At 35, John Connolly is Ireland's only bestselling, internationally known crime writer, and he's full of surprises and contradictions. For starters, if you picked up Connolly's new book and third novel, The Killing Kind, you'd have to think you were about to read a work by an Irish-American, rather than an Irish, writer. You'd find yourself in Maine, in the company of Connolly's PI and former New York cop, Charlie "Bird" Parker. You wouldn't find an Irish character or an Irish bar or an Irish inflection of speech anywhere in The Killing Kind, nor in either of Connolly's two previous novels, Every Dead Thing and Dark Hollow. You would, however, find many of Connolly's fine writerly hallmarks: a journey through the "honeycomb" world that links past and present; a series of clammily chilling adversaries; a meticulously researched examination of the kind of religious sect historical Maine was no stranger to and, tying it all together, Charlie Parker driven by the kind of moral zeal that ain't for hire.

Connolly has a particular aversion for the archetypal Irish novel. It's a point he's passionate on. "There was this recent anthology of Irish writing and in the introduction it said something along the lines that the nature of being an Irish writer is to explore the notion of Irishness. If you accept that, then it seems to me that its primary purpose is not at all to explore universal themes, and it's such a very narrow definition. It's like there's a committee of people with cardigans and pipes who have a checklist of what has to be in a book by an Irish writer, and the idea that you would write outside that is viewed as offensive. It made me want to go the other way completely."

Back in the '90s, John Connolly was getting tired of his career as a freelance journalist with Ireland's leading quality broadsheet, the Irish Times, and it seemed like a good time to get around to the long-postponed first novel. But when it's put to him that it took audacity for an embryonic Irish writer to set his sights on the great American crime novel and take it on in a wholehearted way, he demurs. "At that stage, there was no concept that anyone would ever publish Every Dead Thing. I did it because I was very frustrated doing what I was doing and it was an outlet for something I wasn't getting in journalism. It came about by not being calculated, by not being the result of reading a 'how to write a crime novel' book. It wasn't a linear narrative; it followed character and it has all the flaws of a first novel. I put everything I knew into it. Ross Macdonald said that a first novel is an index of a writer's interests for the rest of his/her career, and that's a good way of putting it."

Whatever it was, audacity or lack of calculation, after initially accumulating a handsome collection of rejection slips, Connolly's final rewrite hit pay dirt and netted him £350,000, the largest advance ever earned by an Irish writer. Add to that $1 million from Simon & Schuster U.S. and you'll understand why Connolly's fellow journalists were green with envy—a fact that gives him no little pleasure. He'd stayed in journalism long enough to learn the craft, not to mention the discipline of filling an empty half-page under the twin pressures of deadline and strained inspiration. "You learn that you can sit down every day and write and that if you have the discipline to do that, you will produce something at the end of the day." But he also thinks that he was lucky. "It's not just the book. You can write a great book and just come along at the wrong time. You give it to an agent who's not anxious to plug it ahead of another book. The editor who might be ideal for it leaves or is sick. The publishers mightn't be behind it 100%, so they get 25% behind it. All these things have to come together, so the book is only one part of it. You need the good fortune as well."

When he studied English at Trinity College Dublin, Connolly augmented an early passion for McBain by taking a course devoted to American crime fiction, and so he happens to be extremely well read in his chosen genre. It was also during his college days that he discovered Maine. A student visa led him to take a summer job in Delaware, but he hated it, and the first bus out of Delaware was headed for Maine. Like Stephen King before him, the dark forests of Maine immediately infected his imagination. He talks about racism in the past due to the state's trading links with the South and the violent and bloody times of the early settlers. "I'm not sure those aspects go away," he says. "If they're part of your history, they make you what you are. I may exaggerate for effect in the books, but there's no denying that Maine is a state that has two sides to it, and I'm more curious about the slightly darker side."

But what about us, the readers, especially women readers, what about our appetite for fresh corpses and blood served slightly congealed? "As readers we certainly have an appetite for violent fiction—maybe it's cathartic," Connolly notes. Though he agrees that sometimes crime fiction can seem squalidly voyeuristic and cynical, he's quick to add, "some of the most unpleasant accounts of the deaths of women and children that I've read have been written by women. Why is it that Kathy Reichs or Patricia Cornwell can write so graphically about what happens to the body, and particularly the female body, and huge numbers of female readers will go out and buy it? Equally, why do graphic nonfiction books about violent sexual crime sell so well to female readers? It may be that there are some things we desperately don't want to happen to us, but that doesn't mean we're not curious about it."