THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW: JOHN CONNOLLY: THE POINTED GUN is the first thing I notice in the study of crimewriter John Connolly, a bright tent-like space carved out under the eaves at the top of his Rathgar house. It's a visual joke: the gold-plated pistol on his desk that appears to balance surreally towards the ceiling is a Philippe Starck gun-lamp. It's the only ostentatious object in a surprisingly small but meticulously ordered study, where every book and piece of paper clearly has its place, including on the floor – but it's not the only esoteric thing in the room.
That would be his dog, Sasha, an animated black and white Pointer cross from a rescue shelter, who is quite endearingly nutty and never far from Connolly’s side. In fact, she spends most of the time either sitting on his lap, or trying to get on to it. Sasha has decided to make her own contribution to the interview by periodically biting hard on an ear-piercingly loud squeaking toy, and looking faux mournful as only a dog can when being told to stop by her usually indulgent master. For the first few minutes of the interview, I wonder if the only words I’ll hear Connolly say are: “Down, Sasha!”, “Don’t mind her” (is he addressing me or the dog?) or, most frequently, “Where’s your squeaky?”.
Almost 12 years ago, Rialto-born Connolly, then a freelance education journalist with this newspaper, stepped out from behind his byline and became the news. On February 18th, 1998, the front page of The Irish Timescarried a report that the advance for his first book, the crime novel Every Dead Thing, and rights of the second as-yet-unwritten book, from Hodder and Stoughton, was €520,000. The US rights of Every Dead Thing, the first book to feature his signature character, police officer Charlie Parker, were soon sold for $1 million, and Connolly exchanged a career as a journalist for one of a full-time and highly successful crime writer.
41-year-old Connolly has just published his 12th book. The Gates, his first title for young adults, is a story about a smart, curious boy, science and physics, and the gates of hell. "I was really sick of books about bloody magic children," he says now frankly. "I didn't know any magic children when I grew up, unless stealing a bicycle in under a minute was a magic skill – which, in certain sections of Rialto, it probably was."
Apart from The Gates, the final draft of The Whisperers, his 13th book and another Parker novel, is currently spread out on the floor of Connolly's office and due at the publisher any day now. He already has ideas for what will be either his 14th or 16th book, depending on whether he writes another Parker novel in between; a book about food and a particular moment in culinary history.
Lest you think he really could be doing a bit more with his time, Kevin Costner stars in a screen version of one of his short stories, The New Daughter, which is due out some time next year. The Book of Lost Thingshas recently been optioned. He is the subject of one of the excellent RTÉ Arts Livesdocumentaries, which will air early next year. There are two new short stories and an essay coming out in October. By the time you read this, he will be on tour again, to promote The Gates, first in Britain and then the US – he recently bought a house in Maine. You get the picture. Connolly is highly focused, talented, and everywhere. He possesses a serious work ethic.
There has been some miscommunication about the photograph for this interview, and when Connolly realises there’s no-one due today, he excuses himself briefly and returns minus his crisp white shirt. He has changed it for a black T-shirt, and as he sinks back into a deep sofa in the downstairs room we’ve moved to, despite all the previous boisterous playing around with the dog, he suddenly looks at home in his own house for the first time since I’ve arrived. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given his drive and the work schedule he maintains, he confesses that he finds it difficult to relax.
“I’m hopeless at relaxing. I can’t remember the last time I took a holiday. I mean, a proper holiday. I just don’t do it. I get bored really quickly and I ramble off and start writing.” Later, he comes back to the subject again. “Holidays are a way of escaping the routine that you’re doing and I guess I don’t have a routine in that way. [Writing] is so much a part of what I am, I think, that I feel slightly lessened when I’m not doing it. I feel like I don’t have any purpose. It’s not like the world is waiting on my every world or on my next story, but it gives me purpose to sit down every day – or most days – and write. If I’m not writing, I’m thinking about writing.”
