John Connolly

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Criticism
Rosita Boland, interview with John Connolly, in The Irish Times (3 Oct. 2009), Weekend, p.7; also interview on Bibliocentric website (Dec. 2004) - see extract.

See also Declan Burke, Down These Green Streets: Irish Crime Writing in the 21st Century (Dublin: Liberties Press 2011), 368pp. [interviews.]

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Commentary
Jocelyn Clarke, review of John Connolly, The White Road, in The Irish Times [Weekend] (9 March 2002): ‘[…] While in his previous novels there wasw a razor-thin line between good and evil, friend and enemy, Connolly has deliberately blurred it in The White Road, locating Parker’s friends and enemies on opposite sides of it - Parker’s partners kill three men to revenge a brutal racist murder while his enemies seek retribution for the detective’s own past deeds. Connolly fuses his signature writing style - a deft blurirng of narration and characterisation, self-conscious literary language and street vernacular - with a driving narrative that accommodates very different elemeents - historical research, religious allegory, clinical psychology - with extraordary confidence and ease […] by far his best novel yet. (p.8.)

Ferdia Mac Anna, ‘Black humour and white supremacists’, review of The White Road (2002), in Sunday Independent (7 April 2002), Living, p.20: A Charlie Parker novel, set in S. Caroline where a young black called Atys Jones has been condemned to death for the rape and murder of a wealthy socialite Marianne Larousse.

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Vincent Banville, review of Every Dead Thing (1999), billed as successor to The Slaughter of the Lambs in Irish Times (23 Jan. 1999; also 17 March 2000).

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Declan Burke, ‘Fairytales from the dark side’, review of Nocturnes, in The Irish Times (20 Nov. 2004), Weekend: cites stories “The Cancer Cowboy Rides”, “The Erlking”, “The New Daughter”, “Some Children Wander by Mistake”, “Miss Froom, Vampire”, and “The Ritual Bones”, with remarks: ‘The tone lies somewhere between Stephen King’s conversational style and Poe’s mor formal precision, but while there are crimes to be solved, and all the stories contain gothic tropes (daemons; witches; nature as an evil neutered by nurture), the title hints at a form older than the crime or gothic genres. / These are fairytales […] All in all, an inventive, intriguing collection.’

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Alan O’Riordan, review of The Book of Lost Things, in Books Ireland (Nov. 2006): ‘His talent for the grotesque and his almost Biblical sense of evil - no latter-day relativism for him - led him to introduce an element of the supernatural to his violent caper [i.e., Deep Hollow ]. […]. Though remaining in the style of naturalism, his last novel Black Angel involved baroque, Miltonic subject matter - fallen angels as well as fallen women. These twin strandes are the source of Connolly’s originality. They are also uncomfortable, unlikely, bedfellows. The tradition of crime fiction is agnostic and religiosity is bold and sometimes responsible for weak and unbelievable moments in Connolly’s writing. / Those misgivings are avoided in The Book of Lost Things. Here Connolly abandons the crime element to embrace whole-heartedly the mythical and supernatural aspect […] The scene is London during the Blitz. David, a young boy whose mother has recently died, moves with his father and step-mother to a house outside London [where] he immerses himself in books, as his dead mother taught him to do. But the books in this house have a habit of talking back […]. David is plunged into a word of anthropomorphic beasts and moving forests […] David the interloper is some kind of reluctant saviour and possibly the next kind […] compelled to seek out the existing king [in a] race against time across this fabulous landscape, pursued by an army of wolves and […] assisted by heroic menfolk […] David’s quest becomes a long Freudian dream’. Note: O’Riordan cites Deep Hollow recte Dark Hollow .

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Quotations
‘The trick is to hide the join between fact and fiction: John Connolly ‘explains how he researches his thrillers’ (The Irish Times, 3 March 2001): Connolly gives an account of forensics as relating to identification of the anonymous victim of murder and details the subject of his current novel, The Killing Kind, in which the people of Maine are persuaded by Rev. George Adams to establish a colony in Palestine during the 1860s and was eventually charged with manslaughter.

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Write what you (don’t) know: ‘[…] I really hate that maxim: “Write what you know”. Ultimately, it’s open to such misinterpretation, and it immediately places limitations on the writer’s imagination. I remember one critic remarked of me that I was “faking it” by writing in an American setting with an American voice, which is just such bad criticism that it deserves to be put in stocks and ridiculed by passing children. ALL writers fake it. It’s fiction. Colm Toibin was “faking it” by writing a novel that attempts to understand Henry James, just as James was “faking it” by writing Daisy Miller. I’m a writer. I come from Ireland, and inevitably I’m a product of my upbringing and a set of social and cultural influences that are generally Irish, but I’m not convinced that those influences should define everything that I do. The American crime novel, like the supernatural story, is a literary form. What matters is understanding that, and doing whatever research is necessary to provide the work with a realistic underpinning. (Sorry, but ‘write what you know’ and the whole American thing really are my twin bugbears!)’ (Interview with John Connolly, in Bibliocentric; accessed 15/12/2004 [link; now defunct].)

