Following on from our massive look at the brilliant eighteen book Charlie Parker series we were delighted to track down the creator himself, John Connolly for an exclusive interview. The first book, Every Dead Thing, was released way back in 1999 and over the subsequent two decades no author has blended detective thrillers and supernatural horror as convincingly as John. Connolly is the absolute master, and his work stands tall alongside the detective greats of Henning Mankell, Ian Rankin, Michael Connelly and CJ Sansom. The difference being those detectives solved crimes and cases without the uneasy sense of the supernatural which make Charlie Parker novels are so much more than mere murder mysteries. This is a rather quirky interview and is probably best enjoyed by those who have read Connolly’s fiction from cover to cover. However, it also gives deep insight into living with the same character for twenty years, aging and changing with them. And more importantly, covers how to keep the plots fresh with every evolving and incredibly long story arc beyond the soap opera of everyday life you might come across in more standard detective series. Although I first read Charlie Parker almost twenty years, it was during the first lockdown that I fell in love with him, his loss and his journey into hell and back. Over the subsequent year I read all eighteen books and happily rank these books amongst my favourite over series. Let’s see what John has to say…. GNOH: A Song of Shadows (book 13) sees a major change in style where Charlie Parker’s character is written in the third person, what was the thought process behind this development? At this point in the series his persona (for obvious reasons) seems to get darker, were you attempting to put some distance between the reader and Charlie by abandoning the first-person narrative? JOHN: Well, events in The Wolf in Winter obviously required a change in the narrative voice, but it also allowed me to present Parker as other people see him and share information with the reader to which Parker could not be privy. By that point I was thinking well in advance, and laying the ground for what was – and is – to come as the series progresses. But you’re right: third-person narrative does create a kind of distance, which some readers didn’t enjoy, but it was important to offer a reminder of Parker’s strangeness, which sometimes got lost in the intimacy of his own voice. GNOH: The length and scope of the story arcs in the series are stunningly long, with threads sometimes disappearing for several books before resurfacing, how far ahead to you plan these? For example, A Bag of Bones (book 17), in some ways (partially) closed up a very long story arc which had bubbled for many books, can we expect many other skeletons to resurface in the shape of reintroduced story arcs in future books? JOHN: From quite early on I wanted to create a sequence of novels with an overarching storyline that would weave in and out of novels, in part because that’s not entirely typical of the mystery genre. It’s more common in fantasy and science-fiction, I think. If I remember right, Lee Child once said that he didn’t want Jack Reacher to have a memory, so that each book could stand entirely alone. That’s largely a commercial decision, so as not to discourage readers from picking up, say, Book 8 if Book 1 or 2 isn’t available. I just found that approach frustrating when it came to my own work, and wanted to see if it might be possible to do something more ambitious, so that readers could read the books in any order but, if read in sequence, they revealed a different picture. Once that decision was made, it became easier to put markers in novels to which I could return at a later stage. Having said that, I have to admit to not being much of a planner in real terms. The novels are not planned out, and reveal themselves through the long, slow process of writing the first draft. When I wrote The Wolf in Winter, I hadn’t intended it to form the first part of a self-contained sequence of six books that would end with A Book of Bones and take in stories from Night Music along the way, including the myth of the Fractured Atlas. I suppose it’s just a matter of being open to possibilities and embracing the most likely ones when they come along. GNOH: Part of the true strength of the Charlie Parker series is the fact that he ages, and the reader feels the process and the emotional pain associated with the various losses he has suffered. Many of the best detectives noticeably age as their series progresses, for example Harry Bosch (Michael Connelly), John Rebus (Ian Rankin) and Kurt Wallander (Henning Mankell) and by extension lawyer Matthew Shardlake (CJ Sansom). Are you aware of Charlie aging as you write the books? I do not think you ever exactly say how old he is, and he does not age in real like (like John Rebus does) but you consciously make him more world weary? JOHN: It’s hard for a series to grow if the character remains the same age, or thereabouts, throughout. I mean, there are pleasures to be found in that kind of writing. One of the joys of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels was that Spenser never really aged beyond his fifties, even though