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  About John
Every Dead Thing
Dark Hollow
The Killing Kind
The White Road
Bad Men
Nocturnes
The Black Angel
Frequently Asked Questions
 A B O U T J O H N 1. Tell us about your background. I was born in Rialto, Dublin in 1968. My father was a public servant, my mother a housewife and teacher. After a few fairly dead-end jobs, I ended up studying English at Trinity College, Dublin, then took a masters in journalism at Dublin City University, graduating in 1993. For the next five years I worked as a freelance journalist for the Irish Times newspaper, to which I still contribute as regularly as I can.
2. What was Rialto like to grow up in? It was a predominantly working-class area, with two big local authority housing projects within its boundaries. There was a good community spirit, but Rialto was used as a dumping ground for drug addicts for a long time, so it was pretty much ground zero for the heroin epidemic that swept Dublin in the late seventies and early eighties. It's still trying to recover from the effects. I used to get the bus to work each morning and the bus stop would be packed with people. A bus would arrive, but I would be the only person who actually got on. The rest were all junkies, waiting for the pusher to arrive but with the option of a 'waiting for a bus' defense if the police asked them what they were doing. After the publication of Every Dead Thing, I went back to Rialto for the opening of a drug treatment center and a guy came up to me and congratulated me on the book. I looked at him and thought: "The last time I saw you I was lying on the ground and you and your pals were aiming kicks at my head." All water under the bridge now, I guess.
3. Were you a good journalist? When the news that Every Dead Thing had been sold broke in the newspaper, one of the arts critics was so aghast that she announced, "But he wasn't even a good journalist", so opinions were obviously mixed. I was good in the sense that I could write well, never missed deadlines and never turned down work. I did everything: education, property, news, features. The only section I never wrote for was sports. I'm not sure how much I really miss being a journalist. I miss having a circle of friends around me in an office but, on the other hand, journalists pay huge amounts of money into pension funds that a lot of them will never live to spend. They lead pretty stressed out lives, and a lot of them end up kind of unhappy in what they do, I think.
4. When did you start writing? I had always written, from the time that I was very young. I used to write stories based around the Ron Ely Tarzan series on Saturday morning TV and a western adventure series called Casey Jones, about a train driver. I was probably about six years old. I wrote for local newspapers, college magazines. I even wrote some poetry, but it was so awful that it gave poetry a bad name and I destroyed it all a few years back. But most people who end up writing for a living have always been writing. 
E V E R Y D E A D T H I N G
I had always read some crime fiction. The first crime novel I ever read was Ed McBain's Let's Hear It For The Deaf Man, probably in the late seventies or early eighties, and I loved it. I devoured McBain from then on. In fact, as a kind of tribute to McBain I gave two characters in Every Dead Thing names that echoed McBain and his work, only to find that in the latest McBain, The Last Dance, there's a four page diatribe about some Irish journalist who stole names from him. Sometimes, you just can't win. In 1991, I took a course in crime fiction as part of my English degree, under the tutelage of a man named Dr Ian Ross who was a big fan of the genre. That was when I read Ross Macdonald for the first time, and he, along with James Lee Burke, became a huge influence on me.
Someone once commented that in British crime fiction, it's not murder that's involved but contributory negligence. American crime fiction seemed much more concerned with the victims, with the possibility that it was society, or the institutions of the law, or, in Macdonald's case, the sins of the fathers and the impact of family history, that was responsible for what happened. In Macdonald's Lew Archer novels, Archer acts to help, defend, or achieve some measure of justice for those who are unable to act for themselves. He does it not out of a desire to earn money, or to restore the status quo of California society, but out of an empathy with their situation and a reluctance to see other people suffer. Meanwhile, I had worked in Maine for a time while a student, and returned there after I left college. If American crime fiction seemed the most suitable medium through which to explore the themes in which I was interested - compassion, morality, reparation, salvation - then America itself was the proper backdrop. As for Irish crime fiction, there wasn't a great deal of it for a long time (perhaps because we didn't have a lot of crime as such, and we were a largely rural rather than urban society) and much of what was written didn't work for me. Some writers tried to import the mechanisms of American or British crime fiction into an Irish setting, and came undone. In addition, there were Irish writers - such as Eoin MacNamee - who found themselves drawn to the situation in Northern Ireland and used some of the elements of crime fiction to explore terrorism. But, in general, there wasn't a great deal of Irish crime fiction and I wasn't interested in trying to change that. I began writing Every Dead Thing in about 1993, mainly as an escape from journalism. I told nobody that I was writing it, since failure is a problem that tends to be doubled rather than halved by sharing. I would use the money I earned as a freelance to fund the research, going over to the US for as long as I could afford, then returning home and writing up what I had found. I never really thought seriously about trying to get it published until 1996, when the Irish Times turned me down for a job and I became very frustrated. I had about half of the book done, sent it out to some agents and publishers in the vain hope that somebody might give me enough of an advance to enable me to finish it. Instead, I ended up with about seventy rejection slips for a book that wasn't even completed. But one publisher - Hodder in the UK - and one agent - Darley Anderson in London - responded positively. Darley encouraged me to finish it, so I went back to the US in the summer of 1997, maxed out my credit card, left my bills unpaid, and the finished novel was eventually sold in 1998. I couldn't believe it. I still can't.
6. But you are writing about America from a different perspective than, say, an American detective writer. But there has always been a tradition of outsiders interpreting and reinterpreting America. It is, after all, a country colonised and reformed by outsiders, with all due respect to the Native Americans. Some of our most potent images of America, particularly in cinema, come from immigrants: John Ford's westerns, the comedies of Capra and Lubitsch, Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas. And crime fiction in particular has always been written from the perspective of the outsider. Look at the great Californian detective novelists. Chandler was born in Illinois and educated in Dulwich, England; Hammett and Cain came from Maryland; and Macdonald was Canadian. Yet each created a distinctive - and not inaccurate - vision of California in his novels. Being an outsider is not an obstacle; it just involves a change in perspective. I find America fascinating, but also a little frightening, maybe because I see things about it that, as an outsider, I find deeply strange. For example, in the year prior to Every Dead Thing's publication, three quarters of a million children were reported missing in the US. The recovery rate was about 99 per cent, but that still leaves somewhere in the region of 7000 children unaccounted for. I find that a terrifying statistic, and it informs elements of Every Dead Thing.
7. Can you tell us a little about your protagonist, Charlie Parker? Parker is a man tormented and haunted by the deaths of his wife and little daughter, taken from him while he was in a bar feeling sorry for himself. Through the course of Every Dead Thing and the novels that follow, he develops as a human being from someone who has descended into violence and despair to become a compassionate, empathetic man, one who realises that he has to forgive himself as well as others if he is to make reparation for his failings. There is a line in the third novel, The Killing Kind: "Reparation is the shadow cast by salvation." That statement represents, in a way, the core of the novels.
8. Why did you choose that name for him? He doesn't even like jazz. I liked the connotations of the nickname that went with it. Here is a man mired in mortality, virtually anchored to the earth, and his nickname is 'Bird'. Some people didn't like it, and I can understand why, but I think it suits him.
