John Connolly

• Born: May 1, 1968
• Place of Birth: Dublin, Ireland

TYPES OF PLOT: Horror; private investigator; thriller

PRINCIPAL SERIES: Charlie Parker, 1999-

Contribution

John Connolly’s first novel, Every Dead Thing (1999), brought him nearly equal amounts of praise and condemnation. Critics agreed that the tale is dark, terrifying, thrilling, and disturbing, not only because of its gruesome violence but also because of the hero’s single-minded quest for retribution. Some critics extolled Connolly’s lyrical prose style and the intensity of the story’s drama. Others found the violence simply repellent and the themes irremediably grim. The Los Angeles Times reviewer deftly characterized Connolly’s literary impact in remarking that the novel “holds the reader fast in a comfortless stranglehold.”

Connolly’s subsequent novels delve ever more into the supernatural to prepare readers for the psychotic killers and macabre violence of the plots. These novels are as much horror fiction as mysteries. The supernatural elements, however, rather than providing escapism, allow Connolly to examine the pathology and psychology of violent crime. British critic Mark Timlin wrote that as Charlie Parker’s character evolves through the novels, Connolly demonstrates the possibility of moral choice and the necessity of action in the face of evil. In this regard, Connolly likes to quote the eighteenth-century English political philosopher , who observed that evil triumphs when good people stand by and do nothing to stop it. It is this thematic approach, critics agree, that makes Connolly’s fiction more than simply thrilling entertainment. Connolly is also recognized for the meticulous research behind his settings and behind his use of esoteric supernatural lore.

Biography

John Connolly was born in Dublin on May 31, 1968, and raised in the city’s Realto section, a rough neighborhood plagued by drugs. His father was a rent collector, and his mother was a schoolteacher interested in writing. At her urging, he read avidly from an early age. He claimed that he began to write a year after he began reading, and a teacher encouraged him by paying him for each Tarzan story he wrote. Connolly completed secondary school at seventeen and took a job in the accounting department of a local government office. For three years, he largely forgot about writing. Bored with the job, he quit and entered Dublin’s Trinity College, majoring in English. Among the subjects he studied was American crime fiction. It was his first introduction to authors who came to influence his own fiction, among them , , and . During one summer, Connolly went to Delaware to work as a waiter. However, he did not like the location and, on a whim, took a bus to Maine, which entranced him. He returned to Maine during subsequent summer holidays, working there and exploring the state. After receiving his bachelor’s degree, Connolly earned a master’s degree in journalism from Dublin City University.

Following graduation, Connolly worked as a freelance writer for The Irish Times, the nation’s leading daily newspaper. He specialized in feature stories, particularly about education, but he found the writing formulaic and frustrating. To escape from the grind of journalism, he began writing his first novel, Every Dead Thing. Before he finished the manuscript, he mailed out sample chapters to seventy publishers. All turned him down. However, one editor wrote a favorable comment on the rejection slip and encouraged Connolly to finish the work.

Connolly left freelancing and moved to Maine for a year, working as a waiter while he revised the manuscript. He resubmitted the novel, which was accepted and, in 1999, brought him the largest advance on royalties for any Irish writer up to that time. The novel was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award for best first novel by the Horror Writers Association and for the Berry Award for the best British crime novel by Deadly Pleasures magazine, and it won the 2000 Shamus Award for best first private eye novel from the Private Eye Writers of America, making Connolly the first non-American author to receive the honor. The White Road (2002) won the 2003 Barry Award, and several other novels and short stories received award nominations, notably The Book of Lost Things (2006), which was nominated for the 2007 Irish Novel of the Year. In 2012, Books to Die For (2012) won the Agatha Award for Best Nonfiction, and the next year, the novel won the Anthony Award for Best Critical Nonfiction Work. In 2014, The Caxton Private Lending Library & Book Depository (2013) won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Short Story.

Connolly is a dedicated reader and music collector. For his fifth Charlie Parker novel, The Black Angel (2005), he included a compact disc, Voices from the Dark, whose music selections are to help set the mood for each chapter. Long a resident of Dublin, Connolly has frequently revisited Maine, where many of his stories take place.

