M E E T    J O H N A N    I N T E R V I E W    W I T H    J O H N    C O N N O L L Y by John Quirk, Isle of Man Examiner, June 2003 When John Connolly's first novel, Every Dead Thing, hit bookstores four years ago, it provoked intense critical reaction. More than one reviewer compared it with the best Thomas Harris had to offer and few managed to go two paragraphs without using the words gripping, terrifying and disturbing. Yet there were those who hated it with a passion, who were left scathing in their assessment of the violent imagery and unconventional structure. The Dublin-born author visited the Island as a young boy and returned for the first time last week as part of a tour to promote his latest novel, Bad Men. Chief reporter John Quirk caught up with him to talk about his fifth book and find out why he's more than happy for people to hate his work. * * * * * John Connolly shuffles past the window of the bar, looks in and smiles. It seems one journalist can spot another without breaking stride. He has a rucksack slung over his shoulder and, wearing big beige walking boots, pale-blue denims and a white shirt - which could do with his mum's iron running over it - I wouldn't have been surprised if he'd whipped out a guitar and started busking. For the creator of private detective Charlie "Bird" Parker, the violent, troubled central character in his first four books, a man with more flaws than most literary villains, Connolly is remarkably softly-spoken with a disarming smile. Born in 1968, he was brought up in the Rialto district of Dublin and suffered the usual myriad of jobs many writers have to go through before he found journalism and subsequently a #350,000 deal for his first two books. I start by asking Connolly about his childhood visit to the Island and soon find he's something of a Duracell bunny as an interviewee - one question and he's off and running, with barely a pause for breath. "My father wasn't particularly a believer in spending huge amounts of money on a holiday," he says. "So he took us over here for two weeks and I have vague memories of the Laxey Wheel. The worst thing was that then my father thought, there you go, you've had your foreign holiday and there's no need to go abroad again. You thought that's what the rest of the world looked like - it's kind of like Ireland." Set in America and focusing on Maine, the Parker novels are crime-writing at its finest. Raw it may have been, but Every Dead Thing marked his arrival on the scene and the sequels - Dark Hollow, The Killing Kind and The White Road - have established him as one of the leading contemporary crime writers. Every Dead Thing opens with an alcoholic Parker tormented by the murders of his wife and young daughter, killed while he's out seeking solace in the bottom of a glass. Spurred on by guilt and a need for revenge, he kicks the bottle and heads off in pursuit of his nemesis, a trail which brings him face-to-face with a serial killer known as The Travelling Man. It's a brutal but brilliant book and one which very nearly didn't find a publisher after a naive Connolly did a mail-shot of the first three chapters before the book was even half-finished. "I got the Writers and Artists Yearbook and I think I photocopied the first three chapters and the synopsis and sent it to about 70 people and kept getting these rejections," he explains. "Some of them were just little slips, and some were really bad. I got rejected in ways that you only get rejected when you're a teenage boy and you ask the prettiest girl in school to dance and she sends you away with a flea in your ear. But one agent and publisher (Hodder and Stoughton) came back. The agent said you've screwed yourself up by sending it out to everyone before you'd finished because no publisher wants to reject the same book twice. He said if you finish it, you finish it for your own reasons." Connolly did and, five years after he had started it, Every Dead Thing was published by Hodder. "The agent was right," says Connolly. "I think the only decent piece of advice I can give anyone is that ultimately you write for yourself. Some people hated the first book, they hated everything about it. A lot of people in particular didn't like the structure. It's been described as an hourglass, because there are two plots feeding into each other. But I like the fact that people who like the books really seem to like them and the ones who hate them really hate them. I mean last year, one reviewer - and this would have killed me when I was younger - when The White Road came out, one of them described me as a repellent writer. And I nearly wanted to put it on the dust jacket, because it was better than getting, 'yeah, it was okay.' It's a strong word. Repellent is the kind of word you use for dictators, you know, people who gas Kurds. You don't really call writers repellent and I was quite pleased by that." Moving away from Parker, Bad Men is a far more conventional ride for readers. It's the story of a group of killers