John Connolly’s latest Charlie Parker adventure is also the first – chronologically. Set before Every Dead Thing, The Dirty South sees Parker in Arkansas in 1997, checking to see if the deaths of two black girls is in any way linked to the deaths of his wife and daughter (read our review here). During lockdown, he also penned a novella, The Sisters Strange, a chapter per day – which will be appearing in book form next year. He also found time to chat with Paul Simpson about all things Parker…

 

It was very surprising seeing Parker referred to as “Bird” in The Dirty South. That threw me – when did he last get called Bird Parker in one of the books?

Yes, one of the lovely things about a prequel is that you can maybe undo things.

What interested me about [writing a prequel] I think was the possibility that you could maybe read the books differently afterwards. That was interesting. Not reverse or retro engineering or retrofitting them but to actually give a different perspective on events. That’s what appealed to me, that there should be an element of playfulness to it. That was one of those things: where did this name come from? When I was a young man I thought maybe having a nickname for a character was kind of cool but even when I was writing the book, he was not comfortable with it and I very quickly got rid of it.

I always think of Ian Rankin giving Rebus a past in the SAS and then you get a couple of books in and it’s like [he’s thought] ‘Really, I shouldn’t have done that’ and so you find a way to quietly excise things from the books. We should learn as we go along.

That was part of the interest: to see if there were things that I could do with it that would enable people to read the books, especially Every Dead Thing, slightly differently in the light of it.

I’ve said to you before that every book should be an experiment and part of this was to see what happens if you take away all of the stuff that people like about the books. What if you take away the supernatural element that for many people is kind of integral to the series now? What if you take away his likeability? This is not a man you’d want to hang around with. He’s traumatised and he’s angry and he’s grief stricken, he’s self destructive and he hasn’t become the character that he becomes about halfway through Every Dead Thing. There’s a risk involved I suppose, it’s not just, ‘Oh look cuddly young Morse’ maybe, it doesn’t work in quite that way.

So, we shall see. In so far as I can be with the book, I’m happy with what I set out to achieve, for good or bad.

When did you first think about doing this prequel? Was it something you’ve had at the back of your mind for some time?

It wasn’t really there. I had written that quite long, what became a six book sequence [which also included] a novella and eight short stories by the end of it. I thought that I needed to take a break. I needed to give myself breathing space to figure out where I was going to go next and give the readers breathing space.

One of the difficulties of writing a series is that, yes, you build up a certain reader loyalty which is absolutely wonderful, but the downside is that it becomes increasingly difficult for new readers to join. Especially, I suppose, a series like this one which relies on interconnections and on reader memory for effectiveness, and so, every so often I’m quite conscious of giving a little plateau where perhaps a new reader can join the conversation.

My fear is [becoming like] season eight of The X-Files you know, where you need a degree in X-Files studies to understand it. I think a series can become quite intimidating [for new readers] because they think “Well, this is a conversation that some people have been having for twenty years.” It’s like joining a group in a pub that’s been meeting for twenty years and you’re the new neighbour. You think it’s much easier to find a group of people who barely know each other. So it’s very important, I think, to allow entry points into the series and let people feel like, “Well, I don’t have to have read eighteen books or six books” because series readers often are quite purist about it as well and will tell you that You must start at the beginning, if you don’t we’re going to come round to your house and we’re gonna beat you up and we’re going to hold your dog hostage, you will read!

It was really halfway through writing A Book of Bones, which was so long and so dependant on what came before, that [I realised] if every book is a reaction to the one that came before it then the natural things is to do something that has nothing before it, where you’re almost starting with a clean slate.

It’s interesting because A Book of Bones was promoted as, “Now it’s time for the answers about Charlie Parker” and now we’ve got this one which is finding out his beginnings. With Parker, were there things that you’d have liked to have done with him in the situations he finds himself in this book that you just knew were wrong for ‘young Parker’, for want of a better term…

That wryness, that self awareness isn’t there at all and can’t be, no more than it was with me – I was in my early thirties. Those are things you acquire as you go through life and therefore you have to cushion it so that other characters take on some of that weight. You don’t want it to be a relentlessly grim book, so he is quite deliberately surrounded by people who are older than him and have some of that self awareness and that wryness. It takes some of the pressure off him a little bit, I think, to be that person, and it makes him stand out more, makes him look more awkward. When he goes into a room, he’s almost like a sulky teenager. Where somebody says “My God, save me from these young curs who are bickering and barking at each other”, the older guys know that you sit back and the older Parker would know that. But that’s quite interesting. That was the reason for doing it, to put myself in the shoes of this very different, very angry man.

The difficulty in writing the book I think was that it’s set, effectively, almost a quarter of a century ago and suddenly you realise you’re writing historical fiction. I would struggle to write about Dublin twenty-five years ago. I grew up here, but the city has changed so much I can barely remember details. I think we all have those experiences where you think, “How could there be a restaurant there because there wasn’t a building there? Did they drop in a building and I didn’t see it?”

