Abstract
Cliff focuses on the way in which John Connolly’s novels featuring the detective Charlie Parker blur genre distinctions, interweaving supernatural themes with the structures of mystery fiction. Connolly has often referenced not only the Californian noir of Ross Macdonald, but also the British supernatural stories of M.R. James, an unusual fusion within the often formally conservative mystery genre. This play with conventions is unique in Irish mystery fiction, and is essential to the strengths of Connolly’s work. The Parker novels extend the boundaries of both Irish writing and detective novels, developing the series’ central image of a ‘honeycomb world’, which embodies both empathy and a broader moral landscape.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
The Gates (2009), The Infernals (2011), and The Creeps (2013).
- 2.
Conquest (2013), Empire (2015), and Dominion (2016).
- 3.
J. Connolly (2015c) ‘I Live Here’ in Night Music: Nocturnes 2 (London: Hodder & Stoughton), p. 414.
- 4.
This attachment to conventions is examined at length by the Agatha Christie scholar John Curran in his scrupulously detailed PhD thesis ‘Happy Innocence: Playing Games in Golden Age Detective Fiction, 1920–1945’ (Trinity College Dublin, 2014). See also Priestman, Knight, and others on this period, as well as Connolly’s essay ‘I Live Here’, first published in a limited edition (Dublin: Bad Dog Books, 2013) and later expanded for inclusion in Night Music: Nocturnes 2.
- 5.
B. Phillips (2014) ‘Irish Noir’, Estudios Irlandeses, 9, 175. Some of Phillips’s assertions suggest that, while his praise of Ken Bruen and Benjamin Black reflects more sustained reading, he has given relatively little attention to Connolly’s work. For example: the claim that violence is something about which Parker feels ‘little need for regret’ (‘Irish Noir’, 169), overlooks a good deal of nuance about Parker’s empathy and his ambivalence around violence.
- 6.
C. De Lint (2006) ‘Books to Look For’, Fantasy & Science Fiction, 110.6, 28.
- 7.
J. Connolly (2001) Dark Hollow (New York: Simon & Schuster), pp. 318, 321; J. Connolly (2002) The Killing Kind (New York: Atria), p. 54; J. Connolly (2003) The White Road (New York: Atria), p. 46; J. Connolly (2007) The Unquiet (New York: Atria), p. 196; and J. Connolly (2014) The Wolf in Winter (New York: Atria), p. 365.
- 8.
J. Connolly (2008) The Reapers (New York: Atria), pp. 45, 46; and J. Connolly (2013) The Wrath of Angels (New York: Atria), pp. 49, 119.
- 9.
J. Connolly (2009) The Lovers (New York: Atria), pp. 25, 20.
- 10.
J. Connolly (2005) The Black Angel (New York: Atria), p. 347.
- 11.
This phrase appears twice, in The Lovers, p. 188, and The Burning Soul (New York: Atria, 2011a), p. 61. A quotation from Wilde’s ‘Requiescat’ also appears in The Wrath of Angels, p. 387:
Tread lightly, she is near
Under the snow,
Speak gently, she can hear,
The daisies grow.
- 12.
J. Connolly (2005), p. 111.
- 13.
J. Connolly (2003), p. 364.
- 14.
J. Connolly (2011b) ‘No Blacks, No Dogs, No Crime Writers: Ireland and the Mystery Genre’ in D. Burke (ed.) Down These Green Streets: Irish Crime Writing in the 21st Century (Dublin: Liberties Press), p. 44.
- 15.
P. Murphy (2006) ‘“Murderous Mayhem”: Ken Bruen and the New Ireland’, Clues: A Journal of Detection, 24.2, 3–16. More broadly, Murphy suggests that Bruen’s Taylor books ‘employ the “foreign” characteristics of crime fiction with Irish settings and characters, realizing the collision of the local and the global that is at the heart of contemporary Irish literature’ (15).
- 16.
C. McCarthy (2000) Modernisation, Crisis and Culture in Ireland, 1969–1992 (Dublin: Four Courts), p. 33.
- 17.
J. Connolly (2011b), pp. 41–2.
- 18.
J. Connolly (2009), pp. 272–5.
- 19.
J. Connolly, The Wrath of Angels, pp. 174–5. As Connolly notes in his introduction to the reprint edition of The Wrath of Angels, the novel ‘is completely in thrall to the supernatural’ (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2015), II.