tracking their leader's wife to a fictional island off the coast of Maine, where she's holed up with his ill-gotten loot and their young son. The Parker novels are richly-drawn webs of intense drama and horror which flirt with the supernatural, yet while the supernatural plays a far greater part in the new novel, it's far less ambitious in terms of its scope. "It's does what it says on the tin," says Connolly. "My instincts are probably to write books which are quite dense, with very intertwined layers and I could have written another one of those. I love reading and occasionally you get on a plane and you want to read something that is just going to keep you occupied so you don't have to watch Tomb Raider for the fifth time, which happened to me. I'm just doomed, I seem to be followed by Lara Croft. It was an awful film, terrible. And I'd read some of these novels and I'd think the person who wrote this book would not read a book like it. It would be beneath them to do it. And you finish it and you go, I spent seven quid of my hard-earned money. Did you take my watch and my wallet as well? You start tapping your pockets, you know. I wanted to see if I could write a piece of popular fiction that took as much time and effort as a Parker book, yet the effort didn't show." The good news for fans is that Parker will return in Connolly's next book after which it will be another stand-alone novel. The decision to write about America was largely formed by Connolly's childhood and the desperate need he felt to escape the confines of Dublin. "Rialto wasn't so great and, until quite recently, Dublin was a vaguely depressing place, well perhaps it wasn't depressing, that's not fair," he says. "The area I grew up in wasn't great. The first girl I went out with was from a place called Rathfarnham in Dublin, which was a nice suburb with semi-detached houses and bringing her to Rialto was like taking her to Beirut. It was burned-out cars and junkies and graffiti and every time you had these current affairs programmes on TV they'd do a 'dublin's heroin epidemic' and it would always be us. You'd watch TV to catch glimpses of people you know and it was great because they'd always appear in silhouette and you'd think everybody knows who you are. Now a lot of things have happened to Rialto. But at the time I hated it, with a passion. When you're growing up somewhere you want to get away from it and that's probably why I ended up writing about America." His parents played little part in his development as a young writer, although his mother did encourage him to read. "My mum does a tiny bit of writing, but my father was a rate collector, so he was really popular," Connolly says. "My mum read a lot so I suppose that was part of it, being encouraged to read and go into a library. I think Wilde said the test of a writer will always be that he will read so much more than he will ever write. People buy these 'how to write a novel' books and you really aren't going to learn anything from them in reality. I just don't believe that you are. Because there's a kind of, not alchemy exactly, but there's a whole lot of things subconsciously that fit together and somebody gives you a book that says now you're going to do plot, now you're going to do character, now you're going to do action. In reality all of these things get tied up together. You learn about writing by reading other people and just taking it in." After leaving school, Connolly worked for a few years before heading to Trinity College to study English. "Of all the things I didn't want to do, when you're 70 you just don't want to be your dad. Unless you're very fortunate, generally speaking you don't want to do what your dad did. And I ended up doing what my dad did. The only job I could get was with the local authority. I remember the interview and they asked what are you good at, what do you like doing? I'd been doing local journalism so I said I really like writing, but I'm not really very good with figures. I'm okay with them, but I wouldn't want to be charged with building a rocket. So they put me in the accounts department for three years. It was like being jailed." By this time Connolly had given up fiction to focus on journalism, working mainly for the Irish Times. He explains: "Anything that wasn't involved with journalism I stopped at the age of 17 and literally wrote nothing, apart from a couple of bad poems, between 17 and maybe 24. It didn't take long in journalism to realise that there are some people who are born journalists, and it's a craft and it's a gift and they have that kind of inquisitiveness. And I wasn't that inquisitive. I liked people and writing about people and I liked doing features. I didn't tell anyone I was writing the book. Nobody knew. And it appeared in the Independent in England, that it had sold, and one person, who is now one of the chief critics at the Irish Times, said: 'But he wasn't even that good a journalist!'