9. Every Dead Thing is a very dark novel, with a bleak, violent prologue. Did you make a very deliberate decision to write that kind of novel? The prologue was the first thing written, and went through even more drafts than the remainder of the novel (and I redrafted that, from start to finish, over forty times). Since the novel was going to be seen through Parker's eyes, and his emotional responses were going to determine the direction it took, it was important for the reader to understand what made him the man he has become by the start of the novel. So we see the death of his wife and child from a number of different perspectives: Parker's own experience of that night, his recollections some months later, and also the dispassionate language of the police report. By the end of the prologue, the reader should be as disturbed, pained and haunted as Parker himself. I'm not sure that the novel is particularly violent. Parker arrives in the aftermath of a great deal of the action of the novel, and tends to describe what he sees in detail, but the actual violence is comparatively scattered through what is quite a long book. But it was important to me that the reader understood the sufferings endured by the victims in the book, for a number of reasons. Firstly, it leads Parker to move from being a violent, obsessed, somewhat selfish man to one who feels a kind of empathy for those who have suffered through no fault of their own. Secondly, I have a problem with writers who use the victims in their novels as tools to power the plot along, yet gloss over their deaths. That seems to be cynical, and also verges on the pornographic in its reluctance to consider consequences, individual identities etc.
10. But the book does have a considerable amount of death in it. Sometimes, it seems to be on every second page. I wanted the reader to feel that he or she had entered a different world, one in which all of the basic rules of human conduct had been set aside, where people fought like animals or demons. In effect, the novel deals with degrees of corruption and evil, from institutional to the rotting of the individual human soul. There are the mobsters, fighting purely for territory and power; the twin killers of the earlier part of the novel, fuelled by perverse desires; there are the corrupt policemen, ineffective insitutions; and then there is the controlling influence in the novel, the character who has set out to create a world in which he can operate with impunity and who manipulates every character in his path in order to attain that goal. Parker descends through darker and darker levels, almost like Dante in the Inferno, until he reaches the very worst and is forced to confront the thing he has been seeking all along.
11. Every Dead Thing uses metaphysical poetry and Renaissance anatomical drawings to power elements of the plot along. How did that come about? I had read a great deal of the work of a Mexican anatomist, F. Gonzalez-Crussi, since about 1986 or '87. He writes wonderfully on the human body, and in one of his books he made explicit reference to the Renaissance and post-Renaissance culture of dissection and anatomical modelling. Then, later, I read a wonderful book called The Body Emblazoned by Jonathan Sawday, which examined dissection in the context of art, poetry, drama, some of which I had already encountered in college. All of those influences began to feed into the novel, and I became interested in one particular strand: the belief that the things of this world are transient, pain as well as pleasure. You may suffer in this world, but there is some reward in the next. I liked the idea of an individual who did not believe in some great reward, who saw human beings as essentially disposable and inconsequential, and for whom the idea of echoing Renaissance tableaux to remind people of their inconsequentiality had a perverse appeal.
12. The novel has an unusual two-part structure. Why? I wanted the book to follow Parker, not necessarily one single plot strand. The two plots are linked, but for Parker to understand what is happening around him he has to change as a person, to become more empathetic. His actions in the first half of the novel equip him to tackle the core of the action: the Travelling Man.
13. He is a particularly terrifying villain, and there are a great many other grotesque and unpleasant characters in the book. Where do they come from? I used to have a very flip answer for that question, along the lines of "Well, they're just products of the imagination and they're nothing to do with me". In fact, all of your characters, good and bad, should probably contain some element of yourself. I think it's similar to what certain actors do: they find the tiny little part of themselves that bears some resemblance to the character, and then expand it out to a performance. I think I probably do the same thing. (When I broke up with my longtime girlfriend, one of her friends commented that she had probably done the right thing to dump me. Given the books that I wrote, there had to be something wrong with me.)
14. What brought about the characters of Angel and Louis? Parker is surrounded by older men who act, to varying degrees, as mentors of some kind: his grandfather, Walter Cole etc. Angel and Louis, I think, are also older than him, and have a better understanding of the kinds of compromises sometimes required in this world. Their banter is based, at times, on the kinds of conversations I have with my two closest friends but, that apart, they have no basis in real life. I think they add a kind of dark humor to the books and also, particularly in Every Dead Thing, show a lighter side of Parker.
15. You followed Every Dead Thing with Dark Hollow, which involved a shift in location. Dark Hollow returns Parker to Maine. I wanted to use the Maine landscape, the changing of the seasons, the cycles of nature, to illuminate the novel. The book is filled with images of predatory nature and, combined with the onset of winter, I hope gives the book some of its power.
16. Parker is a far more sympathetic character in this novel. For the reader, yes. As an individual, he is becoming increasingly empathetic. He feels the pain of Rita Ferris's death as his own when he views her body, actually forces himself to recreate her final moments, to experience what she experienced. He takes on her sufferings, and the sufferings of her child, as his own, then refuses to rush to judgment on her ex-husband, Billy Purdue.
A couple of days after her death, it emerged that she had come over from London to work as a call girl in Dublin over Christmas and the New Year, and the attitude towards her death seemed to change. The tabloids began referring to her as a "Sri Lankan hooker", even when her parents were coming over to identify and collect her body. It was as if she had brought what had happened to her on herself because of the nature of her business, and that public sympathy altered, became less intense, as a result. And I felt very strongly about what happened, maybe because it was the first murder that I ever covered. I just believed, and still believe, that nothing could justify what happened to Belinda Pereira, that nobody deserved that kind of death. Her murderer has still never been caught. And so, in Dark Hollow, Parker hides the fact that Rita Ferris has been working as a call girl because he is afraid of the reaction of both the public and the police, and he doesn't want her labelled in that way and the awfulness of her death diminished because of it. It seems to be a different book in tone and execution. Dark Hollow was inspired by some of the structures of fairy stories, and motifs from that tradition emerge in the book: the dark forest, the monster from the past dwelling within it, the abandoned son. That was very deliberate. I also wanted to create a more sinister feel for the novel, and felt the fairytale elements added to that. It's not a serial killer novel, despite some of the views expressed about it. The central villain is a little more complex than that. And the third novel is definitely not a serial killer novel.
17. While The Killing Kind takes up themes from the earlier novels, it is a very different book from its predecessors. I've tried very hard not to repeat myself in the books, because it's very easy to retreat into formula. Basically, I realized when I began Dark Hollow that the sequence of novels was taking on a particular form: Every Dead Thing dealt with sin and forgiveness, Dark Hollow would deal with reparation, and The Killing Kind would offer at least the possibility of redemption. In that sense, it's a more hopeful book that either of the preceding novels. I don't think it's quite as dark (although a lot of people have disagreed with me on that) and it's more of a thriller than either Every Dead Thing or Dark Hollow. It moves very quickly, I think.
18. It has a quite startlingly nasty villain, in the form of Mr Pudd.
19. On one level, it's a book about religious obsession. In The Killing Kind, one of the main characters is never encountered directly. Her name is Grace Peltier, and by the time the novel begins she is already dead. But sections of the thesis she had been working on when she died are planted throughout the book, and we learn about her from the recollections of others and the writings that she left behind. The background to her thesis is religious obsession in the state of Maine, and most of it is true. The only part I made up was the group called the Aroostook Baptists but, given the religious history of the state, the Aroostook Baptists don't seem any stranger than the real religious movements that inspired them.