- 20.
J. Connolly, Every Dead Thing (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), p. 252.
- 21.
There is also a brief mention of a sound ‘like the beating of dark, leathery wings’ in the early pages of the second Parker novel (Dark Hollow, p. 71). Though Dark Hollow does not freight this image with supernatural weight, it nonetheless is so specific as to anticipate the explicitly supernatural ‘leathery wings’ – central to the imagery of the dark angels as the series progresses – first mentioned in The Killing Kind, p. 65.
- 22.
See in particular his introduction to the reprint edition of The Black Angel (New York: Atria, 2015). These reprints have begun to be issued in the UK and Irish markets, and are planned to be fully up to date in the US market by the middle of 2016.
- 23.
J. Connolly (2005), p. 216.
- 24.
J. Connolly (2003), p. 61.
- 25.
J. Connolly (2002), p. 3.
- 26.
J. Connolly (2002), pp. 264–5.
- 27.
J. Connolly (2003), p. 277.
- 28.
J. Connolly (2003), p. 323.
- 29.
J. Connolly (2003), pp. 39–40.
- 30.
J. Connolly (2001), p. 121.
- 31.
J. Connolly (2002), pp. 27–8.
- 32.
J. Connolly (2015a) ‘Author Introduction’ in Dark Hollow, reprint edition (New York: Emily Bestler/Atria), p. xiv.
- 33.
J. Connolly (2015a), p. xiv.
- 34.
J. Connolly (2010a) ‘Charlie Parker’ in Otto Penzler (ed.) The Lineup: The World’s Greatest Crime Writers Tell the Inside Story of Their Greatest Detectives (London: Quercus), pp. 69–71. Macdonald’s final Archer novel, The Blue Hammer (1976), is referenced as the name of a coffee shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the US (but not the UK) edition of The Killing Kind, p. 49.
- 35.
J. Connolly (2002), p. 94.
- 36.
J. Connolly (2011b), p. 54. Also of interest here is Richard Kearney’s work on various aspects of Irish culture that show ‘an intellectual ability to hold the traditional oppositions of classical reason together in creative confluence’ (‘Introduction: An Irish Intellectual Tradition’ in The Irish Mind: Exploring Intellectual Traditions, ed. Richard Kearney (Dublin: Wolfhound, 1985), p. 9).
- 37.
A. Bourke (2000) The Burning of Bridget Cleary (New York: Penguin), p. 31. In Bourke’s discussion of the ways in which fairies fleetingly but suggestively mark their presence, too, one can find further analogues to Parker’s experience of the honeycomb world, as in The White Road: ‘It was neither a dream, nor a reality. It was as if, for a brief moment, something that resided in a blind spot of my vision had drifted into sight, that a slight alteration of perception had permitted me to see that which usually existed unseen’ (p. 135); a scant few pages later, Parker’s dog Walt’s ‘eyes remained fixed on a patch of darkness in the corner, denied light by the thick drapes but darker yet than it should have been, like a hole torn between worlds’ (p. 137). This sense of converging worlds further underscores the physicality of the honeycomb world: such convergence is perhaps the inevitable motion of, in, and through such a world.
- 38.
J. Connolly (2005), p. 307. Strikingly, Enoch is also mentioned as part of the Traveling Man’s cosmology in Connolly, Every Dead Thing, pp. 251–2, 272, 276, 296. In particular, Rachel references an edition of Enoch by the Victorian scholar R.H. Charles (p. 252). In a gratifying example of coincidence, this edition was reviewed by M.R. James – described by Connolly as ‘my favourite writer of supernatural fiction’ (Night Music, p. 417) – who concluded that ‘we can heartily thank Mr. Charles for what he has given us’ (M.R. James (1894) ‘Charles’s Translation of the Book of Enoch’, The Classical Review, 8.1–2, 44).
- 39.
A. Bourke (2000), p. 249n8.
- 40.
P. Muldoon (2000) To Ireland, I: The Clarendon Lectures (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 7.
- 41.
J. Connolly (2010a), p. 77.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2016 The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Cliff, B. (2016). A ‘honeycomb world’: John Connolly’s Charlie Parker Series. In: Mannion, E. (eds) The Contemporary Irish Detective Novel. Crime Files. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53940-3_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53940-3_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-53939-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-53940-3
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)