Obviously I didn’t grow up in Arkansas in the 1980s and 90s, I have no knowledge of what the place looked like there. Where did people go to shop? What beers were around? What was happening? And so you realise that what seems like something that’s going to be quite a simple exercise, actually starts to [be more complicated], because it suddenly becomes an act of almost archaeology and deep historical research.

I had to find people who lived during that period and who were aware of the intricacies of law enforcement and government at the time. And thankfully, all I can do now is put out feelers, so you ask somebody who asks somebody who asks somebody who says I know a guy, and then you send an email to the guy and say look, somebody said you might be able to help.

That’s kind of what happened, two people, one was a lovely policeman who helped me with the research – I think he was the research person for True Detective, just an immensely generous man. And also, when I was over there I had tweeted a picture of what hotel I was in. It looked like The Overlook, this extraordinary hotel, eeriest place I’ve ever stayed, and somebody said, “Oh, you’re clearly in my state”. It was a lovely lady named Rebecca and she and her husband helped. Just over coffee they were prepared to say “Yes, we grew up here, here’s what it was like in that period” and so suddenly you begin amassing this information that you need.

Then I sent [the manuscript] to them and said, “Look, please, if I’ve got something wrong I don’t mind being told it but I don’t want to make it into the book.” I think [the policeman] made one correction about a gun. He said that model probably wouldn’t have been around at that time; that was the only thing. He had been so generous and he had served in every facet of Arkansas law enforcement for years, so any question I had, he knew the answer to.

He was a gift. The only place we could find open was a Burger King, so it cost me about 95c I think for a coffee. but I just would have sat there all afternoon listening to him. Just extraordinary anecdotes and insights. He’s a very interesting and generous man.

Is the Arkansas element set up in Every Dead Thing?

No, there’s no mention at all.

The research was hard but what was really difficult was having to read my own book. And I know that’s not a great advert for the book…

No, I know exactly what you mean. You go back in and you see everything that everybody else has probably seen and been very kind about!

Oh God, yeah and I actually couldn’t read it all, I had to give it to [my wife] Jenny, and she read it. And again something I’ve never done was show her the manuscript. She read the manuscript and then she read Every Dead Thing and she spotted things that I had forgotten. She said I was so in thrall to my influences.

It feels quite mannered, the style. If you read The Dirty South and Every Dead Thing they won’t really seem like they were written by the same person, it’s just not possible. The dialogue is quite stylised and was very much enthralled by a particular image of noir fiction, because it’s taken me twenty years just to begin to find my voice. I really didn’t have it then. She spared me torture. I rely a little bit on people like Claire and sometimes readers to pick up errors because I can’t bring myself to go back over my own work.

Like I said, it’s not the greatest advert for it but it’s the truth. It’s not laziness it’s just, there’s only so much cringing you can do before your spine hurts. (laughs)

Slightly sidetracking a bit but why Arkansas?

I’d never done it, I’d never done Arkansas.

Fair enough.

It was literally that but also, in preparation for the book, I’d been reading books about that period and there were two things:

I found an article about two murders in Mississippi a little bit after the period in which the book is set where it was quite clear that the institutions of local law enforcement and the state had colluded in the cover up of the murder of these two girls. I realised that actually that probably wouldn’t have happened further north; that element of historical weight and historical shadowing wouldn’t have had the same impact, I think.

So then immediately you’re thinking, “Well actually, for what I want to do, the South would probably allow me to do that” because these two young black women in the books are victims of prejudice and poverty. You could do poverty further north certainly, prejudice not so much.

Also it was a period, during the Clinton administration, when a great deal of money was pouring into the South. He did pay people back and particularly the aerospace industry, the defence industry. The South did very very well out of that and there were towns that were literally prepared to sell themselves to a company. They were so poor that if you wanted to come in and build a factory all the regulations would be set aside, if you wanted to essentially take over the police force, if you wanted your private security, they didn’t care because actually people had no money.

It was the perfect setting for something like this. It wasn’t simply that I just stuck a pin in the map and went, “let’s stick it there”. There is actually a cushion for the book there that suited the themes of it and so it was almost ideal.

I think the other thing is that none of those incidents would be isolated.

If you were a poor black man or woman in the South, until quite recently, the law was not going to function for you in the same way that it did for the wealthy, a lot more than it ever does for the wealthy and powerful. It’s funny: only yesterday I was going through all of my backlog of emails I’d built up through the website and it was one of those days where I got a slew of… what did they call me? “A literary bully, a typical mean spirited liberal” (laughs). I get a lot of that; every so often I’ll get two or three out of every batch that would be a bit like that. And I always have to point out the same thing: because I’m not American my conception of liberalism and conservatism are very different, but the view my books take is that the vulnerable and the poor should not be subject to the predations of the wealthy and the powerful. For me, that’s Christianity, that’s got nothing at all to do with being a liberal or a conservative and kindness. and so it’s a factor in the books as well.

