John Connolly - Every Dead Thing

[andydecker]

John Connolly - Every Dead Thing (Hodder & Stoughton, 1999, posted edition Pocket Star Books, 2000, 467 pages)

Often talked about in the Vault, John Connolly is an Irish journalist and writer. This first novel is the start of a series, featuring American ex cop Charlie "Bird" Parker, living in Maine, whose wife and little daugther were killed by a serial killer which he is still hunting years later. His later cases often develop supernatural elements.

He gets some assistance from his friends Angel and Louis, a gay couple, one a thief, the other a hit man. Despite the supernatural elements is Parker no occult detective, these stories are more akin to Heart of Darkness  with their dark and desperate atmosphere, cults, serial killers and violent happenings. Some describe them as Lovecraftian, which may be misleading. A lot of crime tv shows rely on this kind of darkness, productions like the first season of True Detective or Hannibal. Parker has achieved some truly grim and gruesome writing in this series.

The novel was nominated for the Stoker award in the category First Novel and won the Shamus Award as best First P. I. novel. There are 20 Parker novels currently in print.

[Dr Strange]

I don't know where to start. I've been gently suggesting this series to Vault members for a while. Now I might need to try to say something more concrete about individual entries, which means I might need to re-read them from the beginning. 20 books in total so far. Fuck. But I love these books - Connolly is a genius, and the comparison to Thomas Harris is (frankly) an insult; Harris is a total hack in comparison to Connolly (I've read Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal) - Connolly does everything better than Harris (characterization, dialogue, setting, action, factual background). And his writing genuinely is "lyrical".

Parker is introduced as a well-worn cliche (cop with alcohol abuse issues and domestic problems) but very quickly becomes something else altogether. The apparent supernatural elements are easily dismissed early on as a product of his alcoholism and grief, but it soon becomes clear that there is far more to it than that. The more "Lovecraftian" aspects take a while to surface, but they are pretty much up-front-and-central by the time we get to A Time of Torment (#14, 2016) or so. Louis and Angel are a brilliant invention, great sidekicks, probably worthy of a series of their own - but there are loads of other great characters who move in and out of the story arc, and Connolly doesn't shirk from killing some of them off when you least expect (or want) it to happen. And those who survive are permanently changed, clearly ageing, with who knows how long left on the clock. (I've just realised I might be avoiding the most recent novels because I don't want to deal with the possibility of some of these characters dying. Fuck, when did I get to be this pathetic?) The first series of True Detective has some validity as a comparison - but, to be honest, nothing else I can think of does, apart from some (seeming) straight-up rip-offs like James Oswald's Edinburgh-based DI Tony McLean (currently running to 12 books, but whose story arc has shown the opposite trajectory with the occult elements becoming less prominent over the run of the series).

Here's an excerpt from Every Dead Thing:

    The patrol car arrived first on the night they died, shedding red light into the darkness. Two patrolmen entered the house, quickly yet cautiously, aware that they were responding to a call from one of their own, a policeman who had become a victim instead of the resort of victims.
    I sat in the hallway with my head in my hands as they entered the kitchen of our Brooklyn home and glimpsed the remains of my wife and child. I watched as one conducted a brief search of the upstairs rooms while the other checked the living room, the dining room, all the time the kitchen calling them back, demanding that they bear witness.
    I listened as they radioed for the Major Crime Scene Unit, informing them of a probable double homicide. I could hear the shock in their voices, yet they tried to communicate what they had seen as dispassionately as they could, like good cops should. Maybe, even then, they suspected me. They were policemen and they, more than anyone else, knew what people were capable of doing, even one of their own.
    And so they remained silent, one by the car and the other in the hallway beside me, until the detectives pulled up outside, the ambulance following, and they entered our home, the neighbours already gathering on their stoops, at their gates, some moving closer to find out what had happened, what could have been visited on the young couple beyond, the couple with the little blond girl.

[andydecker]

The comparison with Harris is indeed pretty absurd. Connolly is so much the superior writer, he is easily up with the best of his peers in this regard, but without writing pastiche.

Here is another small, throwaway passage from the second novel which stayed with me for some reason, the narrator remembering an old small-time con man he knew. It is as good as Chandler, McDonald or Hunter without trying too hard or being pretentious.

Saul had never married. "A married man's a mark for his wife', Saul would say. "Never marry, unless she's richer than you, dumber than you, and prettier than you. Anything less than that, you're a pigeon.'
He was wrong, of course. I married a woman who took walks in the park with me, who made love to me and gave me a child, and whom I never really knew until she was gone. Saul Mann never had that joy; he was so worried about becoming a mark that life swindled him without him even noticing. […]
I watched him work the crowds, and I learned as I watched. He targeted the elderly, the greedy, the desperate, the ones who were so uncertain of themselves that they would trust another man's judgment above their own. He sometimes went for the dumb ones, but he knew the dumb ones could turn mean, or that maybe they wouldn't have enough cash to make the scam worthwhile, or that they sometimes possessed a low cunning which made them naturally distrusted.

Connolly is a bit of a baffling success for me because he demands a bit of effort and concentration from the reader, which in this genre can be difficult.

I will post a few more of his early novels in the next time, which have some at least decent covers before they became as bland as the rest of the genre.

[Dr Strange]

Apart from the Charlie Parker novels, the only other things by Connolly I have read are his first collection of short stories (Nocturnes, 2004), the short story "Lazarus" (in the zombie anthology The New Dead 2010, aka Zombie: An Anthology of the Undead, ed. Christopher Golden), and the non-Parker novel (though he has a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo appearance) Bad Men from 2003. His short stories are pretty good, and there is one novella-length Charlie Parker story in Nocturnes ("The Reflecting Eye") - other stories in that collection are deliberate homages/pastiches on MRJ, Ray Bradbury, and the like. Bad Men is generic, formulaic, Stephen King style horror - instantly forgettable and hard to believe it was written by the same person as the Charlie Parker books. But Connolly has also written a lot of other stuff that hasn't appealed enough for me to give it a go - including YA fantasy (The Book of Lost Things from 2006, and the Samuel Johnson v. The Darkness trilogy from 2009, 2011, and 2013), a second short story collection (Night Music: Nocturnes 2 from 2015, which also seems to be more fantasy than horror), he: A Novel from 2017 (a "literary imagining" of the life of Stan Laurel), and a 2018 monograph on the 1972 film Horror Express.

[andydecker]

He must be a workaholic. To write so much in nearly 25 years and keeping this level of quality is a achievement. He has my respect.

[jamesdoig]

I'm about a third of the way through The Nameless Ones, and it's just as good as the other Charlie Parker books, though this one focuses on Louis. I've always found him an easy read - effortless prose, his dialogue is always amusing and he has this knack of finding the right word or phrase. He comes on marketing trips to Australia from time to time - the last time was for the prospective last Charlie Parker book, A Book of Bones. He also spoke about that odd book he wrote about Stan Laurel, which has friendship between blokes as its theme - something that never much gets talked about. I dug this up from one of his earlier visits - must have been for the Black Angel.