Connolly was born in 1968 in Rialto, where his mother worked as a substitute primary school teacher and his father was a rates collector for Dublin Corporation. As a teenager, he briefly flirted with the idea of first being a vet – “I read too many James Herriot novels” – and then an actor, an ambition prompted by classes he attended a music-theatre academy.
He went to Synge Street CBS for both his primary and secondary education, an experience he hated, regularly pretending he was sick so he could go home.
“Synge Street was a meat and potatoes kind of education and there was no art, there was no biology, there was no sport,” he says flatly. “I just found that very frustrating. And I didn’t enjoy it. Looking back, I realise they were huge classes being taught by people to the best of their ability, but it just wasn’t where I wanted to be.”
As a teenager, he had obsessive compulsive disorder, the same trait he gives David, the 12-year-old boy who is his main character in the dark, absorbing fable The Book of Lost Things. David, whose mother is dying horribly of an unnamed disease that appears to be cancer, counts obsessively and ritually touches objects to maintain a kind of order in a world that's imploding out of control.
“It seems to me that when you make that transition from childhood into early adolescence, you become conscious of just how powerless you are as a child and just how complex that world out there is and how frightening, and how you’re not really allowed to admit that.”
The days of obsessive counting, touching the bathroom taps in a certain order, and making sure the left foot is the first to touch the floor in the morning are over, but Connolly still has at least one ritual he maintains. As we talk, he fiddles constantly with a small cross he wears on a piece of leather around his neck.
“It’s a Byzantine pilgrim’s cross,” he explains. “It’s somewhere between, I guess 900 and 1300 years old, but its value is entirely personal. I saw it in a little antique store in London and I just liked the shape of it.” Then he says: “Actually, it’s the second one I’ve had. I’ve found, as a comfort thing, I tend to hold on to it. And I wore away the little block at the front just where the loop is, and it broke and it disappeared. So I had to get a second one. I was quite distraught when it broke. I find it very comforting to wear. And I’m very unhappy when I’m not wearing it.”
THE EXPERIENCE ATSynge Street made him so keen to escape the restraints of the educational system that he decided not to go to university right away. Ironically, he got a job that operated within the boundaries of its own ingrained system, at Dublin Corporation, where his father worked. "I remember my father's immortal words when I got the job: If I stick with this, I might be city manager some day. When the corporation interviewed me, I said, look the only thing I'd really rather not be doing to do is working with figures, if that's okay. It's not that I'm mathematically inept, but I take no great joy from it. And so they put me in the rent accounts department. For three and a half years!"
He laughs when he says this, as he laughs frequently throughout the interview, even though it's clear to both of us there's nothing amusing about being made to do a job you dislike for years. Later, when I play the recording back, I realise that Connolly laughs as a default, creating an aural pause in the conversation, a kind of tic. He talks at high speed, as if he can't articulate fast enough all the things he wants to say. In an interview he gave to the London Independentin 2006, the journalist noted that "Once he gets hold of a point, he starts practically speaking in italics." I'd describe it as speaking in bold.
When Connolly left Dublin Corporation to study English at Trinity College, he had money in the bank, and a renewed vigour for education. On a summer student job in the US soon after, he called home one evening from New York and discovered his father had been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. He flew home the next day, and his father died soon afterwards. The cancer he died from has since become a recurrent symbolic motif in Connolly's work: people's bodies being horribly consumed by something they cannot control. "I think because of what happened to my father and the way he died, I have an absolute loathing and fear of that disease. I just think it's so insidious and so appalling. It occurs in the books again and again. The Cancer Cowboy Rides[a story in Nocturnes] is the most explicit version of it, but again and again, with people in my books, there is this image of cancer or of being eaten from the inside."
Recurrent also in the books is the theme of fathers – fatherhood, absent fathers, dead fathers, men who don’t know whether they want to be fathers. “I think all young men are trying to prove something to their dads,” he says carefully. “I think his whole idea was he worked so that at some point, he didn’t have to work any more, and that work was a kind of chore he got through as a prelude to retirement, when he could do all the things that he planned on doing. And then you know, work kind of had the last laugh, because he died while he was still working.
