John Connolly met up with our Spanish Literary Editor at the Tapa Café in Madrid, Spain - taking a break during his signing sessions at the 2026 Madrid Book Fair.
We’d been excited following the release of A RIVER RED WITH BLOOD as John Parker reviewed the book and spoke with the author [archived HERE] earlier this year.
John Connolly’s Spanish publisher Tusquets had brought him over from Dublin to promote Los Hijos de Eva (The Children of Eve), which has just been released throughout Spain.
John Connolly’s work, especially his Charlie Parker Detective Series has worldwide appeal outside of the English speaking territories. This has made John Connolly travel the world to meet his readers.
Our Spanish Editor sat down with John Connolly previously in 2019 in Aviles at the Celsius 232 festival of literature just prior to the world entering the COVID-19 pandemic. So it was with great pleasure that thanks to Clair Lamb that John Parker got the opportunity to sit down with the award winning and bestselling writer in Spain.
John Parker: How are you, sir?
John Connolly: John! It’s nice to meet you again.
JP: Likewise. So how’s it going? I guess you’re here for the promotion of the new book for Spain? [The Children of Eve]
JC: Well, they haven't billed me for my hotel room, so I suppose it's probably all right. You know, the Spanish language market is very important for me. I'm off to Chile and Argentina later this year to promote there. The reason why I've learned Spanish is to be able to communicate with people here because of the success of the books. They've been longstanding publishers there. They've been with me from the beginning. I haven't changed. So it seems to be going grand. Here, France, Italy, some countries with a Catholic heritage have less of a problem with the mix in the books than, say, Germany or Scandinavia, where I've always struggled to get a foothold. I think they don't like the combination in the books. So Spain has always been kind of a friendly ground for me.
JP: We're all wondering when you'll make it back to Aviles for the Celsius 232 festival?
JC: Yeah, that was a really nice festival. Yeah, I've done a couple. I was in Valencia a few years back for their festival.
JP: Meanwhile, A River Red With Blood has been published recently; the 23rd book. People are counting, apparently. There’s a lot of talk about what's happening. I don't want to give away any spoilers. Louis, Angel and Charlie seem to be a bit closer than we thought they were a few books back. Can you comment on that?
JC: Yeah. The books are obviously moving towards a conclusion. But it's the farming out of that information, doling it out at appropriate times, I think. You know, most writers just die. We don't give conclusions to series. We die. And if either the books live on as back lists or if you're sufficiently successful, your publisher hires some hack who has his name letters in tiny letters underneath yours. But I've always used the novels, certainly The Black Angel, as chapters in a larger narrative. And if that's the case, then that larger narrative requires some kind of conclusion going along. But it's hard to do without annoying or frustrating readers. I've known what I’ve wanted to do with it for quite a long time now.
JP: It seems you do because the Book of Enoch does pop up quite a lot.
JC: Yeah. All of that biblical apocrypha has always figured in the background and will begin kind of coming to the fore as things go on, I think. But it always feels odd. You know, it's funny. When I come over here, similarly in France, I think, you get quite esoteric questions about your work. And what's obvious is that they take genre fiction very seriously. And I find myself going back a little bit and going, you know, I do kind of want to entertain people, too. (laughter) So it is a balancing act. I sometimes get imposter syndrome when I come over here.
JP: Well, A River Red With Blood is the last book published over in England, Ireland and the USA as we’ve said. That is a great novel…
JC: Thank you so much.
JP: But it’s dark….. is it not? (…John looks slightly askew…). A little bit, you know. I mean, there’s the suffering of children and serial killers…
JC: I've got better at leaving it to the imagi ...... you know, there isn't much violence on the page. I’ve kind of, as the books have gone on, I've become, you know, you hope that you're developing a little bit as a writer. And I'm conscious of how I use violence in the books in the way that I wasn't when I was writing in my mid-twenties , you know, the first novel, and even my early thirties. And, you know, people, again, that sense of the books being dark.
JP: That's only my opinion.
