John Connolly - ProfilesArchive

About Me

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John Connolly was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1968 and has, at various points in his life, worked as a journalist, a barman, a local government official, a waiter and a dogsbody at Harrods department store in London. He studied English in Trinity College, Dublin and journalism at Dublin City University, subsequently spending five years working as a freelance journalist for The Irish Times newspaper, to which he continues to contribute.
His first novel, Every Dead Thing , was published in 1999, and introduced the character of Charlie Parker, a former policeman hunting the killer of his wife and daughter. Dark Hollow followed in 2000. The third Parker novel, The Killing Kind , was published in 2001, with The White Road following in 2002. In 2003, John published his fifth noveland first stand-alone book Bad Men . In 2004, Nocturnes , a collection of novellas and short stories, was added to the list, and 2005 marked the publication of the fifth Charlie Parker novel, The Black Angel . John's seventh novel, The Book of Lost Things , a story about fairy stories and the power that books have to shape our world and our imaginations, was published in September 2006, followed by the next Parker novel, The Unquiet , in 2007, and The Reapers , in 2008. He is currently working on The Lovers which, if he stops pfaffing about, will be published in 2009.
John Connolly is based in Dublin but divides his time between his native city and the United States, where each of his novels has been set.
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My Interests

Gym, a nice glass of wine (generally New World and frequently South African), cooking (Cajun, Thai - hell, anything spicy, basically)

I'd like to meet:

Like my website, I'm hoping that this page will attract people who are interested in books (and not just mine), music, movies and anything else that helps to make the time on this earth pass a little more entertainingly and enjoyably.

Music:

I don't consider spending money on books or music to be a vice, so I'm a big CD buyer. (Still haven't quite fallen for downloading, on the basis that, if it doesn't make a sound when I drop it, then I'm not sure that I've actually been sold anything.) So far, I've put together two compilation CDs to go with two of my books, The Black Angel, and The Unquiet, and the music included on those CDs is a fair reflection of my musical tastes, which are pretty wide. The first CD contained songs by the following bands and artists: Lullaby for the Working Class; Red House Painters; Hem; Lambchop; Kate Bush; The Go-Betweens; The Walkabouts; Beachwood Sparks; Neko Case; Thee More Shallows; Pinetop Seven; The Triffids; Radar Brothers; and The Blue Nile. The second CD includes music by Nickel Creek; Sufjan Stevens; Midlake; Low; Willard Grant Conspiracy; The Czars; Efterklang; Hood; Woven Hand; Starless & Bible Black; The National; The Delgados; Jim White; Espers; and Phelan Sheppard.

Movies:

Perhaps surprisingly, when I look at my DVD collection (and my videos, having come of age in the eighties), I see that much of it is given over to comedy: Laurel & Hardy (never much cared for Charlie Chaplin, on the grounds that he didn't seem content to make me laugh. I was supposed to cry as well.); W.C. Fields; Steve Martin; The Marx Brothers . . . There's also a lot of Hitchcock, some sci-fi (John Carpenter's The Thing, the Alien quartet), and a bunch of classic westerns (Peckinpah, some John Wayne), action movies (Southern Comfort), and police thrillers (The French Connection).

Television:

Like most of my peers, I'm a huge admirer of David Simon and The Wire. I've also become addicted to watching TV series on DVD, as I miss so many when I travel. Therefore, along with the movies listed above, my shelves groan with The Sopranos, Deadwood, Six Feet Under, The West Wing, assorted Family Guy and South Park sets, and lots of vintage British comedy, particularly Dad's Army and the collected Ronnie Barker.

Books:

I'm a voracious reader, but if I had to list a few favourites off the top of my head . . .

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
six nonlectures (and Collected Poems) by e.e.cummings
The Lonely Guy by Bruce Jay Friedman
The Jeeves and Wooster stories of P.G. Wodehouse
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
War & Peace by Leo Tolstoy and Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (okay, I know those two make me sound like a pseud, but they were two books with which I thought I'd struggle, but instead loved, and have read more than once.)
In mystery fiction, I've been very influenced by James Lee Burke and Ross Macdonald.

Heroes:

I don't know that I have many heroes. There are people - often writers or artists or musicians - whom I admire, but I'm not sure they're heroes, exactly. In fact, I'm not sure that I entirely trust the concept of heroes . . .

My Blog

A Work of Incandescent Beauty

Greetings from sunny Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the most difficult part of the current jaunt: four flights in four days, each of them early in the morning, and each taking me to places that are a li...
Posted by John Connolly on Sat, 14 Jun 2008 11:31:00 PST

On Nostalgia

Let me start by saying that I'm not proud of myself for what I've done. In retrospect, it was the wrong thing, but I couldn't help myself. I'm a man, and I have needs. There was a woman involved, of c...
Posted by John Connolly on Sat, 14 Jun 2008 11:30:00 PST

On THE CHILL by Ross Macdonald

Ross Macdonald, or Kenneth Millar, to give him his true name, described The Chill (1963) as having "my most horrible plot yet". It is, in many ways, an angry, haunted book into which he channeled his ...
Posted by John Connolly on Tue, 29 Apr 2008 10:50:00 PST

Flashback

First of all, thank you to all those who offered suggestions as to how I might retrieve the chapters of The Lovers that I accidentally overwrote last month. Unfortunately - or fortunately, depending u...
Posted by John Connolly on Mon, 14 Apr 2008 12:26:00 PST

HELL

While computers have done a great deal to make a writer’s life easier, there is one way in which words on a screen can never improve on paper. Barring a fire, or a careless spring clean of a ro...
Posted by John Connolly on Sat, 22 Mar 2008 08:50:00 PST

The Black Book

I'm in a rented apartment in Maine, trying to get some work done on THE LOVERS before returning to Europe and the various commitments that will keep from writing as much as I might wish during the wee...
Posted by John Connolly on Thu, 21 Feb 2008 11:37:00 PST

ON WRITING, AND DISTRACTIONS FROM WRITING

Five chapters into THE LOVERS, the new Parker book, and just as I'm starting to hit my stride, I realize that I'm now going to be sidetracked for a while. In an ideal world, there would be one book u...
Posted by John Connolly on Mon, 14 Jan 2008 12:32:00 PST

The Response

My American and British editors have now read, and offered their opinions on, THE REAPERS. The manuscript went out to them last month and, as is usually the case, my British editor read it first, and...
Posted by John Connolly on Sat, 22 Dec 2007 10:13:00 PST

To Be, or Not To Be (A Classic)

I've been wondering what constitutes a 'classic' of fiction. I hasten to add that this isn't some random problem to be addressed, in case readers are entertaining visions of me seated in my smoking ...
Posted by John Connolly on Wed, 19 Dec 2007 02:43:00 PST

THE ERLKING

This week has been spent attempting to get to grips with the script for the proposed film of The Erlking. I've never attempted a script before, and it's been a frustrating task at times, largely beca...
Posted by John Connolly on Sun, 25 Nov 2007 12:28:00 PST