That idea that because of their colour, because of their position in society, the killings of these young women are not being investigated to the same degree, they are sacrifices to the altar of greater prosperity for all. It’s an interesting argument that I liked when I was writing the book: having gone from a series where there were these quite grotesque villains, these otherworldly figures, the evil in The Dirty South was really mundane and understandable and actually for a lot of it, doesn’t even qualify as evil.

It’s simply people thinking, “Actually, we’re so poor if we can just sideline this for a little while. It’s not that we don’t care but if you can just not do all of this dreadful investigating which is going to draw a lot of attention to it, just put the paperwork aside and then we’ll apply all our resources to stopping this – but for now this is the only chance we’ll ever have of all of our people being raised up.” That’s a quite potent argument: at what point do the rights of the many outweigh the rights of the few?

There’s a banality of evil.

Oh yes, there is. Perfectly understandable. It’s human weakness, it’s human frailty and the interesting thing is who in the same position would not, even for a second, countenance the same thing?

I was looking up the period and it was still unusual to have female police officers in the South, in the late 90s there just weren’t that many of them. They actually got newspaper articles about them. You really wouldn’t have had very many black police officers to the same degree and certainly not in positions of authority. So inevitably you’re ending up writing a book that’s actually consists of male authority figures looking into the deaths and the lives of women and minorities, without any balancing factor. There’s a moment in the book where the Reverend says to Parker “You’re the white saviour”. And it’s very important that Parker says, ‘Actually I don’t care about any of you, I’m actually blind in those terms because actually I really don’t care. I just want to leave’.

I’m quite conscious as a writer that the book is open potentially to accusations of misogyny because it’s quite difficult to find that balance or at the very least not any empowered female figures. And the only argument is that by and large actually in that structure then there really weren’t that many, if any at all.

I was wondering if Louis and Angel would make an appearance…

Yes, there was a sense of: “And special guest star Lorne Green”!

It would have been very difficult had they not been in it at all and they gave a moment of brief lightness of tone. If Parker can’t provide it then we need to bring it in from elsewhere.

I was very conscious of the fact that “here they come” but if it cheers up the reader, what’s the harm in it?

I think they arrived at the right place. I think that having them as Parker’s adjuncts, which they sometimes can be (and he can sometimes be theirs), wouldn’t have worked, but there were moments about halfway through where I thought, “We actually need Angel here just putting the fear of the living God into one or two of these characters”. Equally then that could potentially overbalance the book out of being a noir thriller into a Parker thriller.

Yes. And it was very conscious. Just as A Book of Bones was a way of saying “Here’s how I might write a British police procedural within the context of these books”, this was “Here’s how I might write a very straight American thriller in the context of these books”. A book that doesn’t have the supernatural element, a book that doesn’t have that metaphysicality, I suppose, that some of the later novels have and yet, at the same time, you don’t want to remove your identity entirely from it because there are plenty of books that do that far better.

You try to find ways to keep some element of the familiar in it and I suppose that’s why, again, it was important maybe that there was a nod to Angel and Louis, in some form. That awareness that they are there, that this is part of this continuum, even if it’s the initial stage of it.

Would you go back further in Parker’s life?

There’s a little part of me that thinks it’s interesting, and yet at the same time it’s so difficult, for those reasons I said earlier, that idea of writing historical fiction. It’s just a minefield, there’s so much you can get wrong and if I thought about it, it would have to be him as a policeman.

The hardest book of the series to write has been The Lovers and that was a nightmare to write, absolute nightmare. Even with the assistance of policemen writing it, there was still so much that I didn’t get right. They knew their specific areas but there were other areas they were less familiar with and I wasn’t always in a position to have someone that I could turn to for that book. So I was relying on someone saying, “Well actually this is probably what we would have done” and then later on down the line, some people said “Actually we wouldn’t”. OK, most people don’t care and most people aren’t even going to notice.

Yes but you do.

I do and it niggles at me, so they’re very difficult. I would perhaps like to do it and I’m not sure what would be there really. I’m not sure what the purpose of it would be. I could see the purpose with The Dirty South.

Unless it’s a flashback within something in the future.

Yes, I suppose I could go back again, The Lovers did that a little bit. I think it’s possible that down the line that I might do it but when I go back to the Parker books you’re kind of in the home straight.

The next book is an Angel and Louis book essentially so that’s pretty much done and then after that, I’d like to do something else before we go into the Parker series again but I haven’t decided what.

Anything else along the lines of He [Connolly’s life of Stan Laurel]?

