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John Connolly, author of THE UNQUIET and five other books and a novella featuring private detective Charlie Parker, as well as two standalones and NOCTURNES, a collection of short fiction, recently sat down with The Mystery Bookstore’s Clair Lamb to discuss the new book and its place in his writing career.
[Photo by Brian L. Valenchenko]
Connolly will discuss and sign THE UNQUIET at The Mystery Bookstore on Tuesday, June 19 at 7:00 p.m.
You have described the first six Charlie Parker novels -- or the five novels and a novella -- as a “sequence” rather than a “series.” What’s the difference?
Well, I suppose a series I’ve always thought of as being discrete novels, in that they don’t necessarily have to link up with one another -- whereas in a sequence, each develops on what’s gone before it. I think the Parker novels have built up a kind of mythology around characters, and while they can be read in isolation, I think they work better if they’re read in order. Each novel adds a little bit more to our knowledge of them, and they’re moving toward a climax of sorts, I think. I’m not sure they’re going to go on indefinitely.
The Black Angel certainly ended with this climactic, almost apocalyptic conclusion, and some of us who read The Black Angel might have wondered if you might just have left him there. Did you think about that?
No, not really. I kind of know where the novels are going by this point, and I realized – I’ve tried to make each one quite different from the one that preceded it. So the Parker novella really was the book that preceded The Black Angel, and that was a very contained and reflective book. The Black Angel was very different; it sort of stood on a pulpit and waved a Bible at people, and preached fire and brimstone. And then the Parker novel that followed was very different again -- was much more in tune with “The Reflecting Eye,” had much more in common with it. So no, I hadn’t. They are very definitely following a pattern, and I more or less know at this point how they will end – but I haven’t decided when I’m going to end them, precisely.
So you don’t know how many more books there will be?
No, no. Part of me – sometimes when I’m in reflective moods I like to think that I might let him grow old as I grow old, and the books would be different by that point, but I’m not sure that any of us are going to live that long, frankly.
How did you decide what would happen next to Charlie Parker, after The Black Angel?
I don’t really work that way, I don’t have any grand plan. I wrote The Black Angel and then sat down and began writing what eventually became The Unquiet – but really only wrote about a chapter or two of it -- and decided that I actually didn’t want to do that, at the time. I put it to one side, and wrote a book called The Book of Lost Things, which was very different – and then came back to The Unquiet a little bit later. By that point, I’d more or less figured out where the novel, that particular book, was going to go.
But I tend to write on the hoop, a little bit. I’ll tend to start with a very vague idea of what I’m going to do. Usually, I’ll know the first chapter, and then I kind of trust that the book is going to develop as I write it. There’s nobody standing over my shoulder and I don’t have to present it like homework every evening, so I can take my time and see how it develops. So I don’t really know where the next Parker novel is going to go. I have a very vague idea of what it might be, but I don’t know how it’s going to end, or really much of what’s going to happen in it, beyond that I could tell somebody in one line what it might be about.
Of all the books – with the possible exception of The White Road – The Unquiet feels the angriest. Why is that, and is Charlie Parker’s anger yours?
It’s political with a small p, I think. As an outsider writing about the United States – there are some British and Irish writers who write about the United States who I think have a kind of love affair going on with it, which I don’t share. Most of my closest friends are Americans now, I love coming over here, I love individual Americans – but there are aspects of American society which I find quite appalling. One of them is your justice system, or what passes for a justice system in this country. And I suppose The Unquiet is concerned with that.
There is a wonderful quote from Winston Churchill, that he judges a society by the way it treats its prisoners – and I find America, in terms of its justice system, to be a very retributive society. And I’m not sure that that qualifies as a justice system. That’s a system of law, which isn’t the same thing at all.
I had read some stuff about how they apply a punishment – it’s not supposed to be a punishment, it’s a form of restraint – called “the chair” in Maine, where a disturbed prisoner will be woken up during the night by a bunch of guards wearing riot gear. They’ll usually Mace him, and then strap him naked to a chair in a cold room and leave him there to “cool down.” And that never struck me as a way that was going to solve any problems for anybody who was disturbed – if it’s going to do anything, it’s going to make you more disturbed. And I find it curious that Americans should have been shocked at what happened in Abu Ghraib, or what happens in Guantanamo, or what happens in the jails in Afghanistan, when in fact you do as much or worse to your own prisoners.