20. The supernatural element seems stronger in this novel. It's gradually becoming more and more explicit as the novels progress. I think The White Road, the fourth book, will take it one stage further. In the end, I don't write realist crime fiction. (In fact, I don't think crime fiction in general can be termed "realist". Too much manipulation of the realities of police work, private investigation, and detection, too much telescoping and compression of events and time, is required for it to really claim that it reflects reality. Instead, it acts like a kind of prism, simultaneously distorting reality and also making the constituent elements of a story or plot clearer to the reader.) I'm interested in using the structures of crime fiction as a springboard to explore other themes: empathy, morality, compassion, maybe even life after death. And I'm also interested in mixing genres, creating hybrids. Not everybody is going to like that, but it's still legitimate to try to do it.
21. In the past, you've spoken about the first three novels as a kind of trilogy. Now, with The White Road, it appears that you've written a fourth novel. How does that fit in? Um, can I have a trilogy in four parts? Probably not, although I think the late Douglas Adams managed to get away with it. I couldn't think of a better word at the time than "trilogy" to describe the first three novels: like I said, they follow a particular sequence, and the ending of the third contains echoes of the beginning of the first, albeit in a positive, hopeful way. But The White Road follows on very directly from The Killing Kind - it's virtually a sequel, which is strange because it wasn't what I intended when I began writing it. I suppose, in a way, it's a kind of coda to the whole Parker sequence. It ties up a lot of things, and once again explores themes that have emerged from, or have been suggested in, the earlier novels.
22. It takes place partly in South Carolina. Why did you choose South Carolina as a setting?
23. You've said that you feel it's the darkest novel in the sequence. Why? In part, it's because a sense of threat hangs over the main characters right from the beginning, and closes in on them as the novel progresses. Also, the Angel and Louis characters are very different in this novel. They're far more ambiguous than they were in the earlier books, estranged both from each other and from Parker. It's a natural development, in some ways, but because they provided some of the lighter aspects the first three books, that lightness is largely absent from The White Road. They still have their moments, though.
24. You followed The White Road with your first stand-alone book, Bad Men. What made you move away from the Parker books? Nothing made me move away from them. The Parker books are quite intense, The White Road in particular, and I felt that I wanted to give myself a little breathing space after it. I also worry a lot about repeating myself, and I didn't want to return to Parker until I'd figured out where I was going to take him and the other main characters in the series. There is also a danger of getting into a rut, of feeling kind of duty bound to keep writing about the same character all of the time. If that happens, then you end up short-changing yourself as a writer and short-changing the readers who buy your books. It's a difficult one. I know that, as a fan, I prefer when James Lee Burke writes Robicheaux books rather than Billy Bob Holland books yet, as a writer, I understand why he does that. Similarly, I can see why Michael Connelly might choose not to make every novel a Bosch book. It's something that you have to do to keep yourself fresh, and to enable you to return to your main (maybe even your favorite) character with renewed energy.
25. So what is Bad Men about? It's about 400 pages. Sorry. Well, when I initially told my publishers about the book they seemed a bit nonplussed, but then I did tell them that it was about a giant policeman living on a haunted island off the coast of Maine. Which it is. They were actually great about it. Bad Men concerns an imprisoned man named Moloch, who is being tormented by dreams in which, 300 years earlier, he led a band of killers onto a small Maine island called Sanctuary in order to kill the inhabitants, who included his wife. Meanwhile, in the present day, a huge policeman named Melancholy Joe Dupree finds himself drawn toward a young woman and her little son who have recently come to live on the island. But it gradually becomes clear that something on the island has been waiting for a sequence of events to come to pass, so that history can be revisited and vengeance claimed. And so the scene is set for a confrontation between Dupree and Moloch, with unknown forces on the island massing in the background. It's basically a big supernatural thriller, a real hybrid of the mystery novel and the chiller, I hope.
26. The supernatural has played a growing part in all of your books. It's even more prevalent in this one? I think the balance in this book leans slightly more toward the supernatural, maybe 60:40 in its favor. It's still recognizably a crime/ mystery novel, though; it just has some extra ingredients. I wanted to write a book that really gripped the reader from page 1 and kept him or her reading right up to page 400, the kind of book that you might pick up before a long journey and find that the time had flown while you read it. I wanted it to be fast, entertaining, a bit scary. I suppose the tone is a little lighter than in the Parker novels.
27. The book has some strong female characters. I hope that they're strong. Sharon Macy is a rookie cop sent out to Sanctuary who finds herself in an alien environment facing vicious killers and supernatural forces. Meanwhile, the woman that Joe Dupree is romancing, Marianne Elliot, also has her secrets, and has discovered depths and capacities within herself that she never suspected existed.
28. Were they hard to write? You mean, as a man? I think that's kind of a myth. Look, it's not like I've never met a woman. I have, honest. Men spend their lives trying to deal with, and understand, women, and vice versa. I think male writers perhaps just bring a different perspective to their female characters.
N O C T U R N E S
Well, I've written an article about some of the childhood background to it, but basically supernatural fiction was really the first genre fiction that I read. It appealed to me from the first, and from a very young age I began reading and collecting it. I had anthologies and novels, both modern and slightly older works. In fact, my preference was for the classic stuff, particularly the stories of M R James. For anyone who hasn't read them, his stories remain among the greatest supernatural works ever written. They're very elegant, with a hint of erudition - as befits an academic - and very frightening. Stylistically, James influenced a number of stories in the volume. Oddly, as time went on I found myself retreating further and further from modern British supernatural fiction. In fact, I never really liked it. People like Clive Barker or James Herbert just didn't resonate with me, and I had a problem with their treatment of sex, Barker's in particular. It seemed to me that he wallowed in sexual horror in the Books of Blood, whereas a director like David Cronenberg, for example, approached similar themes in a much more clinical, detached way, which heightened their impact for me. That horror of sex, or the way in which sex is presented in certain modern British horror fiction, strikes me as the flipside of the sexual attitudes presented in the Carry On. . .films. Both share, I think, a kind of repugnance for the sexual workings and appetites of the body.
And we're off on a tangent again...