Literally from where I’m sitting I can see all my research books and I have assembled a library of stuff for the other book that I had in mind at the time. Which, in terms of historical fiction went much further back. I’d love to do it, it’s just a question of time.

At the moment I’m writing the first draft of the screenplay for The Book of Lost Things and that’s taken up much more time than I thought it was going to take. I’ve never written a screenplay before and it turns out it’s really hard!

Who knew?

Who knew, yes!

I’m not naturally a collaborator and that’s been very difficult because the way I write is that nobody sees what I write until I deliver it, and I’ve reached the stage where thankfully editing is a pretty light touch. So to have people, when you deliver something, go, “Well actually this is all very good but it’s not what we want”. You really have to go back and go, “OK how do I give you what you want while also retaining something of the identity of my book?” You use up a lot of mental energy in ways that I hadn’t anticipated.

I remember when you were talking about doing the Invaders series with Jenny that you were clearly outside your comfort zone.

Oh God yes, poor Jenny, the suffering that woman endured. But I don’t think it’s a natural fit for a lot of modern writers. Some novelists, someone like Nick Hornby seems to make the transition relativity easily. Maybe it’s a matter of habit.

I’m sure when I said I’d do it the filmmakers went “Great” and gritted their teeth slightly –“God, I thought we’d dodged that bullet” – but it’s not the first time someone’s tried to adapt The Book of Lost Things. They have never quite worked for anybody and actually down the line looking at it, I’ve been quite ruthless with the book.

Which probably is because – don’t take this the wrong way but I can’t think of a better way to phrase it – you don’t have the respect for it that other people do

Yes, that’s probably it. I think it’s mine and I’ll always remember that Jean-Jacques Annaud when he made The Name of The Rose saying it’s a palimpsest, which I always thought was a really interesting way of putting it. And so, when I’m writing the screenplay I’m particularly conscious of the people who read it as teenagers who had gone through grief or loss who are quite possessive of the book. They have

instances in it that they love, but when I wrote out the treatment for it, the treatment was four hours long. When we went through it and had everything that everybody wanted in it, it was unfilmable.

Dennis Lehane did a very interesting little introduction in The Guardian to a new edition of one of Elmore Leonard’s books coming out and he made a really interesting point: he said the difference between film and a book is the difference between plot and story. Films rely on plot, books rely on story. Stories meander, and part of the point of them is that the journey is the story itself, but a film needs plot. Everything needs to have a reason for being there in a very different way.

I realised he’d expressed something that I had gradually come to understand. You then look at your work in a different way, you begin to think, “If I’m not beholden to story and I’m beholden to something else, this has no place. It’s very interesting and I love the imagery but it has no place in furthering the plot” and so you become then quite good at excising things from the book. So now it’s down to about two hours.

I think TV has returned us more to story than plot. You have that space to have an episode where nothing happens. We’re watching The Sopranos and that’s almost entirely conversational; The Wire where you think actually it’s furthering character, it’s not necessarily contributing directly to plot. That is a very novelistic approach.

So, you’ve got the Angel and Louis book and The Sisters Strange. How did that come about?

I was trying to give people something that made up for the late publication of The Dirty South.

That’s taken up more time as well so now I’m writing the script, revising the Angel and Louis book and trying to write every day a section of The Sisters Strange so it can go to three different translators and then to their editors who check it again and send back. Logistically it’s a nightmare! It seemed really simple at the time, even though doing it in English would have been difficult, but doing it in four languages is very difficult but a challenge because again, it’s not the way I write.

The first thing I thought when I saw that you were doing it was “he’s given himself a challenge for Covid-19”.

That’s exactly it because I suddenly found I had, not a lot more time on my hands but a little bit more. I wasn’t going to have to do the three weeks I’d set by in April for promotions and cons. I wanted to do something reasonably constructive with that little bit of extra time.

One of the things about being a writer is that no one sees it until it’s finished so if you make an error in chapter two and you only realise in chapter forty, you can go back and tweak it and all the machinery works again. This doesn’t work that way: once you’ve written something down you’re committed to it, you can’t change it.

It’s like a TV series putting new episodes out each week.

Yes, it’s very similar, so you have to live with what you’ve done, and yet the way I write means that I still don’t know where it’s going so that retroactive tweaking is not open to me. It’s not quite by the seat of your pants but it is an experiment that might fail – but it is a chance for people to look underneath the bonnet a little bit.

But also, if you’re going to fail, fail gloriously.

Yes and it’s fun. And the idea as well was that I think people are looking at their phones so much that it had to be something you could read without skimming on a phone, and I think that’s limited to six or seven hundred words. After that people tend to be flicking through it.

Even with this, it becomes more dialogue-driven almost naturally because dialogue is a very easy way to ensure that people don’t skip and are also able to progress quite easily. Yes it’s been interesting to do.

The Dirty South is out now from Hodder; click here to order from Amazon.co.uk