Occasionally I do get – I don’t agree with those people who feel that social commentary has no place in crime fiction. It has almost more of a place in crime fiction than any other, because crime fiction is so in tune with issues of good and evil, with issues of justice, and with the nature of the society in which it functions.
And I also get very resentful when Americans tell me that I have no right to be criticizing their society. I’m sorry, it’s not as if you’re Togo or Belize, where you have no great impact on the world beyond. Your impact is incredible, and by this point, it seems legitimate to be able to able to examine it as a society. And the books don’t preach, but I think you can raise these issues in the books and allow people to judge for themselves whether they’re right or wrong. People aren’t idiots. The worst thing is a book that preaches from the pulpit, and I’ve been trying not to do that.
Certainly you’re known for the research that you put into the books. Did you go to the prison, the Maine State Prison?
I’ve been to the Maine State Prison.
That’s more than I’ve been.
Well, I wouldn’t want to be rushing back to it, let me tell you.
Yeah, I’ve actually spent some time trying to stay out of it.
Well, I think most of us do, that’s a very good attitude to have to life. Yeah, I visited it a few years ago, and really, I didn’t – I paid a quick trip to the new one, just to have a quick look at its geography more than anything else. But I have no desire to step back inside those doors again. I spent a day there the last time, and you know, I’ve been to other jails, as a part of when I was a journalist in Ireland. Jails are jails, and hell, they’re just not places you want to linger. I’d done my duty the first time.
What else did you have to learn specifically for The Unquiet?
The book touches on child abuse, I guess, although there are no children abused in it. I’ve read books that touch on that issue before, and it’s very easy to become exploitative, I think, in touching on subjects like that. Crime fiction always risks that -- you’re writing books that are supposed to be entertainment, and yet you raise serious issues, and writers by their nature always step over the line occasionally.
To step over the line on a subject like that raises significant difficulties. So I wanted to really deal with the people who treated troubled children, people who deal with abuse cases and people who testify in them. So I spent a lot of time – I have a friend in New York who’s a forensic psychiatrist who testifies in cases – and then I spent time with the Spurwink Center in Portland, which is Maine’s clearinghouse, I suppose, for allegations of child abuse or investigating allegations of child abuse.
I was curious, I suppose, about why people would enter that field to begin with, given that you would see the worst of what human beings are capable of … but also I wanted to know the methodology of it, and the mechanics of it. Not the mechanics of child abuse, obviously, but the mechanics of dealing with these cases.
I suppose what I learned was just how difficult the whole thing is. I would have assumed that it’s relatively easy to diagnose whether or not a child has been abused, especially a very young child – and in fact, it is immensely difficult. One of the difficulties with the justice system, as we were talking about earlier, is that justice, the system of justice, wants black and white answers. That’s the nature of the beast: are you guilty or are you not guilty? Was a thing done or was it not done? And the issue with cases of abused children is that it’s almost impossible to say definitively that something has been done.
And also, one of the curious things I thought was that as in Ireland, and in Britain, there is this movement toward mandatory sentencing, the idea that the moment you are charged with a crime, if you’re convicted you’re facing a certain period of time in jail.
What was interesting was that most of those who dealt with child abuse cases were against mandatory sentencing. Where I would have thought, “Yeah, you know, yeah, surely, it’s a black-and-white deal, if these people are guilty, lock ‘em up.” They’re very hard to treat, they tend to have a high rate of re-offending, why wouldn’t we want to put them in jail?
But the reality of the situation is that for every hundred cases that go to – that are reported to the police, 50 are immediately put to one side. Either too much time has gone by, or there’s simply not enough evidence to proceed. Of the remaining 50, as these things stand, about 40 will cop a plea, will plead guilty for probation or for a lesser period in jail. Ten will go to trial, and usually the conviction rate is about 40%. So you get four convictions for every 10 you take to trial, maybe.
