Irish author John Connolly in Melbourne for Writers Festival

It’s been 20 years and 16 books since Irish author John Connolly introduced the world to his hugely popular private detective, Charlie Parker. In town for the Melbourne Writers Festival, he’s shared whether there’s still life in the fictional tour de force.

John Connolly’s private detective character, Charlie Parker, is a firm fan favourite.

In 1999, Irish author John Connolly introduced the world to fictional tour de force Charlie Parker in his debut novel, Every Dead Thing.

Twenty years and 16 books later, private detective Parker is still going strong and Connolly has no plans to retire him.

In Melbourne for two Writers Festival events last week, including one at Sam Merrifield Library in Moonee Ponds and RMIT’s Kaleide Theatre, Connolly admits he is reluctant to call time on a character who has served him so well.

More than that, though, Connolly believes Parker has much more to offer and, as long as he feels the character is continuing to develop, he is going nowhere.

Connolly has written 16 Charlie Parker books.

And detours into other work, such as his fictional reworking of the life of famous comedian Stan Laurel, mean that Connolly can return to the Charlie Parker series with fresh impetus and renewed vigour.

“Had I just written a Parker book each year (and not done other things), I think they would have gotten worse,” Connolly admits.

“I think I would have become frustrated because in those constraints I would have thought that I couldn’t develop his character any more.”

That doesn’t mean that Connolly doesn’t cast a critical eye over each book in the series.

“I hope that he has progressed over the course of the series but the truth is that every book could have been better,” Connolly says.

“That’s not false modesty, it just recognises that if you’re committed to progressing and if you’re committed to learning from each book, then the next book should be the next stage in that development.”

In his mid-20s, Dubliner Connolly had grand dreams of making his mark in the world of journalism with the Irish Times, but when it became clear to him he would only ever be a journeyman, throwing himself into the world of fiction seemed to be the next best way of remaining a writer.

“I just got very frustrated with being a journalist because I wasn’t particularly good at it,” he says.

“An editor once said to me I would make a good hack and he was probably right.

“There are people who are born to be journalists, but I wasn’t that person.”

Connolly admits, though, that a writing career was almost a case of the “last-chance saloon”.

And, in Charlie Parker, a man almost but not quite broken by the slaughter of his wife and daughter and a sense of guilt that he was not there to protect them, Connolly created one of the great fictional characters of recent times.

“I sat down and began writing what became the prologue of Every Dead Thing about four years before it came out in 1999,” Connolly remembers.

“I spent too long writing that prologue but I wanted people to understand just how damaged this man was.

“It was a book about a man who has had everything taken from him, a man who steps into hell.”

Despite his success, Connolly admits that he is still driven by self-doubt and a nagging fear that he “is about to be found out”.

“It takes a long time for a writer to believe that maybe they are going to have a career,” he says.

“I still think someone is going to come along and start reclaiming the furniture (because writing hasn’t worked as I hoped it would).”

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So, 20 years after he first appeared, what does Connolly think of Charlie Parker now?

“There is something almost Christ-like about him in that willingness to take on the pain of others,” Connolly says.

“He is punishing himself and saying ‘I will take on your pain because it will distract me from my own pain’.

“But within that is guilt because he was unable to save his wife and daughter, and there is also survivor guilt.

“I get really annoyed when you read books in which someone has lost someone but the message appears to be ‘okay, but let’s move on’.

“People who have lost someone have to deal with it every day and Parker wakes up every day with that pain.”

With Parker now a firm favourite among readers all over the world, Connolly admits there is much to consider when deciding how many more books he can draw from his damaged creation.

“I really start to think, ‘you know what is my obligation to the reader’,” Parker says.

“So I know there must be an ending but, to be honest, I’m not tired of writing him.”