Analysis

Reviewers compared John Connolly’s novels to those of and in his use of the supernatural and his emphasis on deranged killers. However, in Connolly’s treatment, history, personal and collective, receives the primary emphasis. History influences and often overwhelms his characters. History not only contributes to present thought and attitudes but also intrudes in a more tangible manner: Connolly’s hero, Charlie Parker, must deal with the actual, if shadowy, appearances of the dead and the presence of diabolical “black angels” who have fallen from heaven and maim, torture, and kill humans to spite God. In The White Road, Connolly writes that people, by their actions in this life, make their own hell in which to exist in the afterlife. Conversely, doing a good deed can atone for some past evil. Most important is Connolly’s conception of evil itself: the absence of empathy. That is, people commit evil when they treat others merely as objects.

From this moral metaphysics come Connolly’s three main themescompassion, atonement, and salvation. Although these may sound like religious goals, for Parker, they have a practical importance and numinous consequences that Connolly does not connect to any faith or organization. (Connolly’s research draws freely from Christian, Judaic, animistic, and Manichean beliefs.) Every Dead Thing opens with Parker drinking away his frustrations with life and work as a New York City homicide detective while his wife and daughter are being tortured and murdered at home. He discovers the bodies and is initially the prime suspect. This personal history haunts him through the novel as he frees himself from suspicion and then sets off on a quest to track down the murderer, a sadist known as the Traveler. In later novels, family history likewise presses on him: For example, his father, also a New York City police officer, killed a woman and child under mysterious circumstances before taking his own life. Moreover, there is a darkness to each generation of his family that he has inherited. Through The Killing Kind (2001) and The White Road, it becomes clear that an unimaginably greater history plagues him: He is himself a fallen angel, a status made explicit in The Black Angel. He is among twenty former angels doomed to roam among humans, trapped in human form forever unless their bodies are destroyed by violence, in which case they are reborn into a new body.

Nineteen of these angels hunt and kill people for various reasons, and from their number come the most villainous of Connolly’s antagonists, such as Kittim, Reverend Faulkner, and Brightwell. Alone among the black angels, Parker feels compassion for the vulnerable and victimized. The compassion derives from his private and family history; an additional motivation, beginning in The Black Angel, is his desire to atone for his original sin against God. He, therefore, fights the bad angels, an unremitting moral war that has lasted, Connolly intimates, through many incarnations. The novels give little indication that Parker’s crusade will win him personal forgiveness from God. Salvation, Connolly hints, is the active pursuit of justice rather than a reward for a good life.

Parker’s life cannot be described as good in any conventional moral or religious sense. Working as a private investigator, he is loyal and ethical to clients and friends but frequently ignores all else—laws, customs, judicial procedures, and common morality. In pursuit of a culprit, he regularly kills, both in self-defense and to ensure that villains do not escape. Connolly’s novels place little faith in the judicial system or police, assuming that red tape and corruption cripple these institutions in the face of evil. Moreover, Parker’s helpers are frequently as criminal and violent as are his nemeses. These include an array of Mafiosi and former convicts, but the most outstanding are Louis and Angel, a biracial gay couple who regularly rescue Parker from dangerous situations by unstinting use of powerful firearms.

Louis and Angel act as foils to Parker in two ways. First, they provide most of the rare comic relief in the novels as they joke with each other and sometimes with Parker, who is otherwise grim, brooding, contrary, and haunted by macabre visions. Second, they have the only stable love relationship in the series. After Parker loses his wife and daughter, he is slow to find another love interest. When he falls in love with another woman, he has difficulty committing himself to her because of fear for her safety and his long absences during investigations. She becomes pregnant and gives birth to a daughter, and they live together, but Parker’s crusades constantly disrupt his family life, and their long-term prospects look doubtful at the end of The Black Angel.

Evil expresses itself through grotesque terror in the Connolly novels. Horrible deformities of the human body, mutilation, artworks of human bone and flesh, deadly spiders, subterranean passages, and visitations of the dead are the means of menacing the helpless among the characters and creating suspense for readers. The extent and superhuman power of the evil that Parker faces impels him to act as his enemies act, with cunning, obsessive perseverance, and violence. Indeed, in Connolly’s novels, the distinction between justice and vengeance is vanishingly thin, even when he acts on behalf of the innocent and helpless.