30. But there were, and are, supernatural elements in your own novels. Clearly you absorbed them, and put them to use. I never really set out to include them when I began writing the Parker novels, but you're right: that fiction impacted on me in a serious way at a young age, and when I started writing Every Dead Thing elements found their way into that book. For me the most interesting work in any artistic area - music, art, genre fiction (yep, it is an artistic endeavor) - frequently occurs at the margins, among those who are curious enough to experiment with it, and to take chances. On a personal level, I would just get bored if I were to simply stick with a pre-existing formula and simply repeat it, over and over. As Paul Newman once remarked: "It's not only dangerous to repeat yourself, it's damned tiresome." Recently, an Irish critic of crime fiction - and one who also writes novels - began his review column by remarking upon the fact that in the so-called Golden Age of crime fiction, no novel was longer than 192 pages. (I fear he's one of those individuals who thinks that mystery writing begins and ends with The Big Sleep, and sometimes imagines that being a great writer - as Chandler was - is just the same thing as being a great novelist, which Chandler sometimes was not.) A novel that size could get the reader from A-Z and provide a solution to the mystery, he noted, and everyone went home happy, as it were. That's fine, as far as it goes (which, given its reductive nature, isn't very far at all) but in the same column he reviewed - favorably - Hard Revolution by George Pelecanos. Now Hard Revolution is not 192 pages long, but more pertinently its main priority is not to get the reader from A-Z as quickly as possible and to end with a neatly-packaged solution to the crime. In fact, Pelecanos tells us early on who is responsible, and then uses the novel to explore a complex web of interrelationships, to examine concepts of duty and of social order, and, in effect, to anatomize the city of Washington and, by extension, the state of the nation at a crucial period in its history. There's an intellectual inconsistency at the heart of his critic's assertion. If he was to have his way then a) either Pelecanos's novel simply would not exist or, equally worryingly b) it would not qualify as crime fiction, simply by virtue of its length and the fact that it was willing to tackle larger themes. Now there's a whole different argument there that I don't have the time to get into right now - essentially, the distinction between literary and genre fiction - but it begs the question: is it only crime fiction if it's less than 200 pages long and shows no interest in anything but the who, what, where, when and why of the crime? If so, then it's essentially an invitation to the genre to stagnate, an invitation that, thankfully, a large number of authors decline to take up. So that's my first point: right from the start, I was curious about fusing disparate elements together in a mystery novel to see how, or even if, they might work. Genre fiction, because it is so heavily dependent upon existing conventions, and readers' expectations of them, is frequently at risk of becoming staid, and perhaps one of the ways of trying to ensure that it does not is to experiment with new forms, or to use its conventions as a means of exploring larger themes. I've spoken before about how I like the fact that the Americans call their crime novels 'mystery' novels. I'm very comfortable with that term, much more so than I am with 'crime fiction' or similar descriptions, and for purely personal reasons. A mystery, in the original sense of the world, really has nothing to do with crime, or murder, or even finding a solution. A mystery is a revelation from God that can't be understood by human reasoning alone. That's how the Greeks would have understood it and that's how the writers of the medieval mystery plays, which were versions of Biblical tales, would have understood it. So, at its very heart, it seems to me that 'mystery' encompasses some concept of the supernatural. For that reason, I've never seen any great difficulty in fusing 'crime' conventions with experiments that would more usually be found in straightforward supernatural fiction. Nocturnes just represents a more explicit presentation of these elements, sometimes with crime/ mystery elements, sometimes without.
31. Which brings us back to how the book came about. I knew I'd get back to that eventually. BBC Northern Ireland approached me, shortly after the publication of my first book, Every Dead Thing, and asked if there was anything that I might be interested in doing. There were a couple of things that came to mind - most of which I never got around to doing - but the one that interested me most was writing ghost stories for the radio. I've always been fascinated by radio as a medium. I think it's hugely underrated and undervalued. People engage with radio in a very different way from TV, or film. In the absence of visual distractions, they tend to focus on the voice, and on what is being said rather than the physical appearance of the person saying it, or the visual stimuli accompanying it. In addition, unlike earlier generations for whom listening to the radio was a communal experience before TV came along, I think many of us listen to it alone now (apart, obviously, from those occasions when it's channeled into a store, or onto a building site.) Storytelling is particularly well-suited to radio for that reason, and so I said that I'd like to write some supernatural stories. I imagined people listening to them alone at night, or as they drove home in the dark. (In the end, the first batch were broadcast at about four in the afternoon, and scared a lot of schoolkids in the process, but that's beside the point...) The problem was that I had never written short stories before. The last time I had written short fiction—apart from one allegorical tale submitted to a college magazine and, very wisely, rejected—was when I was writing essays for school. I wasn't even sure that I could do it. The first drafts of the stories were actually written as plays, but the BBC's budget wouldn't stretch to mini dramas, so I rewrote them as monologues, since they were all going to be read by one male actor, Tony Doyle, who sadly has since died. Those first five stories were 'The Erlking', 'The Ritual of the Bones', 'Mr Gray's Folly', 'Mr Pettinger's Dæmon', and 'Nocturne', and they seemed to go down pretty well when they were broadcast, thanks mostly to Tony's great readings and the producer, Lawrence Jackson, who is just fantastic. A couple of years went by, and Lawrence suggested writing another set of stories. By that time, I had begun thinking of writing a collection of shorter pieces, so I wrote one version of each story for the BBC - as no story could be longer than 14 minutes long when read—and another with a view towards possible publication. I had also begun work on the first of a pair of novellas, which featured Parker, the main character from my first four novels. I was interested in experimenting with length and pacing, and that novella, 'The Reflecting Eye', was what resulted. I could have given that to my publishers, I guess, and got them to print it in big type, and then have published it coming up to Christmas and creamed a tenner from people who really liked the Parker books (and I wouldn't have been the first writer to do that) but I really didn't consider that an as an option. Instead, I could see how it fitted in to the overall concept of Nocturnes, so it was set aside to become part of that volume. The stories that made the second broadcast were 'Some Children Wander By Mistake', 'Ms Froom, Vampire', 'The Shifting of the Sands', 'The New Daughter', and 'The Inkpot Monkey', a version of which also appeared in Karin Slaughter's anthology/ novel, Like A Charm. I think I used Karin's book as a kind of dry run, because I figured if she rejected the story, or if readers didn't like it, then I was on the wrong track. Luckily, Karin did like it, so I'm very grateful to her for accepting it for her book. Combined with Lawrence Jackson's enthusiasm, it gave me the confidence to continue working on Nocturnes. Sometimes, I think writers publish a collection of short stories simply because they happen to have written a lot of them for various anthologies or publications, and it seems like quite an easy option to stick them all between covers and publish them. Other times, young writers use them as a calling card for their careers, or as a dry run for a novel. Nocturnes doesn't really fit into either of these categories. It was planned. Stories were written especially for it, and there are thematic links between them. I thought that putting together Nocturnes would be easy, as most of the stories were not very long, but in fact it was desperately hard, and I literally put years of effort into it. Each story was like working on a small novel, and as I'm an obsessive creator of new drafts I found myself rewriting each one over and over again, and worrying about tiny details in each. Even now, after cutting four stories from it, I still agonize over some of the choices that I made. Still, it was worth it. Nocturnes will never sell very many copies, but that was never the point. Some of the best work I've done is contained in its pages, and I'm proud of it, if it's okay to admit to that.
32. Were you ever tempted to write a novel that was entirely supernatural in nature, instead of the short stories? Not really. I should confess that I - in common with quite a lot of readers, I think - don't tend to read short stories very much. I love Donald Barthelme's work, and some of Tobias Wolff's stories, and the stories of Raymond Carver, but after that I'm struggling a little to find very many short story collections on my shelves. (Oh, an honorable exception is P.G. Wodehouse, whose stories I still return to in order to cheer myself up...) Having said that, I do still dip into anthologies of classic supernatural stories, so that's one form of the short story to which I do return. I actually think that the supernatural is almost ideally suited to the short story form. In a novel, there is a kind of duty to explain, even in horror fiction. There is the requirement of some degree of explication, and a conclusion of sorts. Short stories don't have to supply those things. Instead, they can be snapshots, revelations of single incidents or captured moments. That gives an added power to supernatural short stories: the threats in them can come out of nowhere, then return to the place from which they came. There is the sense that they have always been there, waiting, and what we have been given is a brief revelation of their nature. It also allows the writer to present the reader with a glimpse of the horror, then return it to the shadows without overexposing it by being forced to confront it repeatedly over the course of a novel. What the reader is left with, depending upon the nature of the story, is perhaps slowly fading shock, or a lingering sense of unease. It's interesting to note that some of the greatest and most enduring of horror novels have been quite short: Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Picture of Dorian Gray, or even, more recently, I Am Legend are probably what we would now consider to be novellas. I sometimes feel that longer supernatural fiction undermines itself by its sheer length, and even in the case of the better novels I tend to remember incidents from them, or images, rather than extended plots. Take Stephen King's It, which is an enormous book: all I really remember from the novel is Pennywise arriving in the library with razors set into his mouth instead of teeth, and the description of him chomping down on his own gums with the blades has stayed with me ever since. Even Stoker's Dracula is memorable for me because of one or two scenes: Dracula arriving back at his castle with an infant in a sack, and throwing it to the trio of female vampires who are seducing Harker, or Harker's first sight of Dracula climbing down the castle walls. In a supernatural short story, one can reduce the horror down to its bare essentials - even just a single image, or a moment of unease - and if it's done right it will impact upon the reader with the force of a blow. I don't know if I've achieved that with Nocturnes, but I hope that at least some of the stories resonate in that way.
