Trying to rescue justice from the mire of the law

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.

“Crime fiction is still very uncomfortable with any kind of experimentation,” he says, “anything that deviates from a functional, rationalist take on the world. But I think it’s legitimate to introduce other elements, and elements that are directly opposed to that rationalist mind set.”

It’s fair to say the experiment has been a success. He’s still only 43, but The Burning Soul, Connolly’s current offering, is his 10th Charlie Parker novel, and he has also published a number of standalone titles, including The Book of Lost Things and the recent young adult stories, The Gates and Hell’s Bells. Despite his best-selling, award-winning status, however, Connolly is still keen to push the parameters of the crime genre.

“Each book tends to be a reaction to what went before it,” he says, “and I’ve recently been subjected to books that have been front loaded with violence, just loaded down with bodies. And I very consciously wanted to write a brooding book, where there was very little violence, and you just had this kind of sense of impending disaster, even though you weren’t sure where it was going to come from. And at the same time to see if I could maintain the tension without resorting to dropping a body in every couple of chapters. To wind the story up through questions of identity, say.

“I also wanted to work with language more. It’s that discussion that writers often have — and leaving aside the fact that all fiction is genre fiction — how literary fiction puts a primacy on certain quality of language. In literary fiction, it goes language-character-plot. The balancing act with genre fiction has to be character-plot-language, generally speaking. But I wanted to see if I could do more with language without necessarily holding up the plot and undermining the tension.

“But here’s what crime fiction has that literary fiction doesn’t — the ability to sneak the big ideas in under the wire. There’s nothing more dispiriting to a reader to hear the sound of the soapbox being drawn up. I’m guilty of it myself, but hopefully you find ways to disguise it. And the more time I spend in the States, the more I talk to people, the more that disparity between justice and the law becomes increasingly disturbing and depressing. And the idea for (The Burning Soul) was, suppose someone walks into a lawyer’s office and says, ‘I killed a child. I was a child myself, and that was the kind of person I was, but I’m not that person anymore. But someone is now trying to destroy me.’ And then other stuff started to feed into that, and particularly the way they treat children over there. In some states in the US, they just love jailing children. I mean, at the time I was writing this, there was a judge caught effectively selling children to private prisons, it was like something out of Dickens. And at the same time, in the UK, there was all that stuff about Jamie Bulger’s killers, and how one of them ended up being put back in jail. And when you think about it, it’s not that surprising. Because what you’re asking somebody to do is entirely disappear.”

Passionate about the crime novel, Connolly is nonetheless aware of its limitations, particularly when comparing it to literary fiction.

“I’m very happy to read literary fiction as its own genre,” he says, “because I do believe it has its own rules, its own parameters. It’s more a mongrel genre than others, because its existence is determined by what a particular book can pull in from other genres to make it all work. And in that sense, there’s an absence of purity to it. But what you get is the primacy of language, which to me defines literary fiction. In that sense, it’s much harder to write than genre fiction. Not least because you have to reinvent the wheel every single time.

“I tend to be at the extreme end of this,” he continues, “where I think that a great piece of literary fiction will give you rewards greatly in excess of a great piece of genre fiction. When a literary writer gets it right in every way, the result is a book that transcends everything — not just genre, but actually the conventional limitations of literature, and it’s something you carry with you for years afterwards. Really, the most life-changing books I’ve ever read are not pieces of genre fiction, even if the writers I most admire are genre writers. But even at that, you’re picking truly exceptional pieces of literature. That’s why I took exception to Lee Child last year, when he said he could easily knock off a piece of literature. I mean, what did he have in mind? War and Peace? The Great Gatsby?”

Despite his commitment to experimentation, he’s self-deprecating about challenging himself “to work with language more”.

“There were times when I’d have one of those marvellous days we all get sometimes, when you think, ‘My God, I’m channelling the divine!’ (laughs) And then you go back the next day and look at it and go, ‘Oh, bugger.’ No, it all comes down to craft. I imagine Da Vinci’s office, littered with all these imperfect circles, y’know, and helicopters that didn’t fly (laughs). But that’s what happens. You just plug away, keep reworking stuff. I mean, if you’re a genius, you don’t have to do that.”

Meanwhile, the supernatural elements of the Parker stories have grown less overt. In recent novels, the ghostly aspects, what Connolly laughingly describes as “the flip side of Scooby Doo”, have morphed into something akin to the psychological expression of spiritual agony.

“Parker describes it as ‘residue’,” he says. “And I think that’s probably the best word for it, because what he deals with is residue. What the police at a crime scene deal with, the blood and the stains and the fingerprints, the body itself — it’s all residue. When Parker ‘sees’ a dead girl, it isn’t her, it’s that final cry of hers which has found a form in the world. They’re psychic manifestations, and the best way I can describe it is that it’s like hearing the echo of a scream.”

Ultimately, Charlie Parker is John Connolly’s mouthpiece for asking questions about identity, justice and the law, the nature of the world and the universe at large.

“If you’re going to spend this kind of time and energy on asking questions,” he laughs, “they might as well be big bloody questions. I think in the books it becomes — again, without sounding like I’m up my own hole — the question of, What is a moral universe? Are we moral simply because it makes us better apes? Or are we moral because it is necessary if society is to hold together, and otherwise it’s just chaos?” He shrugs. “I always go back to that William Gaddis quote, who said that in the next world we get justice, in this world we have the law.”

*Declan Burke is an author and journalist. His latest novel is Absolute Zero Cool published by Liberties Press.