. At the time I went, 'for God's sake, it's sour grapes', but she may have been right. I wasn't bad, I was perfectly adequate, but there were far better journalists. But I was an okay writer and that is why I started writing the book because I was doing journalism and realising that while I was writing, it just wasn't terribly fulfilling. You don't get to interview world leaders. They would occasionally send me to cover cat shows. I don't mind cats, but I don't have a great fondness for them. But as soon as the news desk learned that, they'd send me on them just to annoy me because they'd think it was funny. I covered education for years. I thought I'd never want to see another student or teacher. Every Easter I'd have to go down and cover teachers, conferences. I hated them." Smiling, he adds: "My mother was a teacher. And I had to balance the fact that I hate these people, but I can't hate my mother. That caused me a crisis." The one constant in Connolly's books is his ability to deliver fantastically diabolical villains and I have to ask just where he dredges them up from. "I don't like men by and large," he says. "I don't think men are particularly decent manifestations of humanity." Connolly is laughing and perhaps half-joking. But only half. "When I was growing up the first adult author I read was Ian Fleming and what I loved about Fleming was he did these grotesque villains, I mean they really were awful, Blofeld, Goldfinger, they just were really awful human beings and I read some mystery novels now and I think the villains are not terribly nice, but they're not awful. They tend to be kind of dull and I wanted to return to that. I interviewed James Lee Burke, who was a huge influence on me, and Burke said something interesting. He said there are some individuals, who are so corrupted, that that corruption had found a way to express itself visibly, so that they were corrupted from the inside out. And it created this alteration to the fabric of their being. I thought that was a wonderful way of describing it. So I like using these huge, awful villains. And yet the other thing about Burke that I didn't agree with, I asked are any of these people part of you and Burke said 'oh no, I'm the good people in my books'. It didn't strike me as true, because I know in my books I use the characters, even the bad characters, to explore things that I'm frightened of and aspects of my character. That's not to say I want to hang people up or lead a band of killers and rapists across the country to hunt people down, but I think we all have aspects of ourselves that we don't share with other people. In the great scheme of things they not going to make us really awful people. But they're things that we're ashamed of. And I think we recognise in ourselves the capacity to hurt other people. We're kind of insidious beings. We have great qualities and yet we do terrible things and I'm curious about that." * * * The following didn't make it into the article because of space, but it's a few words John said about the art of seeing your book through to the end. "The mechanics of it is that people get disheartened because they think writers somehow find writing easy. I remember one guy who used to have a thing in the Irish Times called 'how I write' and when I did it I more or less described how I kind of just sweat words out and the next one was Niall Williams, who describes how he wakes up in the morning and immerses himself in this river of words and I thought, good for you. You need to write every day. Everyone who writes a first book is doing something else at the same time, trying to raise a family, trying to work for a living and you've got all these things on the go and it's very hard to find the time to write, you tend to fit it in here and there. But it really helps if you can write, even if it's just 50 words a day. That's a paragraph. The thing is if you write 50 words a day for a week, the next time you sit down, the next week it's 100 words in the same time. You have to not think about a book as a 90,000 or 100,000 word thing, because that's a huge investment of time and energy and if you think like that you can get disheartened. You're plodding along and if you start thinking about the overview then you are going to get tormented. So that's the first thing, just to get disciplined into writing every day. For me, and I'm sure for a lot of writers, there's a wall that you hit with books and it usually occurs about 20,000 to 40,000 words. That's the point at which people abandon books, because they think it's really not going anywhere and say maybe if I go away and come back to it later of if I start something else I'll be okay. It happens to me with every single book and I know it will happen to me on the book I'm working on now. The solution is not to put it away. The solution is to go back to your 50 words a day and crawl your way through it. And you will come out of it at the other end. The number of 20,000 word novels that are abandoned would probably refurbish rainforests." Visit the Isle of Man online!