JC: Oh, no, I understand. And it is true. I mean, the subject matter is, but the books would be very difficult to read if they didn't have a large dose of humour to them, and a kind of self-awareness. And I think that's there through as well. There is that, you know, you want readers, you don't want it to be an endurance test for readers. That would be awful, you know, that, you know, I kind of want people to get some pleasure from what they're reading. And now I find that I have very little tolerance for books that, mystery novels that don't really seem to have much of a sense of humour, you know, that seem to want to put the readers through the grinder. That's of no interest to me at all. And I, you know, I see this with some of those writers, and I just can't read them, so…
JP: I mean, the banter between Charlie and the others…
JC: …Or just that sense of self, or just as a degree of self-awareness in the books…
JP: …there are some very funny moments, as you say, you know. Serial killers, I mean, there are serial killers in this book. That's not a spoiler - that is very clear…..
JC: I guess they're toxic males. They're the ultimate toxic males. And, you know, your mystery fiction, you know, the word I've been using here all the time is “convivir”. You know, that things can co-exist. And we're in an era of excessive, exceptional toxic males. I mean, we seem to have been in that era for a very long time.
JP: I think so, yeah.
JC: I don't think that's changed very much. It's just that it's more obvious than it was before. And so these are simply the ultimate, they're toxic, entitled males. I don't even think of them as serial killers, oddly enough. I just think of them as unpleasant men.
JP: Well, yeah, but I mean, I'm not completely...
JC: I know what they are, yeah, I know what they are. It's funny but when I think of them, I don't think of them that way I just think of them as just pox balls…
…..(Laughter)….
JP: Deeply, deeply unpleasant.
JC:… to use a technical term.
JP: Yeah, ok , I mean, have you read the book Holly by Stephen King?
JC: Yes, I have, yeah. Yeah, but that has a huge streak of dark humour. I mean, that's one of the most blackly funny books he's written since Misery, I think.
JP: Yeah, I loved it too and I wanted to mention it to you because I know it's a different kind of serial killers book.
JC: No, it is, yeah, but it does have that kind of sense of humour, you know?
JP: Okay. The Charlie Parker books may be biennial from now on, you mentioned. I did an email interview with you a few weeks ago, remember? You said you hadn’t started the new Parker yet. I remember six years ago, you said to me that when you're... you haven't started this one, but six years ago, you told me that normally when you're writing a Charlie book, the seed of the next one pops up somewhere. Is that happening? Are you planning what you're going to do in the next novel? Is it too soon to say?
JC: Well, I'm... I'm in a weird position. Increasingly, I want to do other things. And... There are writers who are able to develop solely within the confines of mystery fiction, and I've never been one of those writers. I needed to move outside and try other things and risk failure, and take lessons and apply them, hopefully, when I come back to the Parker book. So, at the moment... And obviously, next year's book is The Castle, which has been written for a while, but just because Hodder wanted to rejacket the books, I had to jig around the schedule a little bit. So that's done. I'm doing the page proofs in my hotel room at the moment, which is obviously not a Parker book. It's set against the backdrop of the Watergate hearings, but it's really about the contrast between state secrets and family secrets, I suppose. There is a book done, set in England, just before the outbreak of the First World War, which nobody has read.
And I'm writing a book about historiography and the female voice, set in Italy, a good piece of literary fiction. Again, that may never be published. That need to stretch my muscles a little bit. One of the reasons why I don't really do mystery festivals and things anymore, I've lost... I'm interested … (slight pause) ... When you're younger... this is going to sound such arse, but I really think it's true. When you're younger, you want to be the most successful, and you want to get the best reviews and everything. You're in competition with other people a little bit.
As you get older, the only person you're in competition with is yourself. I want to be the only person doing what I'm doing. And that involves going off and following paths that I'm more aware of than ever of that tension between those creative imperatives and those commercial imperatives.
