does all the things you do with a first novel. You lump in everything you know."

No-one however has pin-pointed perhaps the key influence in the conception of the book. "I'd always read crime. But I was lucky to be in Trinity when somebody suggested it (a course in crime writers and crime writing) and through that I encountered people that I wouldn't have read. I'd read Robert B Parker and I'd read Ed McBain, Chandler and a little bit of Hammett. Then they started feeding me stuff - most of which I hated - but it was the first time I'd read Ross Macdonald. And that just completely changed my view of crime fiction. I loved the compassion. I'd never been a fan of British detective fiction, especially the Golden Age stuff with its middle or upper class detectives, a victim who is lower class and who is guilty of some petty little offence, a theft or they have slept with someone they shouldn't have and so on. With Macdonald, his victims were vulnerable, they didn't do anything to bring it on themselves and you've got this wonderfully compassionate hero who because of things that have happened to him, tries to alter the way other peoples' lives are going, not out of a desire for money, but out of a desire for natural justice, that he doesn't want other people to suffer the way he suffered."

Every Dead Thing, the title comes from a poem by John Donne incidentally, was written initially for amusement, though "it was so hard to do, amusement isn't even the right word. But I was frustrated in journalism, I was always broke, I felt I couldn't turn down work, you couldn't offend anyone, so I thought I'd give this one go and if it worked it worked, and if it didn't well I hadn't told anyone I was writing it and I'd have had no egg on my face."

At what point did he cross the threshold from amusing himself to the point where he realised he had something he could sell? " It didn't work out that way actually. The Irish Times refused to give me a job! Actually it was just to prove a point. That you've made this decision about me, I'll show you how wrong you are. So I decided to finish it. Even my girlfriend had not read it. The first person that read it was the agent and he liked it, or rather the half that I had done, and he said, finish it and don't send it out to anyone else. And up until it was done he was still the only one who had read it, because I had no faith in it."

In Connolly's book, the Lew Archer figure is Charlie "Bird" Parker, an ex-NYPD detective struggling with the knowledge that he was out drowning his sorrows at a time when his wife and child were butchered in a particularly horrifying manner. "It always began with the prologue, that idea of a man coming home to find that his life had been taken from him. I was concerned initially just with that character, and finding out how he would cope with that, and he would develop as a human being from someone who descends into violence and despair, a complete lack of hope, and who gradually evolves into this being who becomes compassionate. He realises he has to forgive himself, he probably has to forgive others, you have to make reparation for your sins."

The book is also a serial killer novel, a form about which both of us have reservations. But Connolly likes "the idea that there is a philosophy behind it. I have a problem with very exploitative violence. There isn't a great deal of explicit violence in the book. But the book doesn't shy away from saying that when someone inflicts violence on somebody else it hurts, it hurts badly, and it is a terrible violation of the person. And yet it is contrasted with this person who actually creates works of art. And there's a kind of beauty to those illustrations and to the models that were created. They are horrific but there is something beautiful about them".

Those illustrations come from another acknowledged influence, Jonathan Sawday's 1995 book The Body Emblazoned, a study of dissection and the human body in Renaissance culture. "I read Sawday's book and a lot of Gonzales-Crussi, a Mexican anatomist who writes wonderful essays on the human body, and gradually I got interested in this idea that goes back to the Renaissance and before then, of using the human body and its capacity for pain to remind people that this is transient, that you may suffer in this world but you will be rewarded in the next. And I liked the idea of someone who thought 'well why not just suffer in this world, because I don't believe there is a next world. And I am so coiled up with hurt and pain that I want to share my hurt in a very special way.' So all of those things became tied together and gradually the idea emerged of an individual who had this very coherent philosophy which was necessary to put across."

I mention the parallels with Thomas Harris's book The Silence of the Lambs, a comparison Connolly's publishers are keen to push. " Well it's not a comparison I would make. And I'm going to suffer by comparison anyway. But on the other hand why not try and have a go at the best. I think Silence of the Lambs is a wonderful novel, but I never felt for any of the victims in the book. You do not get the sense of them as people who have suffered and endured. My novel does not shy away from that at all. It says, look, this is what happened, they hurt and they died badly."

And the allusions to John Donne, George Herbert and the other so-called Metaphysical Poets? " That idea of metaphysical poetry, making connections between things that initially do not appear to be connected in any way - I liked that idea and it is reflected in the crimes in the book, and it's what Charlie has to make."

But aren't Connolly's policemen amazingly well-read? "I have met some wonderfully cultured policeman, especially doing the research for the novel, amazingly sensitive individuals. And tied in with it, Charlie had to have that kind of sensibility for him to make the connections that were going on."

A remarkable feature of the novel is that it is so totally American in feel, if not typical in style. I wonder why he went this route, especially given the success of writers like Colin Bateman, even Hugo Hamilton. "Irish writers have tended to write about Ireland, insular novels; not necessarily a bad thing, it's our literature. But I'm part of a generation that routinely went away...my father for most of his life never went further than Jersey." Nevertheless he admires both Bateman and Hamilton ("some of the very few Irish detective novels that are actually working.").

