Irish author John Connolly's new novel The Whisperers is out now in Australia.

Pádraig Collins caught up with bestselling Irish author John Connolly in Sydney on the eve of the release of his latest novel, The Whisperers, which hit the shelves in Australia this week.

THE WHISPERERS features Connolly’s regular hero – private detective Charlie Parker – investigating the death of an Iraq war veteran in the north-eastern US state of Maine.

He credits the novel’s development in large part to his friend Tom Hyland, who served in Vietnam.

“He came back with post-traumatic stress disorder, or post-Vietnam syndrome as it was then. He’s been coming to my signings for eight or nine years and we’ve become reasonably close,” said Connolly.

“As we became closer he would tell me more and more about Vietnam. So I was getting this very personal narrative over a period of years from him at the same time as there was a very public discussion going on over the war in Iraq, in particular the nature of the sufferings incurred by the soldiers when they come home.

“So those twin narratives were going on at the same time, one public and one personal. And because writers are very magpie-ish by nature – you look for a shiny thing and think ‘oh, that’s interesting’ – the seeds of the book began to take place.

“I don’t think it would have mattered to me so much had I not had a very personal insight into it.

“Tom read the narrative as it was being written and would make suggestions for changes.

“His input was invaluable. It wouldn’t have been written without him,” he said.

The Whisperers, like most of Connolly’s work, is based in Maine, where he worked for a summer while a student in Ireland.

“I fell in love a little bit with Maine and began going back because I found it quite interesting.

“When I began writing books it seemed natural to use a place I had an affection for and some knowledge of.

“It also hadn’t been colonised by crime writers. If you use New York it’s so hackneyed that it’s very hard to find anything new to say about it.

“Nobody had used the Maine landscape in that way,” said Connolly.

Why did he never consider writing about Ireland?

“There was this sense that I had where if you were an Irish writer you were expected to write about certain things, you were expected to engage with the nature of Irishness.

“I simply didn’t want to do that. I wanted to write in genre fiction and genre fiction was not something we had done, certainly not crime fiction.

“At that point there were two crime writers, Eugene McEldowney and Jim Lusby, and that was it,” he said.

Connolly says things are changing and has written a blurb for Stuart Neville’s acclaimed novel The Ghosts Of Belfast.

“Now suddenly there’s been this huge explosion of crime writers in Ireland, people like Declan Hughes, Gene Kerrigan, Arlene Hunt and Stuart Neville are writing these fantastic books.”

Connolly says he enjoys creating new characters for each book.

“I wish I could keep more of them alive. It’s that great [Raymond] Chandler quote: ‘You can never have two people in a room and keep more than one alive for any length of time’.

“There is that problem when you introduce characters, especially in books like mine, where you kind of get the feeling that everyone has a clock ticking somewhere behind them,” he says.

His books go through 10 or 11 drafts from start to finish and the role of new characters develops in this time.

“The rhythm of the book begins to emerge and I see where people have their place in it.

“You begin to like that character and you think ‘I’d like to spend more time on that character because there’s something interesting there’.

“Crime fiction is entirely character driven. Most people cannot tell you the plot of the last crime novel they read.

“They all tend to be the same. Somebody dies; somebody comes in and solves it; the end.

“There are a limited number of variations on that theme. But people have enormous affection for characters,” he said.

Connolly gives a surprising, and brutally honest, answer when asked what question he hasn’t previously been asked.

“’Who do you think you’re fooling?’ is probably a good one. ‘When are you going to be found out?’ I think that’s the one that nags at writers.

“Anyone who does anything in a creative field where you present it to the public, whether you’re a musician or a painter or a writer, it’s that balancing act between a huge act of egotism in thinking this screed you’ve written is worth somebody paying $32 for, and giving up a certain amount of their time for,” he said.

“And it’s balanced by this nagging suspicion that it’s not good enough, that you’re never good enough, that you’ve fooled people, that eventually you’re going to be found out.

“I think most creative people are waiting to be found out.

“You’re always looking for the one person in the crowd who isn’t clapping, because not only is that the person who’s figured you out, but that’s the person who is the manifestation of your own little voice of doubt in your head.”

Voice of doubt notwithstanding, The Whisperers is another great John Connolly read.