I learned so much about the use of dialogue, the use of white space, even after having published for, at that stage, 17 or 18 years. I wouldn't have learned that just within the confines of the Parker books. Increasingly, that urge to go and experiment, and then to come back to the Parker books, renewed a little bit so I have an idea for the next... that’s kind of simmering away for the next book, and I'll probably start that sometime this year. But I don't know when those other books will... and I don't want to publish two books a year anymore. It's too much like... not so much the promotion and things, but... you know, doing four sets of page proofs, because the Americans have their own, obviously, and then four sets of copy edits. Nobody got into publishing to do more copy edits and page proofs. That's what they pay you to do. That's the hard work.
So I'm in a kind of odd position of having quite a lot of... like if I die, I'll be like Catherine Cookson, where people think, this woman's going nuts somewhere, because the bloody books just keep appearing, and she's supposed to be dead.
…..(Laughter)….
JP: The TV series, you mentioned it to me, the possibility of a Charlie series, I think, Amazon, you said.
JC: It's Amazon and Blumhouse, but we're in... [really]…. in the middle of the process, and these things more often, with all the best will in the world, the people who are doing it are very committed. You know, you're dependent on money from other people. So I strongly suspect that, you know, my grandchildren will dig my skull out of a box and put it on the couch eventually, and say, look, there's Grandad's TV series. All those years ago he dreamed. So yeah, they're looking for a showrunner at the moment, and that showrunner would then be responsible for writing a pilot episode and doing a lot of reorganization material. My only involvement has been to essentially do a 20-page outline so some poor sod doesn't have to read three million words of my deathless prose, you know, that they can kind of come in, because they want to very much pick and choose and reorganize material, which is why I found it interesting. They weren't talking about adapting book after book after book. They were going to do er… that lovely word that Jean-Jacques Annaud did for his adaptation. He did the adaptation of The Name of the Rose, didn't he, all those years ago?
JP: All those years ago in the 80s.
JC: Yeah, he said it was a palimpsest of Umberto Eco's novel.
JP: It was a what, sorry?
JC: It was a palimpsest of Umberto Eco's novel, not an adaptation. And I find that idea interesting, that slavish commitment to the written word doesn't really do any favours for adaptations, I don't think. So somebody who comes in and actually is going to tear the stuff apart and put it together in a new form, that's kind of interesting to me.
JP: I remember in 2019 you mentioned that there was a Charlie Parker script written back then, do you remember that?
JC: I didn't like it. Somebody else did it, not these people. Yeah, it was an awful, I thought it was an awful script. My main issue was just its engagement with the gay characters was so clichéd, it was appalling. And I did … when I was talking with these producers, I did say that was the one thing that you can't, you just can't do. And you know, to be fair, writers can kick and fuss all they want, we are the least important person in this process. You know, there are a lot of people. But you can, at the beginning, at least say, look, you pick your battles, and you say, look, this is the kind of hill I would be prepared to die on here, which is that we don't have camp hairnet screaming queen gay characters, because this is not what these people are. And I think they understood that immediately.
JP: And in 2019, you also mentioned back then about The Book of Lost Things being made into an animation film, wasn’t it? Did that go to development hell?
JC: No, what happened there, and I have to step very, very carefully, is that there is now a credit on Studio Ghibli's The Boy and the Heron crediting The Book of Lost Things, so the matter was settled amicably.
JP: I know everyone has their own opinion, but for me, a Book of Bones is your masterpiece.
JC: That’s very nice of you to say.
JP: I adored reading that sequence of six books and The Fractured Atlas, I mean, I loved that sequence…..
JC: Thank you.
JP: …….now I've got children, …..you've got children, and like all parents neither of us has a favourite child…... So……. do you have a book of yours that you're more proud of than the others…….?
JC: You mean in the Parker series?
JP: Or any book of yours that you've written? I guess it’s a hard question?
JC: No, it isn't. No, I mean, it's a very fair question, and it's one that often comes up. I think I managed to dig deeper with ‘he’ than I'd managed to go before, I think.
And so I suppose that's the appeal of that book, or the appeal of the one I'm writing at the moment, where you're doing something that really is stretching you creatively. And even if people… even if it wasn't published, I wouldn't have wanted the time back. So I suppose that's the way I look at it. So I would stand over ‘he’, I think.