If you have mandatory sentencing, there’s no incentive for people to cop a plea. Why would you do it? You may as well go to trial and take your chances. So what happens is that immediately you go from 50 put to one side, to maybe 70 or 80, because prosecutors hate taking cases that they don’t think they can win. And then you take those to trial, and on the basis of the previous figures we’d say eight to 12 will actually secure a conviction. So instead of having 45 sex offenders on the register and being able to monitor them, you’ve got – 10. And that’s why they’re against it.
So those issues arose, and I suppose researching it changes your mind, and it forces you to think a little more deeply about issues that are very, very emotive, and rightly so. But I was very concerned that it wasn’t going to be a book about child abuse. That wasn’t what I wanted to write.
Parker himself, throughout the books, has had a very hard time with this issue of justice vs. retribution, because Parker himself really wants to believe in the black and white.
There’s a part of him that likes lashing out. There’s a part of him that likes – he’s angry at – there is a line used in the book, in The Unquiet, from the Jacobean revenge tragedian John Ford, who once said that “revenge is its own executioner.” Parker is a revenger. He likes the idea of lashing out, and he’s also been hurt himself. He gets to channel some of that anger on behalf of other people, and gets to feel good about it – and gradually I think he has come to the realization that he is destroying himself slowly. In the book he is confronted by a man named Frank Merrick -- and Merrick is Parker as he will be in 20 years’ time. Merrick is a figure entirely corrupted by the desire for revenge, who has nothing left. And it’s pointed out to Parker, “You are going to be this person, this is you in the future.”
And then the other question raised by one of the characters in the book – one of the characters says to him, “How can you tell the good from the bad when their methods are the same?”
So Parker is in danger of becoming the thing that he despises. But that has always been an issue in the books, it’s been an issue from the start. It’s in there in Every Dead Thing, when he realizes he’s been used by the very person that he’s trying to find. This person can actually—
You know, the nature of revenge tragedy is that an offense is committed and in the process of avenging it, the whole thing escalates out of control, because there’s never an “equal to” sign between acts of revenge. Somebody does something to you and it irritates you, you tend to hit them a bit harder than they hit you – and then the thing becomes a kind of cycle of violence and retribution.
And in the first book, that’s what happens with Parker. This man he’s hunting realizes that maybe he can get Parker to destroy himself – and it’s only Parker’s dawning realization that this is what’s being done to him that causes him to stop and reassess his position.
Something similar happens in The Unquiet. I think that Parker is aware of what he is becoming – but he can’t stop it.
You mentioned the standalones, The Book of Lost Things and the earlier Bad Men. And Bad Men is a traditional ghost story, really, while The Book of Lost Things is almost unclassifiable. I’ve been in bookstores where they’ve classified it as science fiction and fantasy, I’ve seen it classified as literature, I’ve even seen it on a young adult shelf. And then in Nocturnes, you wrote a story called “The Cancer Cowboy Rides,” which is almost a Western – it’s a supernatural Western, but it is a Western. So are you just determined to make genre irrelevant? Do you consider genre irrelevant to your work?
No. I think there are a lot of stories that I want to tell, and not every story fits comfortably into crime fiction. One of the unfortunate things about writing in a particular genre is that you tend – if you stick with it, your room for maneuver tends to be very restricted by the end.
It’s a commercial decision. If you make a commercial decision that you’re only going to write crime fiction – and there are a lot of writers out there who are quite happy to do it, and sign long-term contracts to write series character novels – you’re kind of – you’re cutting off a lot of artistic avenues, I think. But you’re probably going to be more successful.
The more departures you make, the more you place your commercial standing at risk, sometimes. You know, even in terms of the way, as you say, the way the bookstores are organized – you know, The Book of Lost Things isn’t beside all my other novels, it’s really hard to find. (Laughs.) It doesn’t sell as well because of it. A lot of your crime readers don’t want to read it because some of them are very narrow-minded, I think, and don’t read outside the genre. Frankly, if your child only ate spaghetti, at some point you’d be entitled to tie it to a chair and force-feed it strawberries, you know?
It’s great that people read, but I suppose I read very widely, and the more widely I read, the more I realize that there are other things I want to write about. And I realize that it’s kind of – it probably hasn’t helped me. It’s helped me as a writer, and I’m much happier for doing it, but commercially it’s probably damaged me.
