Looking for the person who isn’t clapping

PERHAPS no other living Irish writer is as successful as John Connolly. His books have sold more than 10 million copies, although curiously – for critics, not for the author himself – none of them are set in Ireland or deal with Irish characters.

For his 13th book, The Whisperers, another in the vaunted Charlie Parker detective series, Connolly uses the war in Iraq and a cadre of disturbed military veterans returned to their home state of Maine as a vehicle to tackle the subject of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Connolly enrolled the services of a friend in the US, Tom Hyland, a former soldier who served in Vietnam, as a sounding board for his research into the subject, in addition to extensive mining of secondary sources to get the science and psychology of it right. It’s an affliction which nation states have yet to properly come to terms with.

“The Australians did a survey of their Vietnam veterans,” says Connolly. “They found out that not only did they have three times higher suicide rates than the civilian population but their children did as well. What happens is that it causes trauma in the family.

“It’s not so much about killing, about being under fire, although all those things contribute, but it’s about going home for a brief period after 15 months in the battlefield, finding your wife has had to take a job because she can’t afford to support your family on what you’re getting paid by the army. There are domestic issues; there’s divorce. It becomes a cumulative thing. I became interested in the human cost of war.”

In The Whisperers, Parker is hired by Bennett Patchett, the owner of a local diner, to look into the affairs of one of his staff. As it happens, the waitress’s mother was in high school with Parker, but is now on her third marriage and is “a little thicker around the trunk” than Parker might remember. The young lady is getting roughed around by her fella, Joel Tobias. But this is only the thin edge of wedge.

The affairs of Tobias, a demobbed squad leader from the war in Iraq, are off-colour, “hinky” – “something,” notes Parker, “that was hinky was more troubling than something that was outright wrong, simply because the nature of the flaw was undefined”.

With a bit of digging, Parker discovers a smuggling ring involved in spiriting ancient artefacts, originally looted from Iraq, across the Canadian border. What complicates matters is the cluster of suicides that has befallen Tobias’s circle, all of them ex-servicemen from Iraq, including Patchett’s son, Damien.

The manner in which the military veterans start taking their own lives may not be completely down to the traumas of war, though, as they are themselves surrounded by Mexican gangsters, sinister characters like the cancer-ridden Herod the Collector, “a settler of debts”, and more benign, crooked hoodlums like the wonderfully drawn Jimmy Jewel and his muscle, Earle Hanley, a goon whose face “resembled the last walnut in the bowl a week after Thanksgiving”.

Of course, intruding on their lives is Parker, an unreconstructed, hardboiled private eye, chewed up by unresolved grief over the brutal murder of his wife and daughter years beforehand, a dormant anger which is re-ignited by a session of waterboarding, the price for snooping where he’s unwelcome.

“Parker is a man filled with rage,” says Connolly. “He’s always trying to fight against it, but at the same time he realises that it does give you a power. It’s testosterone, hormones flooding through you. It’s the thing that gives you impetus, and especially if you’ve been frightened – that rage comes back. It’s the flipside of it.

“One of the interesting things that Tom had said to me was that there’s an old myth that if somebody sets off a firework or bangs a car door that soldiers suffering from stress will hit the ground. In fact that’s not what happens.

“What he says would happen is that he would hear that noise and he would immediately get angry because he had to stimulate himself to fight. If he didn’t fight, he’d run away, so you needed that anger to keep you in place. And he was a mailman. He was delivering post and people would slam doors and he would find himself simmering with rage because he associated certain stimuli with being ready to fight. He didn’t hit the ground. He did exactly the opposite.

“That rage was the impetus that gave him the strength to go on and to conquer his own fear. In the books, Parker is a man who is trying to rein in his anger and control it so that when he has to release it, it’s focused. He’s not just lashing out wildly. He understands the potency of it.”

Born in 1968, Connolly, who grew up in Rialto, Dublin, splits his time these days between Dublin, his home in Portland, Maine, and bouts of book tour work where he gets to meet his legion of fans, who number, among others, David Simon, creator of the TV series, The Wire.

Connolly cites James Lee Burke, a favourite of Charlie Parker too, as the most cherished of all the crime writer interviews he has conducted as a freelance journalist over the years.

“They tend not to be jackasses,” he says of his interviewees. “Any ones that were difficult tend to come across in the interviews. Some people simply don’t like to be interviewed. The thing about being a writer is that you balance a huge ego with a huge level of insecurity. You need to be egotistical to think that what you have to say is worth writing down and worth publishing and worth forcing on other people. The minute you put it out there, you think, ah, that really wasn’t worth saying after all. I think all writers struggle with that; all writers are looking for the one person in the crowd who isn’t clapping.”