He goes on to cite the cinematic tradition of directors like John Ford, the son of Irish immigrant parents or emigrés like Wim Wenders who have fruitfully explored genres that are specifically American. "But there is still this reluctance to accept a similar process in literature. But in the end you write what you love - and I thought I could bring something a little bit different to it."

He continues: " I find America a little bit more sinister than most Americans do. I come from a country of four million people and you go into a city that is larger than that. And you realise how vulnerable people are. Whilst researching the book, I discovered that 851,000 children had been reported missing in 1997. Most, perhaps 99%, are recovered but that still leaves 5-8000 children a year that aren't found. You realise that in this vast society, how easy it is at the margins to just disappear. Americans, by and large, don't see it that way. They are very comfortable, and the ones that could tell them, they don't live near. So there's that idea in the book - that once society goes that way, there are those that will exploit it."

As a jazz fan, I mention the expectations raised when the novel's key character carries the name of the music's most legendary figure, especially as Connolly appears to do very little with it. "I pick up detective novels and they have characters who listen to classical music and jazz, these wonderfully sophisticated tastes. But the central character in this book is not a great deal older than I am. And we don't just listen to jazz or classical music. We listen to...Blondie, the stuff that I used to listen to when I was seventeen or eighteen, and still do, and I like the idea of doing that. But the name was chosen because initially I liked the idea that the novel was riffing on the detective theme. The other point about Parker is that he has this nickname, Bird, this thing in flight and nobody is more earthbound than this character, so anchored in the ground."

We discuss another of the major themes within the novel - " the idea that there are degrees of evil. There is the viciousness of the two killers at the start of the novel, a capacity to cause pain, purely to satisfy some basic desire within them. Then there are these mobsters, again they are people just fighting for territory, a mundane evil about it and then above them you have this character who has this vision and everybody gets drawn into what he has created. Then there are degrees of corruption in the New Orleans police and this poor guy who has done something wrong in his youth and is trying to make up for it. And there are people constantly trying to make reparations. And I hope that the book more or less holds all that together."

Were those "two killers at the start of the novel" in any way inspired by the Fred and Rosemary West case? "No" he states definitely. "The Wests' case happened while that was being written. It was just interesting to see it reflected (in reality)."

Adapting a description of Elmore Leonard in the previous day's Observer, I ask Connolly whether the fact that he is "cradle Catholic from urban Dublin" has anything to do with his view of evil. "Certainly it is a very Catholic idea. But in the novel it is Bird who says that evil is something that is explained away, and in some ways that is a valid point for him. He does not want to have this thing explained away as some quirk in someone's character. He feels that there is some kind of absolution in that and he feels that is some kind of excuse. So Fred West wasn't loved as a child, which may well be the case but that doesn't alter the fact that what he did was appalling. You can explain away anything. But Parker has got to the point where , right or wrong, he does not want to hear the explanations.  I don't necessarily share those views" Connolly adds as an afterthought. " But that's why he is an interesting character."

And has evil touched Connolly? "No. I probably have been very fortunate. I remember reading about Martin Amis after the West murders. One of his relatives had been one of the victims. I thought that was incredible. Here was a man who had written so vividly in his earlier novels of the horror, the pain and the sheer mundanity of existence and something had reached out and touched him. I thought that was fascinating."

Connolly is hard at work on his next book. Is it a Bird Parker novel? "Yes it is. I had very consciously thought of it as a two-novel sequence. Or as a trilogy in two parts, if you prefer. And the next one is probably about 20% shorter as well. (Laughter, for one of the reviews has mentioned that the current book could do with a little pruning!) Not as complex and not as violent but that was very deliberate but not a commercial decision. I'd written my serial killer novel. The next novel isn't. I felt that there was more, he develops. And I like some of the other characters. I like the Angel and Louis characters. It's funny, I've been accused of a cliche, these characters do crop up in other novels, in this one they are gay. They are also the only relationship you could point to and say 'there is a functioning loving relationship'. I just think that if you are writing a genre novel there are certain conventions. You can use them and you can change them."

The interview is drawing to a close. My wine tastes slightly more noxious. Connolly's coffee is long past cold. Manchester and Edinburgh beckon. One final topic occurs to me. Having exorcised the violence, might we see more of the sexual side of Parker in the next novel? "It was difficult to include (in the first book); after all, the man has been recently widowed!" I suggest that the Literary Review's annual Bad Sex Prize has created a climate which may well frighten less experienced writers. He agrees: "It's very hard to write well about sex. I probably shied away from it for that reason. Not because I have a problem writing it but because I don't think I could write it well. There's a little bit more in the next one, but I still kind of like the sound of the bedroom door closing."

Bob Cornwell