John Connolly: ‘You can blame my Catholic upbringing. I still wear a cross’

Author John Connolly sits at a table in a cafe on Dublin’s Dawson Street, slightly breathless after hurrying from a shoot with photographer Nick Bradshaw.

“He took me down an alley,” he says with a good-humoured grin. It’s not a bad place to create an atmosphere of shadow befitting Connolly’s work, though it’s far from the small towns and forests of Maine that are the haunt of his 25-year long protagonist, private investigator Charlie Parker.

In The Instruments of Darkness, Connolly’s latest book and the 21st in the series, there’s a particularly disturbing house buried in one of those New England forests and that proves hard to forget. Parker is once again working with lawyer Moxie Castin, this time to help defend a woman accused of the abduction and possible murder of her son. He enlists the assistance of familiar friends the Fulci brothers, and long-time associates Angel and Louis to uncover the truth behind the child’s disappearance. But this is no ordinary whodunnit; Connolly entwines mystery writing with the supernatural, producing an absorbing, elegant and unsettling read.

Its title and epigraph are taken from Macbeth, a warning from Banquo to his friend. “And oftentimes, to win us to our harm, the instruments of darkness tell us truths...”

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Readers might like to mine the book for references to the Shakespeare play, but did the quotation drive the narrative?

“I think it was originally Anthony Burgess’s title for Earthly Powers, which he shelved for some reason, and it had always stuck with me,” says Connolly. “You can be quite magpie-ish about detail like that.”

He has enjoyed weaving in the hints and allusions.

“I’ve always felt it’s quite nice to find ways to slip in these references for the same reason the books often include snatches of poetry. In previous books I got to use lyrics, to reference them, and for a while we’d give people a compilation of them with the books.”

Those books are kind of prismatic in that they become a way to refracture your own experience. Whatever you’re writing about, you’re writing about yourself ultimately

—  John Connolly

The all-pervading sense of dread present in Macbeth is also in The Instruments of Darkness. And, as in all of Connolly’s Parker novels, true evil is an external presence rather than only stemming from internal, human fallibility.

“You can blame my Catholic upbringing; it’s very hard to shake. I still wear a cross,” he says. “And I think most human fallibility is down to anger or jealousy, or pain or greed or frustration; they are very understandable human emotions.”

But for people raised Catholic, “there is a deeper wellspring”.

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“Sometimes we will look at instances of what human beings have done to each other and think ‘how can they do that?’ and so much of it can be explained by psychology, and bad upbringing, and ‘you were dropped on your head as a child’ or whatever it may be, but I still think it’s interesting to explore that idea of a deeper evil in the books.”

While that depth has been plumbed in all of his Parker novels, its accompanying violence has lessened and the PI has developed and matured as the books continued.

“My experiences of mortality and illness – even the worst things I’ve done in my life, I’ve given to somebody in the books,” Connolly says.

In a sense, he lives with the characters.

“Those books are kind of prismatic in that they become a way to refract your own experience. Whatever you’re writing about, you’re writing about yourself ultimately.”

Connolly, 55, who lives in Dublin and is married with two adult children, cites his US influences, including Ross MacDonald and Ed McBain, but could only place himself on “the Irish continuum” after producing Shadow Voices, an anthology of Irish genre fiction.

“When I began publishing it was very hard to find Irish models for what I wanted to do or to even find a consistent historical or cultural thread in the way that you could in England or United States.”

But he found Irish writers had been incredibly influential in genre fiction.

“There were writers exploring horror and mystery and a lot of them were women and in the 20th century they vanish from the Irish narrative. They vanish because it’s not part of the narrative we were creating after independence.”

‘My family hate playing games with me because I’m so competitive and so they think it’s probably a very good idea that I don’t go. They say, I’m not sure you’d be a good loser. And they like me. Imagine what the people who don’t like me say about me

—  John Connolly on attending awards ceremonies

Having worked on the anthology though, he now sees himself following on from Sheridan Le Fanu mixing crime and the supernatural in Uncle Silas, and from LT Meade defending herself and her work. He laughs.