33. Can you take us through the stories, perhaps telling us a little about each without giving too much away? THE ERLKING I have a particular affection for this story, as it was the first one that I wrote, and like I said earlier, I wasn't sure that I could even write a short story. The myth of the Erlking has been explored before, and both Goethe and Angela Carter have produced versions of the tale. I didn't read either before embarking upon my own story, although I was aware of both. It has the feel of a folk tale, which was quite deliberate, and has probably been revised more often than any other story in the book. The appearance of the Erlking himself, with his adornments of bone, was worked out after two or three years of thinking about it. Funnily enough, while I'm very fond of it, my editor and agent didn't seem terribly keen on it when they first read it. MR PETTINGER'S DÆMON This tale, like THE SHIFTING OF THE SANDS, owes a lot to M R James. It's also one of a number of stories that reference the Protestant religion. While I'm Catholic, there is something appealing to me about allowing the supernatural to collide with Protestantism in a story. I suppose I feel that Catholics have a pretty high tolerance for mumbo-jumbo, and for all the whistles and bells that go with their faith, but again it's probably also the influence of that earlier, British tradition. It may also have to do with the fact that while Irish writers have always written supernatural fiction, its most famous Irish practitioners have all been Protestants: Bram Stoker and Dracula, Sheridan Le Fanu and Uncle Silas, Charles Maturin and Melmoth the Wanderer, even Oscar Wilde and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Someone once remarked upon the fact that a lot of these stories feature men at the end of their line living in crumbling old houses, which was kind of the reality of Protestantism in Ireland for a certain class, to some degree. They were living in big houses surrounded by a sometimes hostile native population, gradually finding that their income was decreasing while the cost of keeping up their property was increasing. Along with THE UNDERBURY WITCHES, this is one of two stories that use World War I as a backdrop. I'm not entirely sure why I found that appealing, but it may have to do with the idea of psychic scarring arising from what was witnessed and experienced by those who fought in it. Mr Pettinger is a profoundly damaged man, and his faith in God is under siege from the horrors he has seen. In a way, the task given to him by his bishop - to investigate a fellow cleric who is also suffering a crisis of faith - is both his salvation, and possibly his damnation. THE SHIFTING OF THE SANDS A number of the stories in Nocturnes began life simply as titles, without any plot to go with them, or with just a very hazy idea of what might follow on from them. I just liked the title when it came along, and sat down to write a story to go with it. This is another story that doffs its cap to M R James, and features a clergyman in a central role. NOCTURNE Like THE ERLKING, this features a child in danger, and the threat is partly sexual in nature. I use children a lot, both in my novels and these stories, and I frequently get asked why. In part, I think it's because we are all children when we experience fear. It reminds us of that powerlessness we felt when we were young, and of our vulnerability. There is a moment in Saving Private Ryan, during that visceral landing sequence at the beginning, when we see a young, mortally wounded man, crying out over and over again for his mother as he dies. That's what fear and pain does to us: it makes us our mother's child, our father's child, once more, and causes us to look to them for succor even when they are far away, or gone from this world. THE WAKEFORD ABYSS This is in part a kind of homage to those old Hammer movies in which good-natured strangers arrive in a small town, ignore local warnings, and suffer the consequences. It even has a scene set in a pub. I like the two main characters in this story. It was inspired in part by Fergus Fleming's wonderful book on Alpine exploration, Killing Dragons, which features a great many Englishmen of the stiff upper lipped variety performing the most incredible feats of daring while carrying large sacks of fine claret and putting on silk nightcaps prior to going to sleep beneath glaciers. THE UNDERBURY WITCHES This is the longest of the stories, and was the last one written. It is a murder mystery of sorts, but is also concerned with the male inability to understand women. I don't mean that in a Men are From Mars, Women Are From Venus kind of way, but in a deeper, more troubling sense. I think there is something about women which is ultimately unknowable to men, no matter how hard the sexes try to reach some accommodation with each other, and that sense of the hidden or enigmatic translates into fear sometimes, and violence. A similar idea is at work in THE NEW DAUGHTER, I think. THE NEW DAUGHTER This was a difficult story to write, and the threat became more explicit as I rewrote it. I wanted to explore that idea of the mystery of women from a different angle to the one in THE UNDERBURY WITCHES, focusing on that moment when a girl ceases to be simply her daddy's little girl - although she will always remain that, to some degree - and starts to become a woman, so that part of her starts to drift away from the father who was once the primary, even sole, male figure in her life. In an earlier version, it was unclear if the father in the tale was simply imagining the sinister transformation he believed that he could see occurring in his daughter, or if it was really happening. That didn't quite work, or maybe I just wasn't good enough to make it work, so now it's a slightly different kind of tale. MISS FROOM, VAMPIRE Gosh, another strong, predatory woman: I sometimes wonder, quite seriously, how much of myself I've exposed in these stories. A friend who read one or two of the earlier versions on the website commented that she thought they were almost more personal and self-revelatory than the novels. I don't think that's true. There is a lot of me in the novels but it tends to be diffused over 400 pages, while in the stories individual facets, or aspects of things that I find curious, can probably be seen more clearly. There's a streak of dark humor in this story, much as there is in THE INKPOT MONKEY. In fact, I sometimes feel that both of these stories are being recounted by the same narrator, someone who maintains an amused, vaguely superior attitude to the characters. He almost invites the reader to collude with what happens to the victims in the stories, as though he takes the view that they really don't deserve any better and rather expects us to take a similar position. This story contains one of my favorite lines in the book, incidentally, in which the male character muses on the problems of engaging in conversation while wearing unfamiliar shirts. THE FURNACE ROOM I have always found it hard to judge my own work, and this was not one of my favorite stories. It may be partly due to the fact that it has a contemporary setting, and I was enjoying writing stories set in the past for a change. Also, the narrator is a nasty piece of work, and I found it hard to empathize with him. Then I submitted the collection to my British editor, and this was the one that gave her the worst nightmares. So what do I know? DEEP DARK GREEN Another difficult story, in a way. In fact, this is not really a story at all, but rather a series of images, and that's one of the reasons why I like it, and why it made the final version. Again, I think the threat in this story is female in nature, although it makes no distinction between the sexes when it comes to claiming its victims. THE RITUAL OF THE BONES This is another tale that began life as a title, and when I sat down to write it I was going to set it in a hotel. I began writing, and this is what emerged, completely out of the blue. That happened on a number of occasions, and the stories that came as a result are probably among my favorites in the book. I've never liked being part of gangs, particularly male groups. I'm quite solitary, and generally prefer the company of women to men, to be honest. I also intensely disliked school and was miserable for much of my time there, particularly in senior school. At least I wasn't sent to boarding school, which I'm sure I would have hated even more. All of those things come together in this story. Tony Doyle, the actor who read this for radio, didn't like it the first time he saw it, but it later became his favorite. I think it appealed to his antiauthoritarian instincts. THE INKPOT MONKEY This is perhaps my favorite story. The title comes from Borges's A Book of Imaginary Beasts, which contains a reference to the titular creature. I remember reading it, saying "Gosh, that's interesting", then thinking nothing more about it. Many months later, I sat down with that