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“Summer Books” [annual column], in The Irish Times (24 June 2000), compiled by Rosita Sweetman: John Connolly is reading Dave Robicheaux, Purple Cane Road; Robert Crais, LA Requiem and Demolition; Harlan Coben, The Darkest Hour; Thomas Lynch, Bodies in Perpetual Motion and at Rest; Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy; Gregory Maguire, The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.

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‘The King of Pulp Fiction’, review of Stephen King, Under the Dome, in The Irish Times (31 Oct. 2009), Weekend: ‘The point about The Unexplained  [a journal that Connolly read in childhood] was that, as its title indicated, it wasn’t in the business of providing answers to such questions; otherwise, it would have been entitled The Explained , which doesn’t have the same ring at all. [...] Something of the same dilemma bedevils supernatural fiction or, more particularly, supernatural fiction in its longer form. The eventual explanation for what occurs, if provided, is usually far less unsettling than the events that came before it, with the result that horror novels have a tendency to be anticlimactic. In part this is because the length of a novel compels the author to offer an explanation of some kind, a conclusion that justifies the reader’s investment of time, energy and attention, thereby undoing much of the power that derives from the initial intrusion of the uncanny. / It may even be that the short story is better suited to explorations of the supernatural, for the short story is not so dependent upon an ending or, indeed, an explanation. It is enough that it provides us with a glimpse of the “other”, a brief revelation of what lies beyond, leaving that moment to seed itself in the reader’s subconscious and there finds fertile soil in deep, primitive fears. / Much as I love the genre, I can think of no 20th-century novel of the supernatural that has impacted upon me in the same way as, say, the best of M. R. James’s short stories or any of a dozen other beloved pieces of short supernatural fiction, Mrs Amworth, The Monkey’s Paw  and The Upper Berth  among them. In fact, while I can recall particular moments from my favourite modern horror novels – and many of them have been written by Stephen King – I often struggle to remember their endings, and those that I can recall are often tinged with a faint sense of disappointment.’

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Notes
Every Dead Thing (1999), concerns NY detective Charlie “Bird” Parker whose wife and baby daughter have been murdered by a serial killer and who sets out to find the killer; uncovers paedophile ring; transfers to New Orleans, where the malefactor - known as “The Travelling Man” is finally confronted.

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The Killing Kind (2000) concerns Charlie “Bird” Parker, private detective in Maine; has suffered loss of wife and dg.; investigates death of apparent suicide, Grace, found with black widow spiders inside her taped mouth and who has just completed a thesis on 1960s religious cults; Mr. Pudd, the chief antagonist; reviewer finds the narrative genuinely chilling; ‘brilliant, terrifying world’.

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The White Road (2002), a Charlie Parker story, set in S. Carolina, and dealing with a black man who faces the death for the rape and murder of Marianne Larousse by Cyril Nairn, dg. of one of the richest men in the state; involves a hooded woman, a black car waiting for a passenger that never comes, and complicity of friends and enemies; Parker’s life is threatened by a fanatical preacher, Faulkner, in his Maine prison cell; culminates on the White Road between swamps and forests, where paths made by the living and the dead converge. [See Read Ireland Reviews].

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Dark Hollow (2000): Haunted by the murder of his wife and daughter, former New York police detective Charlie Parker retreats home to Scarborough, Maine, to rebuild his shattered life. But his return reawakens old ghosts, drawing him into the manhunt for the killer of yet another mother and child. The obvious suspect is Bill Purdue, the young woman’s violent ex-husband. But there is another possibility — a mythical killer who lurks deep in the dark hollow of Parker’s own past of thirty years previously, involving in a tree with strange fruit, the troubled history of Parker’s own grandfather, and the violent origins of a mythical killer known only as Caleb Kyle. (Account cerived from Powell Books [online], & John Connolly Website [online] accessed on 7 March 2007.)

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The Unquiet (2007): Daniel Clay, a once-respected psychiatrist is missing following revelations about harm done to the children in his care. His daughter Rebecca’s fragile peace is shattered when the revenger Merrick - a father and a killer obsessed his own daughter’s disappearance - comes asking questions. Parker is hired to make Merrick go away and soon finds himself trapped between those who want to know the truth about Clay and those who want it to keep it hidden. Meanwhile, Parker’s hunt is being fjunded And Merrick’s actions have drawn others from the shadows, half-glimpsed figures intent upon their own form of revenge, pale wraiths drifting through the ranks of the unquiet dead. (See John Connolly Website [online] accessed on 7 March 2007.)

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The Lovers (2009): Charlie Parker, Connolly’s detective protagonist, is working in a bar in Portland having been stripped of his private investigator’s licence and is on the trail of own father’s past - a father who killed two unarmed teenagers about Charlie’s own age when the latter was a boy and committed suicide soon after. Doubts about circumstances of his father’s death bring Charlie back to the city of his childhood where he uncovers evidence of a betrayal leading to revelations about his own parentage, and finds himself face to face with lethal and mysterious couple who have long haunted him, and who want to get rid of him. Meanwhile, a troubled young woman is running away from some unseen threat which has takenthe life of her boyfriend and a journalist called Mickey Wallace is conducting an investigation into Charlie Parker with a view to basing a book on his exploits.(See Books Ireland, Sept. 2009, p.197 [“First Flush”] and the John Connolly website [online].)

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