I think he might have served in Korea. Those books were pure escapism, and undemanding pleasures as long as you didn’t demand anything more from them in turn. But I began writing the Parker books when I was in my mid-twenties, and I’m approaching my mid-fifties now. My conception of the world, and my experiences, obviously inform everything that I do, including my writing, so it’s natural that Parker should change as I change. He’s about two years older than I am, according to what I set out in Every Dead Thing, the first Parker novel, but the events of that six-novel sequence that commences with The Wolf in Winter actually take place over a relatively short space of time, so he hasn’t aged a year with every book. Then again, next year’s book will probably consist of two novellas, one of which is set in 2020. That would put Parker in his mid-fifties, Angel and Louis in their sixties, and age Sam, Parker’s daughter, a few more years. I’m still trying to come to terms with what that might mean for the books.  GNOH: Part of the longevity and success of the Charlie Parker books is connected to the fact that they are not typical detective novels. Often there is no traditional ‘murderer’ and once we get beyond the ‘Travelling Man’ in book one or the vicious serial killer in Dark Hollow (book 2) the books fan out into much wider plots and do not have the major ‘reveals’ you might associate with detective stories. If you were to look back at the early novels in the series, were you aware that Charlie Parker was moving away from the traditional detective novel? Or did it just develop that way over time as the plots unfolded? JOHN: Well, traditional mystery novels always had a very ambivalent relationship, at best, with the supernatural, so the Parker books start out from a point that is slightly at one remove from the tradition and then grow increasingly distant from it. Then again, the connection between the mystery novel and the supernatural is more convoluted than the traditionalists would have us believe, the main point of contact being the common roots of the two genres in the Gothic. I think, as I progressed, I came to understand that I could experiment and readers would follow, but the experimentation had to be gradual. Those early books retain a certain ambiguity about the supernatural elements – they could simply be manifestations of Parker’s guilt and grief – which is slowly dispensed with as the series progresses. That was entirely deliberate. I suppose it was a case of saying to the reader, “Okay, you accept A, so it’s not too much to ask you also to accept B. Are you comfortable with B? Right, how about C?” I think I have some readers who, had they been told at the start where the novels might lead them, might have been reluctant to pick them up on the grounds that they had a particular conception of the mystery novel, one that didn’t allow for the intrusion of the anti-rational. But some of the books are more traditional than others. The Dirty South, for example, is a very traditional kind of thriller. I wanted to see what would happen if I set aside all – or most – of the elements with which I as a writer, and the reader, had become comfortable. Every book should be an experiment. Each should try something new. Otherwise, I can’t progress, and I can’t learn, and the result will be that the series atrophies. GNOH: I am particular when it comes to reading a series in the correct order and whilst reading Charlie Parker often wondered how a casual reader might find being parachuted into random parts of the series? For example, A Bag of Bones (book 17), is a direct sequel to its predecessor and new readers may well be perplexed by talk of ‘Not Gods’ and ‘Principal Backers’. Which books might you identify as good entry points for those readers who may not want to start at book one? JOHN: I’m not a purist at all. Like a lot of writers, I suspect, I find it hard to recommend the earlier books because I hope I’ve at least improved slightly since then. Then again, it’s a source of profound relief to me when someone comes to the series for the first time and finds that those first novels still stand up. I like The Black Angel, The Wolf in Winter, and The Dirty South. They’re natural starting points for a new reader and are almost deliberately constructed to be so. GNOH: I often recommend Charlie Parker to readers in the horror community, one fellow reviewer (who shall remain anonymous!) felt that you provided too much background detail which was not pertinent to the main plot. Although this opinion is not something I necessarily agree with, but it’s an interesting point, what do you say to this observation? Or is it just a matter of your particular writing style? JOHN: It’s a stylistic decision. I fully understand that there are readers who just want a writer to get on with the main plot, but I’ve always set out to create interweaving narratives, and I don’t subscribe to the idea of minor characters. What we’re glimpsing in a novel is a kind of Venn diagram, the shaded point at which a series of circles intersect, and each of those circles represents the universe of a single character. Were one to shift the emphasis slightly, like Tom Stoppard does