title in mind, and two hours after starting I had the finished story. I had no idea how I was going to use the image of the monkey when I began to write, though, so what came out continues to surprise me. It's a story about writers and writing, on one level, and the nature of the process of creating fiction. It turned out subsequently that a bookseller friend of mine who read the story had twin phobias about monkeys and wrists, and was quite traumatized as a result. SOME CHILDREN WANDER BY MISTAKE Originally another title in search of a story. I've never found clowns funny. I don't find them frightening, but I don't find them amusing either. There is something desperate about them. One more tangent coming up here, but it may have something to do with why I always preferred Laurel & Hardy to Charlie Chaplin. In his 'Little Tramp' guise at least, Chaplin never saw a heart string that he didn't want to pluck. He just about stopped short of following the audience home from the cinema, begging it to love him. With Laurel & Hardy, there was also an awareness of the audience - Ollie would look despairingly at the camera, inviting us to sympathize with the burdens he was forced to carry in Stan - but he wasn't looking for our love, or trying to wring a tear out of us. There was no escape for him and he knew it, because they were bound together, each defined by his relationship with the other. I always believed that to call Laurel & Hardy 'clowns' was to do them a disservice: what was going on between them was far more complex than that. In them, especially as I get older, I find my relationships with friends and family reflected, that mixture of love, bemusement, frustration and sometimes despair that we all sometimes feel as we are forced to coexist with those who matter most to us in the world. Anyway, back to 'Some Children...' This story was deliberately written in a very simple, unadorned style. It's a nasty fairy tale to frighten children, but it's also one of the stories that was most transformed when I heard it read aloud. Alun Armstrong did a brilliant job, taking my little story onto another level entirely. Watching him, and listening to him, as he read it in the studio was one of the great pleasures of the last year for me. THE CANCER COWBOY RIDES This is the novella that opens the book. Fear is universal, but particular to each one of us in the forms that it takes. I think that's what good supernatural fiction taps into: the little kernel of fear that is common to us all. I have a horror of cancer. It killed my father, and very nearly killed one of my closest friends a year or two ago. I despise it for the way that it corrupts the body, turning its own cells against itself. In this novella, I gave my fear a semi-human form. It is a kind of 'body horror' story, and although the worst stuff takes place beneath the skin, it is also the most gruesome of the tales. Nevertheless, it is one of the most personal stories. Did it help me to write it down? Not really, unfortunately. In a strange way, I worried about expressing my fears so explicitly, as though I were inviting it to happen to me. THE REFLECTING EYE This novella concludes the book, and is a kind of haunted house story. When I finished writing Bad Men, I wanted to experiment with different story lengths. I had an idea for a Parker story which wasn't really suited to a novel, and so I decided to just write it and see what emerged. (Similarly, with the next Parker novel, The Black Angel, I've tried to pace it differently from the other books, making it more contemplative at times, which means that it runs a little longer than the other novels.) 'The Reflecting Eye' is also less violent than the earlier Parker stories, as the worst crimes have already been committed by the time the book opens, but it takes up themes that should be familiar to anyone who has read the Parker novels: the lingering taint of the past upon the present, and one's duty to those who have suffered, even at the cost of one's own comfort. It finds Parker in a good situation. He's at ease, preparing for the birth of his child, and in love with the woman in his life. There are storm clouds gathering, though, and it provides some indication of the direction The Black Angel will take. There is also a nod to Dracula, incidentally . . .
34. What about the Nocturnes: A Coda volume? 
Well, I cut some stories from the collection because I didn't feel entirely happy with them, but I'd spent a lot of time trying to get them right. They were 'The Bridal Bed', 'The Inn At Shillingford', and 'The Man From The Second Fifteen'. I kind of like the first and last of those, and even 'Inn' has one or two nice moments in it. I decided to put those stories in a separate volume, with a short introduction, and sign them. There aren't too many copies - probably one for every seven first editions of Nocturnes - so most of them are destined for the people on the mailing list, or those who happen to find some in their local store because I happen to know the bookseller. I'm considering including them in the paperback edition, but still as a kind of coda to the main collection.
35. It seems like a long time since the last novel was published. What took you so long? Well, it's really only been about twenty months since Bad Men, and in between I've published Nocturnes, so it's not like I've been sitting around watching children's TV in my vest or anything. I suppose it may seem like a while since there's been a full length Parker novel, but The Black Angel was a difficult book to write.
36. What do you mean by "difficult?" Well, I think that it's probably had the longest gestation of any book since Every Dead Thing. I was actually still writing Every Dead Thing when I first came across references to Sedlec, the ossuary which features at the heart of the new book. I've said before that writers are very magpieish by nature: most of us tend to be attracted by shiny things, or little details that seem interesting, and we store them away in the hope that they can be used in the future. Sedlec was a little like that. It's a town in the Czech Republic, in what used to be Bohemia, and it boasts an amazing ossuary, essentially a church decorated with human remains. I read a feature on it in a newspaper - well, more of a photo essay, really - and thought, wow, that's just fascinating, but it was a couple of years before I actually got a chance to visit Sedlec itself. That was probably early in 2002, and by that point I knew a little more about its background.
37. Why did you find Sedlec, and this period of history, so interesting, the ossuary apart? I found the ossuary interesting first, but I then discovered that it couldn't really be separated from the history of the monastery and the town. Well, I suppose it could, but it would have been a pretty shallow exercise. Basically, silver was discovered in the area around Sedlec, which made it a very wealthy place indeed. At one point, half of all the silver in Europe was coming from this one area. The branch of Cistercians who founded the monastery had an interest in, and experience of, mining, so they in turn became wealthy. Then, in the 15th century, a conflict arose between Church and the followers of Jan Hus, a Czech who had been executed for heresy for demanding, among other things, that the Bible should be available in Czech and that the Church should dispose charitably of some of its great wealth. This was a pretty tumultuous time in Church history, as three different popes were laying claim to the papacy. The one with the loudest claim was John XXIII, who was a nasty piece of work. He was reputed to have poisoned his predecessor in order to ascend to the papacy, and was also accused of theft, sodomy and sleeping with a vast number of nuns. Any argument against papal infallibility really just needs to mention the 15th century John XXIII and it's match over. Anyway, Hus died a pretty horrible death, as heretics tended to in those times, and his supporters were furious. They fought, very successfully, against the armies of the Holy Roman Emperor, who were sent to crush them, defeating them over and over again. They did this despite the fact that their leader, Jan Ziska, only had one eye, and lost the other one shortly after the Hussite wars started. He continued to lead them, despite his blindness, until 1424. When he died, as per his instructions, his skin was removed and made into a drum, which was beaten as his army advanced on its enemies. As a result, you could say that he managed to continue to be with his men in both spirit and, indeed, body, after his death. Eventually, a very temporary truce was agreed between the two armies. The Hussites surrounded Sedlec, but it wasn't in their interests to do anything that would harm the silver industry, even though the Catholics in the town had thrown Hussites down the mine shafts to kill them. Instead, they sacked the monastery, and killed all the monks that they found inside. A version of that incident is recounted in the book.