But that’s okay. It hasn’t damaged me enough that I can’t pay my bills.
And you know, to be fair, Bad Men – the other thing that annoys me a little bit about crime fiction is that you say, “Oh, I’m writing a standalone,” and people say, “Oh my God, what a huge commercial risk you’re taking, writing a standalone!” The fact of the matter is that [in] most mystery standalones, you could take the central series character, dump him in the standalone, and it would make no difference at all to the nature of the standalone. They just tend to be the same book with a different character. That’s just the way it is. And I suppose Bad Men falls into that category. It could have been a Parker novel.
Yeah? I don’t think so.
Its pacing is slightly different, I think, and it doesn’t have that kind of reflectiveness, I think. I wanted to write something that was more straightforward, in a way.
One of the things I think is so interesting about your books is that you really do seem – if you read the books in order, you seem to be teaching yourself something new with each book. And I saw Bad Men as an exercise in teaching yourself to write a female protagonist.
That might be part of it. Macy is a character that I’m going to go back to at some point. But it was also to experiment with pace. The Parker novels are very deliberately paced; something like The Unquiet is actually very slow. I think by comparison with a lot of crime fiction, it moves at a very, very deliberate pace. With Bad Men, I wanted to see how quickly I could get people to turn a page without sacrificing the quality of the writing. I wanted people to feel that it was a book with its own momentum. It was very influenced by “High Noon,” the idea that we know what’s coming, we know there is a confrontation and it’s a matter of seeing how this confrontation occurs.
With Nocturnes – after Bad Men there was a temptation to go back to the Parker books, I think, and instead I thought, no, I want to try other things, I want to stretch my wings a little bit, and see what else I can write.
And short stories are the kiss of death. They really are.
Why?
People don’t buy them. I had to give it away to my publishers. I gave it to them for nothing. But it was important that it was published, and for me it’s the most important – in terms of what happened later – it’s the most important book. Because it represented kind of a real departure, more so than Bad Men was. It was a real turning my back on a certain set of expectations that I might have had, or that my publishers might have had, about what I was going to do – to try and learn a whole lot of new skills, to try a whole lot of voices.
Out of it came the Parker novella, which was quite different from what had gone before, and which influenced The Unquiet; out of it came a number of stories that could almost have been dry runs for The Book of Lost Things. And so I look upon that as a kind of turning point. Things are pre-Nocturnes, post-Nocturnes.
Nocturnes -- several of the stories were actually written for the radio, right?
Ten of them were written for radio. Well, five were written initially for the radio and then I thought, well, I’m actually really enjoying writing short stories, and I went back to them, and the BBC had such a – well, they’d had kind of a mixed response. It was funny, they’d put them on at 3:00 in the afternoon, the first series, when kids were coming home from school, and got a record number of complaints about some of them. So the next set were put on about midnight, which I think was probably more appropriate.
But they were designed – I was very influenced by M.R. James, who was a kind of 19th century English ghost story writer living in the 20th century. He was an academic, and James used to read a short story to his pupils – to his students, and some of his fellow professors, every Christmas. It was kind of a tradition in his college, that people would go to James’s study and they would have mince pies and things, and he would pour them alcohol, and they would sit and listen to him tell his latest story.
And these stories are like fairy tales, they’re most effective because they’re stories designed to be told, or to be read aloud. And I’ve always been fascinated by radio, and I love the idea of people sitting at home at night, or driving in a car, particularly – which is when I listen to the radio – you know, driving alone on a dark road, and having this voice telling them this story while they’re in this cocoon of darkness.
So they’re – certainly the first five were very much written with that in mind – I think they’re all first-person narratives, and then the other five that followed weren’t. And I wrote some extra stories that I was curious about, that I enjoyed doing. And the two novellas that bookend it, which are both a little bit different in tone from the stories in the middle.
You experiment – you play around a lot with the idea of crossing media. The Black Angel came with a companion CD; The Unquiet, in the UK, comes with a companion CD of its own. You also produced a short film about Sedlec as part of The Black Angel. What interests you about this?
