JOHN CONNOLLY
Saturday, June 14
3 p.m.
Borders Buckhead
3637 Peachtree Road NE, Suite C
404-237-0707

Dublin, Ireland-based author John Connolly is best known for his series of crime thrillers starring eternally haunted private eye Charlie “Bird” Parker. Filled with tensely quiet, isolated settings and distinctive, spooky antagonists, Connolly’s novels increasingly flirt with the supernatural—a realm explored in more depth in standalone works “The Book of Lost Things” and the story collection “Nocturnes.” Those elements aren’t as prevalent in his latest book, “The Reapers,” which focuses on Louis, a former hired killer whose past threatens to catch up to him with deadly results.

Q Each of your previous books to feature these characters has dealt with themes of redemption and reconciling our dueling natures. But Louis isn’t seeking absolution or to make peace with his past.

A My interest in Louis was quite different. When I began writing the [Charlie Parker] books, Louis and [his partner] Angel were there to humanize Parker, because the first book [1999’s “Every Dead Thing”] was so dark and grim. As the books went on, they became much more ambiguous characters. Readers really liked them, and I found that kind of odd because they have a kind of morality, but it’s a very gray morality. Louis represents a side of Parker: that ability, that desire to lash out, to take revenge. The idea of domesticity, of a normal life—the two are completely incompatible with these urges. That’s what Louis represents for Parker: a kind of liberation. But it comes at a terrible price, because you can’t have anything else.

There’s a Bob Dylan quote: “To live outside the law, you must be honest.” I wanted to explore the psychology of someone who’s killed.

This is the seventh book to feature these characters. How much do you worry about keeping that world fresh?
When I sit down to write a book it’s because it’s something I really want to write. Sometimes it’s something that’s led me away from crime fiction altogether. There is a difficulty in being a genre novelist; as you achieve an amount of success, there’s pressure to repeat that success, to do pretty much the same thing. Having done “Nocturne,” it’s never going to sell in the kind of quantities that the Parker novels will sell in. You’re not going to make that much money that year. I recognize this dependence I have on a certain readership, and sometimes that comes into conflict with the desire to take chances.

Speaking of taking chances, you’ve received some flak for injecting some supernatural overtones in these stories.
I’ve always been curious about morality and compassion and justice, and all of those things are rife naturally within crime fiction. The thing I get criticized a lot for is, occasionally, quite ambiguous supernatural elements will creep into my books. Crime fiction is a really conservative genre; there’s no miscegenation in crime fiction. And that’s really odd to me. If you read a lot of crime fiction, issues of redemption and salvation arrive again and again. And there’s a kind of possibility of a kind of spiritual interpretation as well: If we live in a godless universe, would you live a moral life? Crime readers are really very intelligent people. From the moment you have your readers on board, you’re talking to people who are capable of running with these ideas and letting them decide if it works or not. SP