The Wolf in Winter

I DON’T actually own an ouija board — says John Connolly with a laugh halfway through our conversation, and it’s hard not to be just a little disappointed.

The Dublin-born Connolly is the award-winning author of 12 novels in the best-selling Charlie Parker series, supernaturally-tinged tales of a haunted private detective set in Maine. Despite the crypt-like interior of Temple Bar’s Il Baccaro restaurant, however, Connolly is irrepressibly cheerful as he discusses his prolific output.

His first novel, Every Dead Thing, was published in 1999. His new offering, The Wolf in Winter, is the 12th Charlie Parker story and his 20th book in total, a body of work that encompasses mystery fiction for adults, fantasy tales for a younger audience, and a collection of supernatural short stories and novellas.

The Wolf in Winter finds Parker investigating the disappearance of a young woman and the apparent murder of her father, a homeless man who lives on the streets of Portland in Maine. Far from resting on his laurels, the 46-year-old author has blended a novel of social conscience into his traditional private eye tale, and also explores themes of ancient and contemporary spirituality.

“It’s because I enjoy doing it,” says John when I ask why it is that he seems so restlessly self-challenging. “I love what I do, and if you love what you do you take a kind of craftsman’s pride in wanting to produce the best work possible. I know that there are writers who object to that word ‘craft’, who say that a book is art or it’s nothing. But I don’t get to decide what’s art and what isn’t. That’s a function of time as much as anything else. And all art is a function of craft. You work with craft and if you’re lucky there’s a moment of transcendence and you produce something that just slips past that barrier, whatever it may be, and becomes something slightly greater than its parts. But you don’t get to decide those things. All you can do is sit down each time and write the best book you can.”

At the dark heart of The Wolf in Winter lies the fictional town of Prosperous. A conventional small town, Prosperous was built around an ancient church, which was transported stone by stone, along with its malevolent carvings, from its original location in the north of England by a religious sect with a sinister take on Christianity.

“They’re fascinating,” says John of ‘the Familists’, aka the Family of Love, “this idea of a chameleon religion, people who would hide themselves in other religions, worship in conformist churches and obey the rules of the land, but in fact had a belief in a much older religion. Because they believed there was a time before Adam and Eve, they had a separation between God and the natural world.”

In the novel, the Familists and their modern descendants in Prosperous worship ‘a hungry god’. When John discovered the sect, it opened up the opportunity to write what he describes as ‘a more introspective book than usual’.

“In one way it’s the least supernatural of the books,” he says, “because really only one thing happens, there’s one moment glimpsed, that could be considered as supernatural. But as one of the characters in the book says, it doesn’t matter if something is real or unreal, what matters is the harm people do because of the belief they have in its reality.”

In The Wolf in Winter, a metaphysical investigation runs parallel to Charlie Parker’s traditional duties as a fictional private eye.

“Because crime fiction is perceived as being escapist — and there’s nothing wrong with escapism in its own right — that doesn’t mean that escapism doesn’t equate to a kind of seriousness,” says John. “That you can’t introduce interesting things and topics, and challenge the reader, and say, ‘Here’s some situations you might want to think about’.”

One of those situations, in a novel that is equally concerned with social and metaphysical issues, is the plight of Maine’s homeless population.

“Crime fiction has always been about taking a stand on behalf of the vulnerable, and particularly American crime fiction,” he says. “British crime fiction, I think, was more concerned with the institutions of justice and law and order, and particularly order. But American crime fiction has always been about somebody standing up for the powerless, somebody giving them a voice.”

Connolly describes himself as ‘a hopeless, dreadful Catholic — I don’t go to church, and I adhere to very few of the tenets’. Nevertheless, there are striking references in The Wolf in Winter to Charlie Parker as a kind of ‘Christ-like figure’.

“The writers I admire, and the characters that I admire in crime fiction, tend to be characters who are looking for redemption. [Michael Connelly’s] Bosch is looking for redemption, [James Lee Burke’s] Dave Robicheaux particularly, is a character seeking redemption, Patrick Kenzie from [Dennis] Lehane’s novels is another. And if you come from a Judeo-Christian background, that comes freighted with certain spiritual baggage. You achieve redemption through sacrifice, it comes with that price, and I think that’s what is being hinted at in the book.”

It seems odd to think of it now, but when John Connolly first created Charlie Parker, the blend of mystery and the supernatural was frowned upon by crime fiction purists.

“I came to mystery fiction relatively late,” John concedes.

“When I was 12 or 13 I started reading Ed McBain, but I was already reading supernatural fiction by then. Robert Parker I didn’t read until I got to college, [Ross] Macdonald and [Raymond] Chandler the same. So the underpinnings of my books are the supernatural, in many ways.” The sense of mystery inherent in both genres appealed to him. “It was only later, when I began reading up on the genre, that I realised that this wasn’t necessarily something that people approved of. But by then it was too late.”

His love of the supernatural endures. Last year he published the limited edition novella The Wanderer in Unknown Realms, and last month had a couple of short ghost stories broadcast on BBC radio.

“That notion of the supernatural tends to encompass a lot of those questions [raised in the Charlie Parker novels], as does the word mystery. I don’t like the phrase ‘crime fiction’, particularly. ‘Crime fiction’ I associate with meat and potatoes. ‘Mystery’ I associate with someone doing something interesting with the recipe.

Twenty books on, there is no sense of Connolly’s creative curiosity diminishing. He has published three books in the Samuel Johnson series for young adults, and earlier this year co-authored Conquest, with Jennifer Ridyard, the first in a proposed series of fantasy novels for younger readers.

“That idea of only writing one book every ten years is fine when you’re in your 20s or 30s but once you hit your 40s it’s not so fine anymore,” he says when I ask why he pushes himself so hard. “You realise that you’re going to die someday. And you won’t always have the energy to write. I’m quite fortunate in that I have the ideas, I have the time to do things, I have the energy to do them, and I have a readership that’s prepared to buy my books. In five years time, at least one of those things may not be true, and possibly two of those things.” He shrugs. “So you do it while you can.”