Trying to rescue justice from the mire of the law

The Burning Soul

AUTHOR John Connolly claims you know the Irish crime novel has arrived, “because we’ve started producing tat. In the beginning it was a blank canvas, and there wasn’t a lot of money to be made, and there was a lot of experimentation, people whizzing off in interesting directions into virgin territory. Now we have the foot-soldiers coming through, producing stuff we’ve read in other forms before. Especially with the serial killer novel, which in the wrong hands can quickly spiral out of control and become a bit nasty, bodies piling up all over the pages.”

The Irish crime novel was still something of a novelty in 1999 when Connolly, then an Irish Times journalist, published his debut, Every Dead Thing. Set in Maine in the US, and featuring the private eye Charlie Parker, its experimental aspect was the blending of conventional crime fiction tropes with elements of the gothic novel, and particularly those of the supernatural.