"He was not impressed by me wanting to be a writer, or to be a journalist. And I suppose part of me becoming a journalist and part of me going to college and doing something like English was a kind of way of saying to him, well actually, what youwant is not what Iwant. The awful thing is, having done all that, had he seen what I do now, he would have been immensely proud." Earlier, he said his father had a distrust of the "kind of freelance existence" that journalism and a career as a writer offered. It's not hard to see where the roots of Connolly's drive and work ethic came from.
His partner, Jennifer Ridyard, arrives in briefly with coffee and cupcakes, and takes away an indignant Sasha. “I met her in South Africa when she came to interview me for her newspaper,” he recounts, slightly sheepishly, but also unable to stop grinning at the memory. They met in 2002, and Ridyard moved over five years ago with her two sons from a previous relationship.
As a student, Connolly worked in Maine as a waiter; a place that was to be the setting for many of the books he was yet to write. "There is a suggestion that to be an Irish writer is to be engaged with nature and Irishness, and that's what defines an Irish writer. I suppose the question that one then asks is, well, what if you don'twant to engage with Irishness? What do you then become?"
WHAT HE BECAMEwas a writer of – sometimes extremely graphic – crime fiction set in the US that incorporates elements of the supernatural. He talks about the set of expectations readers have of crime novels. "Would people read crime fiction if, at the end of it, the criminal got away? Would they read a crime novel if, at the end, a child died and nobody was punished for it? We want to see in crime fiction the kind of justice we don't get in real life."
The first book, Every Dead Thing, was written on credit card debt and many research trips to Maine over the years he worked as a freelance journalist. It went through 40 drafts, and yet he had the self-control to tell very few people he was writing a book, until it had its quite glorious success. At the time, his advance was the biggest ever paid to an Irish writer.
So is he madly wealthy? It’s a superfluous question: we’re sitting in a beautiful house in Rathgar, so large I’m not sure whether I counted four floors or five when I had an edited tour of it. “Well, I can certainly pay my mortgage.” Pause. “Yeah, I’m sure by any standards, I’m doing well.” Pause. “Yeah, quite well. I’m sure my father would look at me and think, yes, I’m wealthy. I can pay the bills.”
He drives a blue vintage Mustang. " That'san indulgence," he admits delightedly. "It wasn't a hugely expensive indulgence, but I still look at it and think it is an indulgence. Most Sundays, when the weather is good, I'll stick Sasha in the Mustang and we'll tootle off to the Phoenix Park in it. I actually feel very happy when I have that little dog sitting beside me in the front seat of the car as we breeze along."
Later he says, “To go back to the wealthy question: If I stopped working, I wouldn’t be. If I weren’t to write, I think my lifestyle would quickly fall away. I don’t have so much money I could afford to stop working, even if I wanted to. I think that’s a good situation to be in.”
Does the man who writes about people who die believe in an afterlife? “Do I think at the end of it, we descend into nothingness where it’s going to be one big black void and that’s it? No, I don’t think so,” Connolly says slowly and utterly decisively, with the sense that this subject is one he’s given a lot of thought to. “I would like not to think so.”
BORN1968, Rialto, Dublin
HIGHLIGHTSIn 1998 he received €520,000 – the largest advance ever given to an Irish writer – for his first novel, Every Dead Thing. The US rights sold for $1 million. It won the 2000 Shamus Award for Best First Private Eye Novel, the first time the prize had gone to a non-US writer.
LATEST NOVEL The Gates, his twelfth title, and his first book for young adults.
“There is a suggestion that to be an Irish writer is to be engaged with nature and Irishness, and that’s what defines an Irish writer. I suppose the question that one then asks is, well, what if you don’t want to engage with Irishness? What do you then become?”