JC: Can I ask you about your doctorate?
JP: Sure, yeah.
JP: Absences and Presences: Towards A Detective Gothic……
JC: Yeah, yeah, yeah (chuckles)
JP: Was M. Macdonald-Bodkin mentioned in Shadow Voices?
JC: Yes, he was included in Shadow Voices.
JP: It’s been a long time since I read it.
JC: Oh no, it's okay. Jeez, I have to open it occasionally to look at who was in it. Yeah, Macdonald-Bodkin was. And, you know, I did Shadow Voices. And that urge to, again, we're going to come back to that metaphor of stretching a muscle, of doing something that is hard and difficult. And so the idea of that, I thought, well, I loved researching Shadow Voices and I thought I want to go back and I want to do a PhD. And I didn't want it to be the standard creative writing PhD [which] involves somebody writing a novel or a book of short stories or a memoir or something. And I could have, I could have done it standing on my head, you know, to write a novel. That would be absurd, you know.
And I wanted to do an academic PhD within the confines of a creative writing doctorate because they were the people who were most fluid. And so they were very open to having a hybrid doctorate, essentially, which, where they, I would research it, but I would be required because part of UC's thing is that they want to assemble a kind of body of knowledge about writers that if I was going to do this, it would be about positioning myself in a historical continuum. So doing that research and occasionally having to reflect upon my own craft.
So I did it and it was about, it's a good 100,000 words, I think. But then, like a lie, I have imposter syndrome like most people, so I'd quietly put it away in that section of the thing where you don't have to make it public. And it's funny how many academics I've met who haven't published their doctorate. It's not uncommon to do your doctorate. But I might, at some point, I might just make it freely available.
JP: You spoke about the golden age of British crime fiction as one part of it, as I understand.
JC: Yes.
JP: Would that be, for example, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy Sayers?
JC: Yeah, there's a big chunk of Sayers. Most of it is about those shared Gothic antecedents and how that is then traced in the life and work of writers like Sayers. You can't look at a book like, you know, there are people who are very purist about the British golden age and kind of going back to those T.S. Eliot or Ronald Knox rules about crime writing. You know, it's hard to think of a book that's more metaphysically engaged than The Nine Tailors. The Nine Tailors, God is essentially the culprit. God commits the crime. It's got this Noah flood at the end that washes away all of this stuff. You know, you can't look at that and not say that here was a woman who wasn't... and, you know, Sayers consistently engages with the supernatural. She was an editor of anthologies of short stories of the supernatural. [Agatha] Christie had a fascination with, you know, psychics and séances and precognition. You can see flashes of it in the work. So it was about unpicking some of those things, but also looking at why, during the 20th century, the production of genre fiction falls off a cliff in Ireland. And what did, because there are Irish writers, but what did they do? A lot of them either moved to the United Kingdom or moved out of Ireland or stayed in Ireland, but based their novels elsewhere. You know, it was very difficult for them to do it. So it was about trying to engage with that and confront some of the prejudices that still exist in Ireland about genre fiction or its position in our literary traditions. Okay.
JP: And there's a part you mentioned … I got this on the internet... it must be true…
JC: That must be true. The internet never lies.
JP: One part of it talks about the effect of OCD in your childhood on your writing. Can you tell us anything about that?
JC: I suffered from OCD as a child. I think a lot of adolescents go through a period of OCD. It is a way of giving yourself the illusion of a control during a period of your life where everything seems to be beyond your control. Not even your own body does what it was supposed to do. It's manufacturing hormones and doing all kinds of strange things. I gave it to David in The Book of Lost Things. David is me as a child. I think I found a way to redirect that idea. I kind of came out of it in my late teens, which is when most people do , unless they're going to suffer from it all through their lives, and it's amazingly debilitating. It was horrible. Just an awful, awful, awful period. But I can see elements of it in the fact that I have nothing unfinished in the drawer. There isn't even a short story that I haven't at some point come back and finished. And if I start something, I tend to finish it. And that is a relic, I think, It's a way of turning a disorder into a kind of positive insofar as possible. And it still has an obsessive element to writing. I find it very hard, even here, I find it very hard to get through a day if I haven't at least set aside an hour to work. I kind of have to earn that time that I have off a little bit. I think it's a relic of that mindset. I don't think it ever really entirely goes away.
