The Reading Of The Green - Death And Glory

She had been shot once in the face at close range. Dried blood, brain tissue and bone fragments surrounded her head like a bloody halo on the wall . . . Spiders and millipedes scuttled across her face and slipped through her hair, hunting the bugs and mites that were already feasting on the body. Flies buzzed. I guessed that she had been dead for two or three days.

Fittingly enough for a crime novelist, John Connolly is physical proof of the old homicide squad axiom that it's the quiet ones you've got to watch. The man responsible for the words above is sitting across from me in a Temple Bar café, carefully sipping coffee, discussing his love of classic crime fiction, and looking for all the world like what he once was: an education-supplement correspondent for The Irish Times.
The passage quoted, by the way, is by no means the most gore-flecked chunk of writing in his new book, Every Dead Thing. When a former NYPD detective, Charlie Bird Parker, comes home one night to find his wife and child slaughtered in their kitchen, he embarks on an obsessive search for the killer, a creature called the Travelling Man who has a fetish for cutting off his victims' faces. It's a search which brings Parker into contact with both the New York mafia and Louisiana's Cajun community, with explosive results and an abnormally high body count.
Yet, for all the violence and spilled blood in the book—Parker sometimes comes on like a heavily-armed Mike Hammer prowling around the Deep South and the eastern seaboard—there is a genuine moral imperative to his activities, however twisted (in one chapter, he kills a paedophile pimp in a railway station toilet, purely on impulse).
"It ain't for the squeamish, but Every Dead Thing looks set to make John Connolly a wealthy man. Most places in Britain it's sold out," he says, "so it's gone back to be reprinted. Hodder said originally they were going to print up 20,000 hardback copies, and there are now 54,000 in print. It's just been published in Australia, too."
Much of the initial interest and hype surrounding Every Dead Thing stemmed from the fact that Connolly had received a gargantuan advance of £350,000stg from his publishers for writing it. However, aside from a couple of snide snipes in UK newspapers and a hatchet-job from The Phoenix, there has been little evidence of the widely anticipated floodtide of jealousy at his good fortune.
"I've seen all the reviews, because Hodder sent them to me," Connolly smiles. "Out of about 40, only four or five were bad. The Phoenix put the boot in, but that was to be expected (laughs). At the start I went obsessively over the bad ones, which you're bound to do if it's your first novel. The worst was in the Telegraph, one of the worst reviews I've ever read of anything. He absolutely slated it.
The book wasn't something I actually set out to get published. It was just something I did. It's so unlikely: an Irish person sitting there writing a detective novel. I never sat down and thought, 'Oh yeah, this is gonna make me a fortune'. Nothing like that."
Connolly wrote the book over a five-year period, slaving away at The Irish Times by day and attacking the word processor at home by night. After a brief stint in local journalism, which he describes as "lousy", he worked at Dublin Corporation as a clerical officer for three years. Then, he says, "I went to Trinity to study English in 1988, graduated in 1992, spent a year in DCU and then began freelancing at The Irish Times after that. I'm still freelance there!
I did a lot of newsroom work for a time, and property journalism. Y'know, when you're a freelancer you'll take anything. And it was all going to pay for the book anyway. By the end I was just frustrated with what I was doing at the Times. It's a horrendous profession in some ways."
Over the past few years, Connolly embarked on self-financed travel around America, particularly falling in love with Maine, where much of the book is set. "It's all forests. I might go and live there one day," he says. His travels also took him to plenty of shitball small towns in the Deep South. One such hideous hamlet turns up in the book, with its name conveniently changed to Haven (a clue: its real name begins with W and it's in the north-east of the state).
"It was an appalling place," Connolly says, shaking his head. "All day I'd sit in these horrible bars and cafés, surreptitiously listening in on conversations, trying to get an ear for the dialogue and the speech rhythms. The only thing this place had to recommend it was that the establishment I was staying in had porn on the TV! You know a town is bad when the best thing about it is the fact that you can look at the Playboy Channel when you return to your hotel (laughs)."
Some reviewers have focused primarily on the carnage aspect of the book and the (admittedly gleeful) descriptions of each messy killing, ignoring the fact that Every Dead Thing is less a thriller than a good old-fashioned detective story with extra blood. When the focus turns to the narrative itself, rather than the graphic depictions of murder, Connolly's prose is more hard-boiled than last week's breakfast eggs.
"Frank tried to look like he was wrestling with his conscience, although he couldn't have found his conscience without the aid of a shovel and an exhumation order," runs one line. "A vaguely folky singer [was] performing open-guitar surgery on Neil Young's 'Only Love Can Break Your Heart'; it didn't look like the song was going to pull through," runs another.
"Much of the text is very stylised, especially the one-liners," admits Connolly. "It's even more stylised in the second Parker novel, which I've finished. I just have to do another few drafts. It follows similar themes, such as redemption and the importance of compassion. It's also not quite as long as Every Dead Thing.
Parker is a weird guy. He doesn't have any identifiable quirk, like a fondness for a particular type of music, or a disability. He's hard to picture, and because he himself has a taste for killing, he is the 'dead thing' of the title."
In a well-publicised move, Hodder & Stoughton splashed the words "The most terrifying thriller since Silence Of The Lambs" on the front cover of the book. They also offered readers their money back if they weren't satisfied that it was, well, the most terrifying thriller since Silence Of The Lambs. Does Connolly feel they created a rod for his back by doing that?
"Yeah, when I first saw it in a bookshop, my first reaction was 'Oh, shit'," he laughs. "But as long as they don't put my stuff next to Kinky Friedman's in the crime section of the shop, I'll be happy."
Every Dead Thing is published by Hodder & Stoughton at £10.