From Eire to noir: Irish mystery novelist John Connolly turns Bad Men loose in America
Published in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, May 2004
Ask best-selling author John Connolly what his recently released thriller Bad Men is about and he'll tell you, "It's about 400 pages." His apology for the one-liner is unrepentant, but his efforts to put on a straight face before attempting another reply seem sincere. "I wanted to write a book that really gripped the reader from page one," he admits candidly, "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."
Not too much to ask. At least not from an author whose potent mysteries have earned critical acclaim in addition to commercial success.
As for the new book, "It's basically a big supernatural thriller," he says, "a real hybrid of the mystery novel and the chiller." It sounds as if he is repeating a well-rehearsed script, until he adds, "I hope."
The man's smile is contagious but, with Connolly, it can be hard to tell whom the joke is really on. That's often the case with the Irish and Connolly, who is a native of Dublin - with the lilt and the charm to prove it - and a regular contributor to The Irish Times, is no exception.
He studied English at Trinity College, Dublin, and journalism at Dublin City University before putting in his time at the requisite dead-end jobs that seem to pave the way to a writer's life. If you're hoping to mine the rich vein of Irish literary tradition, you can't do much better. In 1999, however, when Connolly published his first novel, the award-winning Every Dead Thing, there were no lyrical wanderings down the streets of Dublin, Cork or even Galway. The novel was set in the U.S. As were the three additional mysteries featuring former NYPD cop Charlie Parker that followed.
"When I began writing my books, I decided that I wouldn't write about Ireland," Connolly explains, "I wanted to use the U.S. as a backdrop. American writers were my literary influences and I didn't feel that the literature of noirish mystery fiction would transfer well to an Irish situation, I still believe that."
Bad Men, his fifth novel and first stand-alone thriller, is set in Maine. The action revolves around events that took place on a small, isolated island 300 years ago as well as those that are unfolding on the island today. The twist - or at least one of them - is that a character named Moloch seems to play a key role in both timelines.
While claiming to be a healthy skeptic himself, Connolly firmly believes in the effectiveness and legitimacy of using the supernatural in his writing. "The curious thing about mystery novels," he says, "is that they are generally not very mysterious at all." No matter how intricately the plot is woven, he maintains, the solution is relatively straightforward. "I would argue that using supernatural elements in crime fiction is actually closer to the true meaning of 'mystery' than more straightforward crime narratives. If you return to the roots of the word 'mystery'," he points out, "it means a revelation from the divine that cannot be understood by human reasoning alone."
In the hands of a lesser writer, such a tool could be dangerous, but Connolly has proven himself adept in its use. In the Parker novels, he wraps the question of whether Parker is haunted by otherworldly spirits or by his own ghosts in darkly compelling prose - and then leaves it unanswered. In Bad Men, there is no doubt as to the supernatural nature of the forces massing on the island of Sanctuary. What is uncanny is the way Connolly uses them to create an almost gothic sense of mounting pressure that propels the plot to a page-turning frenzy. "It's still recognizably a crime/mystery novel," he insists, "It just has some extra ingredients."
Bad Men is also still recognizably an American mystery novel. Connolly credits the American mystery tradition with providing an appropriate setting for the themes he wanted to explore as a writer: compassion, morality, reparation and salvation.
He recalls reading Ross Macdonald for the first time in 1991. "I loved the compassion and sense of justice that I found in Macdonald," he says in earnest, "the belief that women, children, the poor should not be allowed to suffer simply because they didn't have power. I had always found British crime fiction lacking in compassion for the victims, and peculiarly reluctant to question the society in which the novels were set."
As an Irishman writing American crime novels, Connolly was well situated to follow in Macdonald's footsteps. "The great Californian crime writers were all outsiders," he says, demonstrating his proficiency, not only as a writer of mysteries, but as a student of the genre, "Ross Macdonald was Canadian; [Raymond] Chandler came from Illinois; and [James M.] Cain and [Dashiell] Hammett came from Maryland. Similarly, Michael Connelly, who came to Florida in his youth, writes about L.A., but didn't go there for the first time until he was in his late twenties."
While Connolly now divides his time between Dublin and the U.S., he is content to remain on the outside looking in. "I find America fascinating, but also a little frightening," he confides.
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