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“My wife said to me, ‘It was an awful lot of trouble to go to, to prove a point’, and I said to her, ‘You can never go to too much trouble to prove a point.’”

He’s won many accolades for his work, including the Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of United States, and the Barry Award for best crime novel published in the UK, but now recoils from such competitions.

“You don’t want to eat chicken in a basket at five-to-one odds,” he says. “My family hate playing games with me because I’m so competitive and so they think it’s probably a very good idea that I don’t go. They say, ‘I’m not sure you’d be a good loser.’ And they like me. Imagine what the people who don’t like me say about me.”

When Dark Hollow, published in 2000, was nominated for the Kerry Ingredients prize, Connolly encountered journalist and author Bruce Arnold, who was one of the judges.

“He was eating a plate of bacon and cabbage, I think, and he paused, and he looked at me in a concerned manner and he says, ‘You write very well, have you ever considered applying your talents to something more appropriate?’, which is when I knew I hadn’t won.”

It’s hard to remain focused when chatting with Connolly; his self-deprecating wit is a constant diversion. He admits, with a grin, to not enjoying literary festivals, but appearing on stage is not the problem.

“I don’t mind that part, I’m a tart. Just give me an audience and lock the doors, that part is fine. But I think if you are going to festivals, they quite like you to mix.”

He recounts an incident at an event in Banff, Canada involving a “really unpleasant argument” with another writer.

“I said [to the organiser], ‘I don’t think I’m going to come back tomorrow.’ And they said, ‘I think that might be for the best.’ And I thought... maybe I became a writer because I didn’t play well with other children.”

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The longer he spends writing, the harder it becomes to move from “this very internal, quiet life, not being a particularly interesting person”, to deal with public aspects.

“It becomes harder, I find, much harder to switch. I do enjoy readers, I enjoy their company, but I don’t spend very much time with writers. They’re lovely people, don’t get me wrong.”

There’s another smile before he adds he has friends “who happen to be writers rather than writers who are friends”.

Anyone reading the latest novel will likely have questions about Connolly’s acknowledgments in which he emphasises the time it took him to write it.

‘”Jesus,” he said, “you’re just knocking them books out.” And the temptation to tap the back of his head just enough so that he would bang his nose off the windshield was almost overwhelming’

—  John Connolly

“I note this only in response to those people, occasionally other writers, who like to remark that I ‘knock’ books out. If I do knock them out, it’s sometimes very slowly,” the acknowledgment reads.

What made him include the remark?

He says there’s a sense of dismissiveness of writers, musicians or artists who produce a lot of work, and an attitude that an artist producing one book every 10 years must be working harder. He’s “only human” and it rankles. He mentions another literary festival, this time more vaguely “in eastern Europe”, when he and “a very well-known Irish writer” were in a car on their way to an Irish embassy event.

“I remember him saying to me, ‘Jesus’, he said, ‘you’re just knocking them books out.’ And the temptation to tap the back of his head just enough so that he would bang his nose off the windshield was almost overwhelming.”

He hastens to add the writer in question is “a lovely person”.

“But I think he got confused about what you say in your head and what you say out loud. Like your mother always said, learn to tell the difference.”

Along with parallel projects, including working on his RTÉ Gold music show, ABC to XTC, Connolly will continue in Parker’s world for perhaps another 10 or 11 books. He already knows the ending and has had to spell it out for parties interested in bringing the series to TV. They wanted to know what they were moving towards, he says.

“And I hadn’t even told my wife. It was very, very odd... it was almost like admitting this thing will come to an end.”

An actor, otherwise occupied at present, has optioned the books. He’s nameless for now, but is “on every level just absolutely the perfect person”.

“A lovely group of people have come on board to do it, but I may well be dead in the ground [before it’s made] and my grandchildren may actually have their children on the sofa going, ‘look, grandad’s TV show has come on at last.’”

The Instruments of Darkness is published by Hodder & Stoughton on May 7th