38. Which brings us to the ossuary. Again, a little bit of history is required here. Legend tells that Jindrich, an early abbot of the Cistercian monastery at Sedlec, brought back with him from the Holy Land a sack of soil which he scattered over the cemetery. The cemetery thus came to be regarded as a piece of the Holy Land itself, and people from all across Europe were brought for burial there, alongside plague victims, fallen soldiers, and the local dead. The 14th century Zbraslav Chronicle records that, in one year alone, 30,000 people were interred at Sedlec. That's almost 600 people every week, and the cemetery itself isn't very big. Finding somewhere to put them all required a considerable degree of effort, energy and ingenuity. The crucial thing to understand about medieval cemeteries is that they were not like our own modern graveyards, all neatly laid out with individual plots and memorials to those who lie beneath the ground. Most of the bones used to furnish Sedlec came from the fosses aux pauvres, the great common graves of the poor that dominated the centre of the cemetery. These were little more than ditches, thirty feet deep and fifteen or twenty feet across, into which the dead were cast sewn up in their shrouds, sometimes as many as fifteen hundred in a single pit covered by a thin layer of dirt, their remains easy prey for wolves and the grave robbers who supplied the anatomists. The soil was so putrefying that bodies quickly rotted, and it was said of some common graves, such as les Innocents in Paris and Alyscamps in the Alps, that they could consume a body in as few as nine days, a quality regarded as miraculous. The stench from such cemeteries, it's safe to say, must have been absolutely vile. As one huge ditch filled, another older one was opened up and emptied of its bones, which were then stored wherever space could be found for them, whether within the main church building, against its sides, or in the arcades and porticoes along the cemetery walls. Under the rain spouts, or sub stillicidio as it was termed, was considered to be a prime spot in which to rest, as the rainwater was adjudged to have received the sanctity of the church while running down its roof and walls. Even the remains of the wealthy were pressed into service, although they were probably first buried in the church building, typically interred in the dirt beneath its flagstones. Until the seventeenth century, it mattered little to most people where their bones ended up just as long as they remained in the vicinity of the church, so it was common to see human remains lining the walls, or the church porch, or even in small chapels specially designed for the purpose, which is how the ossuary at Sedlec came into being. So Sedlec was the place to be buried in central Europe, and the monks had to do something with all of the bones. They entrusted the task to a half-blind monk, who built huge free standing pyramids of skull and bone in the ossuary. That work was taken up and developed by the architect Santini-Aichl in the eighteenth century. Finally, a local woodcarver named Frantisek Rint was given the task of redecorating the ossuary in the nineteenth century, and the most spectacular additions - the chandeliers, monstrances, the coat of arms - are his. I'm particularly fascinated by Rint. I haven't been able to learn a lot about him, but he had the most extraordinary imagination. How many of us, confronted by a collection of bones dating back centuries, would have the capacity to come up with the kind of constructions created by Rint? I've often wondered what went through his head when the project was offered to him, and what kind of man he was. It is on one level, an extraordinary leap from carving wood to creating chandeliers of bone. Then again, on another level, it's simply an extension into a new medium of the craft that he had learned.
39. It sounds macabre. Well, on a superficial level, it probably is. It gets a few tourists who stay for ten minutes or so, pronounce it "spooky" or "weird", and then head on to Kutna Hora to look at Saint Barbara's Cathedral, or go back to Prague at the end of a day's sightseeing. But if you look at it more closely, it operates on a number of levels. It is a reminder of the transience of our existences, of the fleeting nature of our time upon this earth and of the fact that we will all end up as a collection of bones eventually. On another level, there is an appreciation of the beauty of the human form, and how marvellous it is. It also functions as a piece of folk art, because there is certainly artistry in the construction of those. Finally, though, there is something immensely touching and moving about the place. After all, most of the people whose remains were used here were probably poor, and they seem destined to remain anonymous now. It's unlikely that they imagined anything more for their remains after death than that they would be thrown in a big pit and then recovered once their flesh had rotted sufficiently, assuming wild animals or bodysnatchers didn't get to them first. All they really hoped, I suspect, is that some small part of them would be allowed to rest within the precincts of the church. Instead, their bones were stored and preserved, and they became part of the church itself, the remains of tens of thousands of people united in a tribute both to mortality and the human form.
40. After Bad Men and Nocturnes, it seemed that you were moving increasingly towards supernatural fiction. Is that the case with The Black Angel too? I've been thinking about that question a lot lately. It isn't really a simple one to answer, and if people want to refer to the interview conducted by Rick Kloster for Cemetery Dance elsewhere on this site, they'll find that it comes up there as well. First of all, Nocturnes apart, I think that I write mystery fiction. I've spoken before about the fact that I have a fairly wide definition of what constitutes mystery fiction, and it may be one that not everyone shares, but that's the way I see it. I get very annoyed at those who try to impose limitations upon it, because I think it inhibits the growth and development of the genre, and is also a manifestation of the kind of snobbery that was once (and often still is) visited on mystery readers and writers by those who regard literary fiction as superior. (And in truth, I think, the finest examples of "literary fiction" produced each year are generally more interesting, more experimental, and probably superior in writing terms to the best of mystery fiction produced over the same period. There's no getting away from the fact that the genre does impose limitations on writers. Those limitations can be made to work in a writer's favour, and they don't necessarily exclude all forms of experimentation, social commentary etc., but they do make their inclusion more difficult.) I've spoken earlier about my reading habits as a child, and my love of those late nineteenth and early twentieth century ghost stories showed clearly and explictly in Nocturnes, but I never really saw a huge difficulty in hinting at supernatural elements in the mystery fiction that I write. It seems very peculiar to me to be criticised for them when the genre seems quite happy to allow cats to solve crimes, ghosts to solve crimes, even Beatrix Potter and her animal chums to solve crimes, but then comes over rather coy when someone suggests that supernatural elements can be wound into the fabric of the stories. But on another level, who is to say that the supernatural touches to the Parker novels are real? I have not re-read many books, mainly because I find myself so aware of all the books I haven't managed to get around to yet, but two of the ones that I have returned to over and over again are Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford. They are very different novels, but they share a fascination with the figure of the Unreliable Narrator, whether Linton in Wuthering Heights or John Dowell in The Good Soldier. In fact, Dowell communicates his unreliability right from the start. "This is the saddest story I've ever heard," is the opening line of the book, but it becomes rapidly apparent that Dowell is intimately involved in the action of the book, and that he has been cuckolded by the "good soldier" of the title. In other words, this isn't a story that he's "heard", this is a story that he's lived. But how can we entirely trust someone who is at once so involved, and seemingly so distant, from the events of his life? Parker is also, in a sense, an unreliable narrator, as most first person narrators may well be. After all, when we tell others of our lives, whether what occurs in them is exciting or mundane, we edit, we pick and choose what we will conceal or reveal, and we will - consciously or unconsciously - probably try to present ourselves in the best light that we can, or if we elect not to do so then we will have very good reasons for making that decision. Parker, in addition to be being the consciousness through which the books are filtered, is a man defined by the most terrible loss. He is emotionally and psychologically damaged, and it's arguable that anyone can fully recover from what he has endured. I've always assumed that the people who read my books are smart, and they can decide themselves what to believe or not to believe about the events described in the books. Is Parker really haunted and tormented by the dead? Is he enduring a prolonged nervous breakdown, the reality of which he hides even from himself? Or does the truth lie somewhere in between? By this point, I think those who dismiss the books as "woo-woo" (as someone on a website once did) are reading them on the most superficial level. That's okay, by the way. I think they work pretty well on that level, frankly, but I still get annoyed when they're dismissed, rather than enjoyed, for that reason.
