An interview with John Connolly

John Connolly was born in Dublin in 1968 and worked as a barman, a local government official, a waiter and at Harrods department store in London. After studying English at Trinity College and journalism at DCU, he worked as a freelance journalist for The Irish Times. His books include Every Dead Thing, Dark Hollow, The Killing Kind and The White Road and introduced Charlie Parker, a policeman turned private investigator, as his protagonist. His new book Nocturnes is a collection of supernatural short stories and two novellas. The DJ caught up with him to ask him about horror, crime-writing, cancer and radio plays.

Your new book Nocturnes is a collection of ghostly, supernatural stories. Will fans of your crime-writing be surprised?
I don't think so, as the supernatural has played a part in the novels as well, to varying degrees. I'm conscious that some of the more traditional readers and critics don't like that, but I've never been very anxious to repeat what other people have done before me. Why shouldn't the boundaries be explored a little? One of the odd things about mystery fiction, as the Americans term crime fiction, is that it isn't really very mysterious at all. What seems strange and beyond understanding at the start is often explained in quite simple terms by the end, and the solution can sometimes be the least interesting part of the novel. I thought that by combining elements of traditional American crime fiction with a little of the supernatural, I might be able to restore some of that old sense of the mysterious to my books, as "mystery" originally referred to revelations from the Divine that could not be understood by human reasoning.

This collection came about because of BBC Northern Ireland - can you tell us about that?
BBC Northern Ireland has a very fine drama department, and the people who work there asked me if there was anything that I might like to do for them. I had always been interested in radio, and I like that old oral tradition of storytelling. I was also a fan of classic supernatural stories, particularly the word of the English academic MR James. It seemed to me that I could bring all of those interests together by writing a series of ghost stories for the radio. I did six, of which five were broadcast. In the years that followed, I thought about writing a collection, and when the BBC came back and asked for some more stories, that provided me with the impetus to do Nocturnes.

What kind of writers - obviously both crime and horror - did you read growing up? (I thought of Alfred Hitchcock collections like Bar the Doors when I was reading this)
I've already mentioned MR James who is, for me, just the finest writer of supernatural stories. I went through a phase, when I was very young, of devouring supernatural stories and novels. A lot of them weren't very good, to be honest, and the more modern stuff didn't appeal to me at all (with the exception of early to mid-period Stephen King). I hated the way they dealt with sex and the body in particular, and their apparent fascination with physical torture. I found myself going back instead to the classic stories - 'Carmilla', 'The Monkey's Paw', 'The Upper Berth' - and those kinds of tales were the greatest influence on Nocturnes.

The stories all have different protagonists and tones, is this one of the merits of a short story collection, in that you get a chance to air several authorial voices?
The novels are all set in the United States, and most of them have the same first person narrator. I've tried to get around that by breaking down the narration a little so we hear a lot of other voices, and the regional nature of the US means that I do get to experiment. Nevertheless, most of the stories in Nocturnes probably have a British setting, and, as you point out, the narrators and the tones vary. There are one or two voices that recur, though: I've always thought that 'Miss Froom, Vampire' and 'The Inkpot Monkey' were probably being told by the same person. There's an arch, vaguely amused tone to them. The narrator is almost sardonic, and he does take a degree of pleasure in what happens to the protagonists, I think.

In the opening story, a novella called 'The Cancer Cowboy Rides', the protagonist Buddy spreads cancer by just touching people. Is this a really modern take on what people's fears are these days, the fear of disease and not monsters/the bogeyman?
Monsters and bogeymen were really just names people gave to their fears, I think, a means of endowing physical form to something unknown and yet terrifying. At heart, we all have our fears: death; illness; the possibility that something might happen to our loved ones, or to us. Generally, they're vague, and they don't really become concrete until we're forced to face them. I think supernatural stories tap into that little kernel of fear that we all have inside us. It doesn't really matter whether or not it's a vampire, a bogeyman, a figure in the darkness under the stairs, or a man in a cowboy hat whose touch is diseased. If the story hits you in the right way, then that fear centre is activated. Having said that, my father died of cancer, and I have friends who have suffered because of it. I suppose I hate that idea of the body being turned against itself. Perhaps cancer is a modern curse. It seems to be a product of our society, and of the way we live now, and there is very little that we can really do to protect ourselves from it. In Buddy, the being at the centre of 'The Cancer Cowboy Rides', it may be that I gave a very specific form to my own very specific fear.

The stories are very filmic, is this a conscious thing?
Not really. I think in quite visual terms when I write, which probably helps when it comes to writing supernatural stories that depend upon glimpses of unknown things, and that work best when the reader is drawn into the story and becomes a part of that world. On the other hand, at least ten of these stories were written to be read aloud, not to be viewed on screen, so verbal cues are being used to stimulate the listener's imagination. My novels tend to be quite complex, and I'm not sure that they would translate terribly well to the screen. I've always been very cautious about the world of film where my novels are concerned. I get very annoyed by writers who seem to be angling for adaptation when they write a novel. First of all, I don't think crime novels translate terribly well to the screen; and secondly, we're actually talking about two completely different languages in the language of books and the language of film. I write to be read, not to be filmed, although the attraction of film is that it draws in new readers. Never say never, I suppose. If David Lynch or Tim Burton came along and offered to film one of my books or stories, then I'd be crazy to turn them down. Even if it failed, at least it would be an interesting failure.