in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the book would be about a completely different character who is the centre of his or her own universe. I’m also very conscious of constructing what feels like a real, lived-in world, because otherwise the intrusion of the otherworldly simply won’t work. I like the idea of creating a world in which the reader can lose themselves, and that detailed world extends now over twenty novels, give or take, and some short stories and novellas. GNOH: My favourite detectives I previously mentioned, including Wallander, Rebus and Bosch get more convincing as their series develops and their cases more complex as the author builds on the earlier cases and developing characters. The same can definitely be said for Charlie Parker, no offence, but I doubt anybody would name the first book, Every Dead Thing as the strongest title in the series. My favourite four Parker novels would be, in no particular order: The Wolf in Winter (12), A Song of Shadows (13), A Tide or Torment (14), and A Book of Bones (17), all of which are later entries in the sequence. Looking back, what are your favourites, or could you pick out any particularly strong groupings of books? JOHN: I think, or hope, I’ve got better from The Wolf in Winter on. That book marked a shift in my writing. But he was also an important book for me stylistically. It’s a piece of literary fiction, but its use of dialogue and white space influenced the Parker books in turn. They’re all products of the same imagination, so perhaps that’s not too surprising. GNOH: I’ve read that the next Parker book, The Nameless Ones, published later this year will be a ‘Louis and Angel’ novel where I presume Charlie has a support role. This was also the case in The Reapers (book 7) which covered a lot of background on these two important characters. Have readers been generally supportive of these occasional departures from the main Parker storyline? Could you tell us a little bit about it? JOHN: Those two characters started out as something approaching light relief, as well as providing readers with a glimpse of a different side to Parker, one that was likeable, even admirable. As the books have gone on, Angel and Louis have deepened along with my understanding of them. It just happened that The Nameless Ones was better suited to them than to Parker, although I’m sure, had I wanted to, I could have made him a major character in the story rather than someone who makes an appearance only for a couple of chapters. The book does tie very much into the larger narrative, though, and Parker’s dead daughter is arguably more important to the story than he is. GNOH: Which author, living or dead, would you most like to notice reading a Charlie Parker novel on a train? JOHN: I wonder if Ross Macdonald would have enjoyed them. He was a big influence on me – not so much stylistically, but more in terms of the philosophy of the books and their conception of empathy. I suspect he might not have liked them, but who knows? Actually, in a recent John Sandford novel Virgil Flowers has a conversation with a fellow policeman about Every Dead Thing, and they both compliment the book. That meant a lot to me as I have been reading Sandford since long before I was published, and I think he’s a hugely underrated writer. It also made up for a much longer exchange in an Ed McBain novel many years ago, in which Meyer Meyer and Fat Ollie Weeks are absolutely horrible about me and one of my books. In my first books, and some subsequent ones, I namechecked writers and characters I’d loved as a doffing of the cap. One of those was McBain, who was my introduction to mystery fiction, so there’s a character called Fat Ollie Watts. McBain, who was very sensitive to perceived slights, never mind plagiarism, took it amiss. Later the concept of someone paying tribute was explained to him, and we had a pleasant chat in which he kind of apologized. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that if someone you admire reads your work, you take your chances… GNOH: John, it has been an absolute pleasure having you on the site. I hope you enjoy the accompanying article which ranks the novels. Apologies to those at the bottom end of the scale, they are all still worth five stars on Amazon or Good Reads! The best of luck with The Nameless Ones, I cannot wait to find out what Angel and Louis are up to but am sure Charlie will be lurking in the background to save them from harm! Tony Jones The Nameless Ones: A Charlie Parker Thriller In Amsterdam, four people are butchered in a canal house, their remains arranged around the crucified form of their patriarch, De Jaager: fixer, go-between, and confidante of the assassin named Louis. The men responsible for the murders are Serbian war criminals. They believe they can escape retribution by retreating to their homeland. They are wrong. For Louis has come to Europe to hunt them down: five killers to be found and punished before they can vanish into the east. There is only one problem. The sixth. TODAY ON THE GINGER NUTS OF HORROR WEBSITE FILM GUTTER REVIEWS: FREEWAY (DIR. MATTHEW BRIGHT,1996) THE HEART AND SOUL OF AUTHOR INTERVIEWS Comments are closed.
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