41. Can you tell us something about the plot of The Black Angel? Well, to begin with it's a long novel, the longest I've written. That was quite deliberate. I wanted to write a book that people could lose themselves in, and I paced it with that in mind. There are some hints as to what it's about in the prologue that appeared on the website, but basically it involves the search for Louis's cousin, Alice, who has gone missing in New York. It rapidly becomes apparent that she has inadvertently involved herself with some individuals who call themselves "Believers", and who are hunting for a statue that they are convinced contains one of the trapped spirit of one of the angels banished from heaven for rebelling against God. The Believers are also curious about Parker, for reasons that are not entirely dissimilar. In an earlier question, I mentioned that whole issue of unrealiability, and the possibility that all is not quite as it appears to be from Parker's perspective. It's addressed directly by one of the characters in The Black Angel, who tells Parker that just because you believe that you're Napoleon, it doesn't actually make you Napoleon. Similarly, other people telling you that you're Napoleon doesn't make you Napoleon either. In The Black Angel, Parker is presented with a set of answers to the questions that have been troubling him throughout the earlier novels, but they are only possible answers. Like Parker, the reader has to choose whether to believe them or not. But Parker also has his own domestic troubles as well. After all, he now has a partner, and a child, and the kind of work that he does places them at risk. He realises that he has a choice to make, and the novel is in part about the nature of that choice, and the cost involved in deciding which path to follow.
42. Is it very closely linked to the earlier books? Since about the second book I've thought of the Parker novels as a sequence rather than a series, in that each book develops themes, ideas and plots from the preceding books, and cases that seemed unconnected are actually gradually revealed to have deeper links. At the same time, they can be read independently, or out of order. It's just that (I hope) readers who have followed the books from the start start to see those connections, and the experience of reading the books is perhaps a little richer for them. The Black Angel very consciously picks up on elements from each of the earlier books, and elaborates on things that were only glanced upon in some of the other novels. The Believers, for example, represent a more advanced, ancient, and dangerous form of the kind of obsession that drove Faulkner and his brood in The Killing Kind, and they are, perhaps, the manifestation of the threat Faulkner levelled at Parker in The White Road ("The things that are coming for you are not even human."), assuming the reader, and Parker, chooses to believe that in the truth of it. The Book of Enoch, which is only mentioned in passing in connection with the Travelling Man in Every Dead Thing, comes to the fore in The Black Angel. There are also structural similarities to the first book. I like using what are almost "stand alone" tales which throw light on the main plot from a different, unexpected angle: the Daddy Helms tale from Parker's childhood in Every Dead Thing, or the long description of Parker's grandfather from Dark Hollow. An entire chapter of The Black Angel is devoted to the story of two WWII veterans whose lives are polluted by their contact with the titular relic, even if they're unaware of how its history has impacted upon them.
43. Can we talk a little about the actual, physical book itself, because it's quite unusual, particularly in its US edition? Well, first of all the US editions - first editions, anyway - have all been signed. I try to travel a lot to promote the books and to ensure that those who would like a signed copy can get access to one through their local bookstores, but even after seven or eight weeks of travel in, say, the US, I've still only signed a fraction of them. I really wanted this book to be a lovely item for people to own. I think Atria have done a great job on the cover, and the look of the book, and I think the signature adds something more to it. Then, finally, there is the CD, which is attached to the inside of all the US first editions, and will be offered with the book at signings in the UK. (For more details on the contents of the soundtrack CD, Voices From the Dark, go to...) Taken all together, I think it's a nice artifact for people to keep on their shelves.
44. Finally, the inevitable question: what's next? That's always a difficult one to answer. I think I'll take a circular approach to the question. The problem for genre writers, particularly those who use a recurring character, is that what your readers, and perhaps your agent and publishers, want you to do may not be what is best for you as a writer. On the other hand, Walt Disney once said that he made movies so he could make more movies. In other words, if I want to continue writing and publishing, then I do have an obligation to produce work that sells. It is important to me that both readers and publishers don't feel they're being short-changed by the books that I decide to write, but there is a balancing act to be done between the demands of readers and the market, and your own needs as a writer, if you're not to stagnate. I'm immensely fortunate to be with both my UK and US publishers (and, indeed, my agent) as they've never tried to pressure me into taking a particular road, or writing a certain type of book. That is certainly not always the case in modern publishing. For example, the London Independent reported recently that Val McDermid's publishers, Harper Collins, had rejected a collection of short stories that she'd written as they felt it wasn't part of their "plan" for her as a writer. To Val's credit, she is publishing the stories anyway through a small, independent publisher, but that's a huge kick in the teeth to a writer from a publisher, I think, especially one who has been as successful for Harper Collins as Val has. Similarly, I know of one writer, who is big on both sides of the Atlantic, whose contract specifically forbids him from writing non-series novels. That's the kind of "golden handcuffs" agreement which, I think, is pretty much a sure road to short-changing yourself and your readers somewhere down the line, unless notions of integrity and development as a writer were pretty much off your list right from the start. If you really care about your work, then there's no way of knowing how you're going to feel about a series, or a character, more than a book or two down the line, and I really do believe that to improve as a writer, and develop new skills, you have to at least be willing to countenance the possibility that you might want to write outside the limitations a publisher might wish to impose for commercial reasons. By contrast, neither Atria in the US or Hodder in the UK raised any objection to Bad Men, or, more recently, Nocturnes (and short story collections are regarded as anathema by many publishers.) In fact, both, in their different ways, bent over backwards to find the best way to publish Nocturnes: Hodder by producing a lovely, signed hardback edition, and Atria by issuing it as a trade paperback in advance of The Black Angel, which meant that Atria would be publishing three of my books - Bad Men, Nocturnes, and The Black Angel - each in a different format, in the space of six months, which is a huge commitment for a publisher. I'm very aware of the contributions of readers to the website. I read both the positive and negative stuff, and I answer politely the postings and mails from those who wish I would stick to the Parker sequence and not spend time on other work. The best piece of advice I have received from another writer came from James Lee Burke, who told me that you have to learn to ignore both the catcalls and the applause, and follow your own path as a writer. That's easier said than done, but I am trying. |
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