The Killing Kind

Preceded by Every Dead Thing (1999) and Dark Hollow (2000), the Killing Kind is the third novel in the Charlie Parker series. Parker is hired to investigate the mysterious suicide of a former girlfriend, Grace Peltier. Before she was discovered dead on a lonely Maine road, Peltier had been researching her master’s thesis topic: a fundamentalist sect known as the Aroostook Baptists, who all disappeared in the early 1960s. Parker reluctantly investigates, eventually with the help of his friends Louis and Angel, after a mass grave in northern Maine is accidentally uncovered. The grave contains the members of the long-missing sect or most of them. Parker encounters a murky television evangelist organization that is a front for antiabortion, antihomosexual, and anti-Semitic militants. Among its reptilian members is Mr. Pudd, who uses poisonous spiders to kill those he considers sinners. Another is a state police officer who has killed Peltier for taking a handmade book bound in human skin, which implicates the organization in many murders. The book turns out to have been made by Reverend Faulkner, once the leader of the Aroostook Baptists and responsible for their deaths. Before Parker finally kills Pudd and captures Faulkner, Faulkner tortures Angel. Parker meets a series of creepy characters, including the Gollum, an assassin sent by a militant Jewish group to stop Faulkner. Prominent among the themes is the destructive effect of extremist religion and the lingering hold of past atrocities on the living.

The White Road

In The White Road, Parker is asked by an old acquaintance to help protect Atys Jones, a young Black man, from being killed by White vigilantes. Jones is accused of raping and murdering the daughter of a leading White family in South Carolina. He is innocent but doomed, for the woman’s death is linked to a long series of tragedies involving the families of the young man and the woman, going back to the times when the young man’s ancestors were slaves owned by the White family. Moreover, Parker’s friend, the defense lawyer, has an agenda of his own. He secretly uses Parker to deflect those seeking to kill him because of the gang rape and murder of Jones’s mother and aunt twenty years earlier, an event in which the lawyer participated. As Parker tries to shield Jones and unravels the tangled history behind the various rape-murders, he comes across another fallen angel, Kittim, who works for the dead girl’s brother and entertains himself by slowing torturing to death those who threaten to expose the family’s history. Parker barely escapes that fate, with the help of Louis and Angel (who have already conducted a murderous vigilante campaign of their own on older members of a long-ago lynch mob). In the end, nearly everyone is left dead, including Jones and the lawyer. The Old South’s history of mob justice, lynching, white supremacists, and simmering racial conflict figures prominently. However, there is a second plot: The Reverend Faulkner of The Killing Kind is still alive and manipulates his way out of jail on bond. Faulkner vows to kill Parker and his pregnant girlfriend, Rachel. In the end, Parker, Louis, and Angel shoot him dead in a joint volley.

The Black Angel

In The Black Angel, Parker is enlisted to find a missing young woman, a relation of Louis. The attempt leads him deep into the supernatural. Already haunted by the apparitions of his dead wife and daughter, he discovers that those behind the woman’s disappearance and hideous murder are black angels, one of whom steals his victims’ souls. He is Brightwell, an immensely obese but agile man. Brightwell is, in turn, the lieutenant of the chief black angel on Earth. The plot involves their search for the chief angel’s twin, captured and immured long ago by Cistercian monks. Catholic medieval history, grotesque artworks, and demonology eventually lead Parker to the chief angel, who, in a deft stroke of black humor, is a dealer of antiquities. As in previous novels, many people die as Parker investigates and as, in turn, he becomes the black angels’ prey, for they want to punish him for defying them, not only in his present life but also in past lives. The climax sees Parker killing Brightwell (who promises to be reborn and track him down) and trapping the chief angel. This success, however, leads to personal failure. Parker’s girlfriend, Rachel, leaves him, taking their infant daughter with her because of attempts on their lives by Brightwell and his agents.

Following The Black Angel, Connolly continued the series with more than twenty novels, including The Instruments of Darkness (2024), The Woman in the Woods (2018), and A Time of Torment (2016). Connolly also authored The Chronicles of the Invaders trilogy

Principal Series Character:

• Charlie Parker is a former New York City police detective with a tormented past: the loss of his wife and daughter to a serial killer. Handsome, brooding, and empathetic, he is driven to help the vulnerable at whatever cost. There is a dark side—indeed, eschatologically dark—to him, which is impossible for him to ignore. He is a fallen angel, driven to atone for his sin against God by fighting the other fallen angels who prey on humanity.

Bibliography

"Charlie Parker." John Connolly, www.johnconnollybooks.com/charlie-parker. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Connolly, John. The John Connolly Reader’s Companion: A Collection of Excerpts. Atria/Emily Bestler Books, 2012.

Nolan, Yvonne. “An Irishman in Darkest Maine.” Publishers Weekly 249 (Sept. 2002): 45.

Schwartz, Richard B. Nice and Noir: Contemporary Crime Fiction. University of Missouri Press, 2002.