Creative endeavor doesn’t exist in isolation. There are resonances and correlations between different pursuits. I went to see a movie called “Pan’s Labyrinth” just before Christmas last year, which was one of my favorite films of last year – and it was clear that Guillermo del Toro, the director, had been thinking exactly the same way as I’d been about the same topics that are in The Book of Lost Things. He’d been thinking about folk tales, and fairy tales – as in The Book of Lost Things, it’s about a child retreating from personal trauma and the violence of the adult world into a world constructed from myths and stories. And it’s very – it’s almost reassuring, in a way, as a writer or a musician or an artist or whatever it is you do – to see other people thinking along similar lines to you, not doing exactly the same thing, but thinking in similar ways.
And so I use lyrics and pieces of poetry in the books as almost signifiers of what’s to come, and their relevance only becomes clear when you get to the end of that section, or when you get to the end of the book. I like creating those little concordances between different areas, I think.
And with music – I use a lot of lyrics in the books, I choose them quite carefully, and it just seemed like a nice thing to be able to give it to people for free, and say, “Look, you know, you might like to hear these songs, hear how these people sound.”
With The Book of Lost Things, when it comes out in paperback, it comes with 150 pages of extra material: the original folk tales that were used in it, a little history of the origins of each tale, how they came about, how they’ve been viewed by critics or other writers over the years, and their particular relevance to The Book of Lost Things. You know, why they’re thematically relevant, why they were chosen.
Because, you know, the experience of reading a book should be enough by itself. That should be enough. And yet – if people want to pursue it further, if people want to look in other directions, it’s nice to be able to give them that option. If you read The Black Angel and you think, my gosh, I wonder what Sedlec looks like, this marvelous ossuary, you can look at the short film, and you can see, you can get the visuals of it and see if it kind of corresponds to what you had in your mind. Was this song like you thought it would sound?
Having seen a reference in The Book of Lost Things to a quite obscure story like “The Three Army Surgeons,” or “The Water of Life,” you might like to go and read that story, or read the original “Beauty and the Beast,” or one of the original versions of “Cinderella” or “Snow White” – and kind of see how they’ve been used in the book, and how they’ve been altered. I think it’s nice to give people those options.
And it is part of a bigger piece – you are, again, someone who’s known for extraordinary generosity to his fans. Your touring schedule rivals James Brown’s. How do balance the need to keep writing with everything your fans have come to expect from you?
With difficulty, frankly. I don’t think I’m going to tour next year at all. I’m behind on a book for the first time. I’m frustrated in that I’ve published two books in six months because of the nature of the publishing schedule, rather than because I’m incredibly prolific – and I’d like to get back to writing. Ultimately, while people do like to meet you and get their books signed, they would be more frustrated if there were no books to be signed, I think.
While I do like – it’s great to meet people, and it’s good for your ego, you know, and it’s good for your confidence, and it’s flattering.
I was doing an interview earlier today and I was asked, “Do you have this compulsion to write?” I do – but only in the sense that I have a compulsion to be read. And if someone said to me that you can write, but no one will ever read what you will write, I’m not sure I would keep writing. I don’t believe writers who say they write for themselves. I think we all write to communicate something. To have it exist in isolation, without anyone else reading it, would not serve any purpose for me. So the writing is very important in that way. I like getting it out there.
Do you write with a particular reader in mind?
No. I learned to get rid of the imaginary reader, there’s no imaginary reader. When I write a book, the experience of writing it is like reading it for the first time. I don’t know what’s going to happen, I’m kind of surprised by the directions it takes, and the changes that happen. And that’s the fun of writing it – and then I rewrite again, and again, and again.
I interviewed James Lee Burke -- he was one of the first writers I interviewed after I’d been published -- and he said, “You have to learn to ignore both the catcalls and the applause.” It’s still the best piece of advice I’ve ever heard.
Yes, you’re writing to communicate, and yes, you’re writing to be read, but ultimately you’re writing to please yourself, on one level. And you’re hoping that what you write has enough of a universal appeal, or resonates sufficiently with people, that they then stick with it.
And I think that’s the mark of a book, or a poem, or a piece of music. It’s very easy to create something that only one person will ever read. It’s harder to write something that appeals to people, that people understand. And if you do that then you’ve probably done something right, because it means that you’ve understood something about people in general, and not just yourself.