JP: Today's earworm from your radio show is Brilliant Mind by Furniture.
….(laughter)….
JP: Remember we talked about...
JC: They just issued an extended edition of that album [The Wrong People], I think, right?
JP: Yesterday. Anyway, six years ago the earworm was... “They don't know your name, they don't know your name...¨
JC: (Delightedly) Oh, that's... Living by Numbers, we were talking about that. That's New Musik, yeah. That's what it’s called.
JP: How do you do that show? Because I have this vision, like many people, of you sitting in a studio with your earphones on.
JC: I used to, that was literally how I used to do it. Until pre-COVID, that was what I did. I went in with a box of CDs. It was very time-consuming. And then when COVID happened, obviously it wasn't possible to go into a studio and I didn't want to lose the show.
So I had a friend who literally got on the internet for an hour. He ran a radio station and trained me in audition, which is a professional radio... So actually I can now do it from home and it's much less time-consuming. I can do it while I'm travelling even. If I have a microphone, I can do it and send the download off. So it's much simpler now. But I still love doing it. It's not purely an exercise in nostalgia because every week I find somebody I haven't heard, a piece of music that I didn't know existed. So it's constantly about new music, but new music from an older period. It's one of the reasons why I don't read, I'm not reading much of the genre anymore and I'm not reading much new stuff. I’m at that stage of my life, when I'm aware of all the gaps with my ignorances, and the PhD taught me that as well, how much I really didn't know about the past in terms of literature and music. So I'm in this constant process of trying to fill in those gaps in my knowledge. I'm very comfortable telling people I don't know now.
…..(Laughter)……
When you're young, you don't want to do that. You make up some excuses. Now I go, I really have no idea, but I will look it up. I was doing an interview today with a Mexican journalist and he was asking me how much Latin American literature I read. I said, I haven't read enough, but I have four months to catch up. He wrote down a list of recommendations and I added them to the list of recommendations I had from other people. Before I go, I will have got up to speed on it. But I'm very comfortable now, I'm not spoofing. I'm just going to read what I learned.
JP: Do you still listen to Kermode and Mayo and Word in Your Ear?
JC: …(Laughs)…. Occasionally, not as many
podcasts as I used to. I try not to drive as much as I used to. I'm not doing
those big trips around the US anymore. In
England, I'm trying not to do that anymore. But I still love Kermode and Mayo.
Yeah, and Word in Your Ear. That's like listening to two old farts now,
isn't it?
JP: Unmissable.
JC: No, they really are. And it's a lovely conversation. It's like sitting with two people. I do remember interviewing Mark Ellen at his kitchen table for his memoir because it came out while I was doing some work for Hodder. It was a Hodder book. And I said, I've always loved Mark Ellen. I've loved his magazines. I remember going to interview him. And so I feel when I listen to that podcast that it's a bit like David Hepworth arrived as well. And I just listen to people who have a lot of opinions in common about things.
JP: And I always get the feeling that I'd like to join in and say what I think.
JC: Yeah, but isn't that that lovely thing about... It's the same reason that I love radio and I prize radio over television in that in radio, you're always the unseen third party or second party in a conversation. That's why when I'm doing the radio show, I never say hello everyone. You assume that you're talking just to one person. It's almost like I'm sitting here with you having that conversation about music.
JP: Can you recommend a book, a film and a record? Off the top of your head?
JC: Off the top of my head?
JP……yep…..I know you just read Dirty Real by Peter Stanfield which you passed to me.
JC: I wouldn't necessarily recommend that. That was an interesting book. Do you mind if I... I keep a list on my phone of books that I've read because I've reached that age where if you ask me what I read yesterday, I won't be able to... Unless I handed you [Dirty Real] I would have gone... it was a book about film, I have a vague notion of who and where but I couldn't tell you who wrote it.
