Criminally Good: Evil that gets up your nose

12 May 2015 - 02:07 By Andrew Donaldson

In the world of private detective Charlie Parker - the creation of the former Irish Times journalist and now best-selling thriller writer John Connolly - evil is so palpable that it has its own particular stench. It is - we discover in A Song of Shadows, the latest in the Parker canon - so noxious that a young girl is struck ill at the merest whiff (it's seeping out of a passing car) and, in a Linda Blair moment, is reduced to a vomiting wreck.Not that you mind. By this point in a philosophical inquiry posing as pulp, you've bought the ticket and you're hanging on for the ride. Connolly's Parker novels, perhaps more so than Lee Child's Jack Reacher series or Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch books, are top-end binge-reading.There are a few caveats. The Parker novels are now quite episodic, much like a TV series. It's best to read them in sequence. A Song of Shadows is the 13th. Best not to start here.Then, of course, there's the supernatural element, which tends to get up the noses of the fundamentalists; troubled spirits, they argue, don't belong in a genre devoted to the rational unpacking of mysteries.This, Connolly says, was an attitude that "concretised" in the 1920s with the publication of clergyman Father Ronald Knox's 10 "golden rules" for the genre, the second of which is "All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.""It's almost like the genre has become set in aspic since the birth of Sherlock Holmes and the death of [Agatha Christie's Hercule] Poirot and those were the only novels you were allowed to write," Connolly says.Younger writers led the drive to "hybridise", fusing elements of one genre with another."Gradually what happens is, if you get enough people doing it they get absorbed into the mainstream - and the mainstream changes. We see it in music, we see it in film."In Parker's latest thriller, the villains are old Nazis living among their former enemies. Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo officer known as the Butcher of Lyon, was an inspiration - because he was a more interesting sort of villain than the "everyday" thugs legitimised by a fascist bureaucracy."He was intelligent," Connolly says. "He regarded himself as quite sophisticated; if it wasn't for the Nazis he may have gone on to become a Jesuit priest."Before his 1987 trial for crimes against humanity, Barbie was confronted by one of his victims, Simone Lagrange, who asked if he recognised her. He replied: "When you have been in prison for seven months it's always agreeable to see a desirable woman." When Lagrange told him he was insulting her, Barbie replied: "The trouble with you is you can't take a joke.""He flirts with her!" Connolly says. "She can't take a joke? It's appalling. You know, I think Barbie saw the Nazis as some horrible punchline to some cosmic joke that the Jews just didn't seem to get. You know, really, Barbie was intelligent. I think Barbie really thought, what kind of universe permits us to do this? You're the Chosen People? Is this what you're chosen for? So, when I read that, I thought there's a real double meaning to that."'A Song of Shadows', published by Hodder & Stoughton, R300..

There’s never been a more important time to support independent media.

From World War 1 to present-day cosmopolitan South Africa and beyond, the Sunday Times has been a pillar in covering the stories that matter to you.

For just R80 you can become a premium member (digital access) and support a publication that has played an important political and social role in South Africa for over a century of Sundays. You can cancel anytime.

Already subscribed? Sign in below.



Questions or problems? Email helpdesk@timeslive.co.za or call 0860 52 52 00.