The parallel with the fear of the unknown is something that is often used as a reason for the war on terror - keep people afraid of an unknown, unidentifiable predator - is this something you were conscious of when writing stories like 'The New Daughter'?
Not really. Bad Men, the novel that preceded this collection, is actually much closer to that. It was written during the invasion of Afghanistan, and I was very conscious when writing it of this impetus toward conflict. As I redrafted the book, a lot of the more explicit references fell by the wayside. I didn't want to date the book, but also there was no way of knowing how that war would develop. There are still echoes of that original idea in the book, but not many. 'The New Daughter' is about a very specific male, um, well, I'm reluctant to call it a 'fear' but possibly a gap in understanding. Ultimately, there are aspects of the female consciousness that are just unknowable to us, and with which we never manage to connect. The father in the story finds that his daughter, who is on the cusp of adolescence, is altering, and initially he is uncertain about the nature of that change. In one of the original drafts, the question of that transformation was left deliberately vague, but it didn't quite work. It's still not explicit, though.

'The Inkpot Monkey' and 'The Erlking' bring to mind old-fashioned horror in the vein of Edgar Allan Poe. Were you paying homage to Poe with these stories?
'The Inkpot Monkey' is close to Poe, or perhaps, to James. 'The Erlking' was influenced by folk and fairy tales. It was my attempt to write a folk tale, although both Goethe and Angela Carter have also dealt with the Erlking. Most of the stories aren't very explicitly influenced by anyone. There are echoes, inevitably, of the writers that I've read and loved, because most writers are, to some degree, a product of their reading, but there aren't really very many explicit homages. Perhaps 'The Shifting of the Sands' and 'Mr Pettinger's Demon' doff the cap to MR James, though.

In 'The Inkpot Monkey', the main character is a man suffering from writer's block - is this at all autobiographical?
Thankfully not. It is about the nature of being a writer, though. Sometimes, stories are almost like monkeys on one's back. When I'm working on a book, I sometimes find it hard to concentrate on other things: reading, watching movies, even engaging with other people. The book takes over.

Why did you choose demons, creatures in the woods made of trees and witches for your characters? Are they the staple characters of horror - as in 'Mr Pettinger's Daemon' - that are always there to be reinvented and reimagined?
I wanted to return to very traditional images, and very traditional tales. I really have been influenced greatly by darker folk tales, both in these stories and in my novels. Dark Hollow, my second novel, was an attempt to combine elements of folk tales with the crime novel. It is interesting, though, how some bogeymen seem to have a longer life, and a greater impact, than others. I mean, why vampires? (Suddenly, I find myself killed in a stamped of Freudians...)

The book is not without its humour as evidenced by 'Miss Froom, Vampire' about a gardening vampire whose roses are the envy of her village. Is it difficult to combine humour and horror in a story?
A number of the stories in the book have a kind of dark humour to them: 'Miss Froom...', 'The Inkpot Monkey', 'The Ritual of the Bones'. Sometimes, what happens in a supernatural or horror story is so appalling that the reader almost has to laugh. The difficulty is not so much in combining humour and horror, but in knowing when NOT to combine them.

A lot of readers wouldn't identify you as an Irish writer. Is this something that just happens with crime and horror writing that it's harder to establish a sense of the author because they're quite removed from what they're writing in that they're not writing what they 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 Tóibín 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!)

Fans of Charlie Parker, the private investigator in your first four novels, will be delighted to know that he pops up at the end of the book in a novella called 'The Reflecting Eye'. You've said this novella provides a link between The White Road and the forthcoming The Black Angel novel, can you tell us why?
It deals with the birth of Parker's child, but also provides one or two hints of what is to come. They're very subtle, though. It's also a chance to see Parker happy and reasonably content with his life. He's in a relationship. His partner is pregnant. It's coming up to Christmas. In a way, that contentment enables him to engage with the mystery at the heart of the novella. It gives him a strength, and a security, that he has sometimes lacked in the past.

Did you feel that you just wanted to take a break from him?
No, not at all. It's just that I'm anxious not to repeat myself, and I wanted to learn some new skills that I could perhaps bring to the novels. The Parker books, and his character, are very important to me. They reflect my view of the world, and there is an awful lot of me in Parker.

Was writing these horror stories, you just getting something out of your system so that you can focus on crime writing or do you think you'll return to horror again?
I think I'm always going to experiment, and I'm always going to want to try new things. I hope that never goes away, because otherwise my writing will just stagnate. I'll return to folk tales in some form because, like I said, they really are a big influence on my work. Because the novels have an interest in the supernatural, Nocturnes doesn't seem like such a huge departure. Really, it was kind of a logical step forward.

What's the best piece of advice you've been given as a writer?
It came from James Lee Burke who is one of two authors, along with Ross MacDonald, without whom I probably would not be writing what I write. He told me that you have to learn to ignore both the catcalls and the applause, and just follow your own path. It's hard advice to follow, sometimes, but he was right.

You have a very comprehensive website full of information at www.johnconnolly.co.uk. Does it take up a lot of your time? You also personally answer questions in the site's discussion forum, is that something you enjoy?
I keep an eye on the website, and I've tried to put a lot of material on it. I think some writers just use websites as an advertising hoarding, but I wanted it to provide a forum for readers, a place for them to exchange ideas and to discuss books, and not just my books. I like hearing from them, but increasingly it does take up quite a bit of time. I answer all my emails personally. They tend to build up...

What was the last great book you read?
Great? Gosh. I loved Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, and I've also greatly enjoyed Lian Hearn's Chronicles of the Otori, which concluded recently with The Brilliance of the Moon. They're probably the books that I've pressed on people most frequently over the last few years.

John Connelly was in conversation with Sinéad Gleeson

Read our review of Nocturnes