JP: You don't have a copy of [George Eliot’s] Middlemarch in there, do you?
JC: You know what? Middlemarch, curiously, I've tried Middlemarch three times.
JP: I know. You mentioned it in the last interview.
JC: Yes…we did….. you know….Jenny went out to... because I
couldn't find my copy from college that I hadn't read and so Jenny went out and
said, you know what she said? You can't get a copy of Middlemarch for love nor
money now. Every fucker's reading Middlemarch, you know.
….(laughter)….
Or trying to read, trying and failing to read Middlemarch. Let me just see what I've read recently, because I have my list of things that I... I was actually looking at that earlier, to try and convince this journalist that I had at one point in my life.....
….(laughter)….
JP: I've just launched into this. (Shows copy of Uncle Silas by J.S. Lefanu) I thought I'd give it a go after I saw that you were reading Middlemarch…..
JC: Now that interests me, one of the first instances of an Irish writer being told by a UK agent, set your book in … revise this and set it in the UK. Because it's originally set in Ireland. So let me see, what have I read this year that I've really liked? I read a first novel THE BOY by an Irish writer Mark Gyves [from Bedford Square] I thought it was really well written. Oh yeah, You Are the Fuhrer's Unrequited Love, by Jean-Noël Orengo, which is a French novel in translation. Yeah, I... That was... About... About having a senior moment. The Last Prisoner in Spandau.
JP: Oh really? Rudolf Hess and all that?
JC: YES……I found it an interesting mix of fiction and historiography because of what I'm writing myself…..
JP: ………What else? …..Where are you going next? As you are The Travelling Man. ….
JC: No, I'm not really, honestly. I haven't been... I've been trying not to travel much, curiously. But I've been doing a lot. I was in Italy. I was literally doing some research last weekend. Got back from that, and then got ready to come over here. So Granada and Malaga after this……
And then I don't have much to do until we go away to Latin America in the fall.
As for music……hile I was in the US, I was listening to the new Thundercat album. So to pick an album, one of my sons gave me Thundercat, who I haven't heard.
JP: Thundercat?
JC: Yes, he's a jazz musician. So jazz, but also bits of 70s soul and things. So I kind of enjoyed that. And for film…. I liked Power Ballad, the new John Carney movie with Paul Rudd, which is set in Dublin. And it's a lovely film about music. I mean, John Carney is one of those filmmakers who just makes films about music that kind of make you leave the cinema with your heart a little bit lighter. Okay. So those were the three things that I loved.
But I'm trying not to travel as much I used to. It takes a lot now to make me want to leave my dogs and my wife. You know, I really don't want to do it anymore. And there are few people I would rather talk to than Jenny or my dogs, you know.
JP: And quite rightly so.
JC: Yes, so that's where we are. So I don't
want to travel as much as I used to.
JC: Anyway, enough about me……It's always nice talking to you and so how is life in Asturias?
JP: It’s very good.
And then we switched of the audio, ordered more coffee and John very kindly stayed on for another half hour as we talked over coffee about our lives, our children, getting older, and John’s delight at becoming a grandfather, the food in Spain, Asturias and many other things.
John Connolly is excellent company and although he looked a little tired (he had done a marathon number of press interviews the previous day and doing an interview in a second language [Spanish] is exhausting as he told me, but he never flagged – John Parker.
Shots Magazine would like to thank John Connolly for taking time out of his travels in Spain to talk to Shots Magazine again.
We would also thank John Connolly’s Webmaster Ellen Clair Lamb, his Spanish publisher Tusquets and UK publisher Hodder and Stoughton, and Laura Sherlock for helping arrange this feature length interview.
And finally we pass our thanks to our Spanish Editor John Parker for his time, insight and enthusiasm for the work[s] of John Connolly.
John Parker’s book reviews and features can be found HERE and his previous interview with John Connolly in Spain [2019] is archived HERE
More information about
the work of John Connolly is available HERE and a primer of his work is available HERE
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