Carlos had just got inside the gates when the guns started appearing. They made him think that driving unannounced into the grounds of John Gotti's home had been a bad idea. A really bad idea.
For those unfamiliar with such matters, John Gotti was better known as the Dapper Don (because of his dress sense) and the Teflon Don (because no charges ever stuck). Immortalised in song as "The King of New York", he was one of America's leading mafiosi until his luck ran out and he ended up in jail. His son John jnr, who wore purple leisure suits, subsequently took over from his jailed father, but John jnr turned out to be the worst godfather in the history of the Mob and wound up in jail as well. Even their social club on Mulberry Street in Little Italy is now up for sale, and the organisation is in tatters.
Anyway, Carlos ended up at the Gotti house because he went to school in Queens with Gotti's other son, Peter. One day, as he was driving from the school, Carlos saw Peter standing at the corner, looking nervous. Apparently, Peter's ride hadn't arrived and now he was in a vulnerable position where disrespectful people could take a pop at him, if they chose, so Carlos offered him a ride home. Neither of them was thinking about the possible repercussions of a strange car pulling into the Gotti drive, at least not until the Gotti soldiers appeared.
"Once they saw Peter, it was OK," Carlos recalled, as he stood on the deck of the Staten Island ferry. "But, man, I saw those guns and I was scared. And you know what really tore my old man up about the Gottis? John Gotti never went to any PTA meetings and Peter never got any report cards sent home. I mean, who's gonna fail a Gotti?"
I met Carlos while doing some final research on my first novel, Every Dead Thing. It concerns the hunt for a serial murderer who bases his killings on obscure anatomical drawings, creating works of art from the bodies of his victims, but it's also about loyalty, and friendship, and forgiveness. Call it a feel-good story, where a lot of people end up feeling bad. Terminally bad.
After three years, I finally had an agent, although I had no publisher and almost no money. I was staying in places where the bathroom was down the hall and shared by about 10 people, not all of whom were clean or capable of aiming straight for the toilet bowl. It was, to borrow a phrase from Spike Lee, "guerilla" novel-writing, the research paid for over a number of years with loans and credit card extensions.
So Carlos, who was an interesting guy and whom I'd found by asking around, went into the notebook, along with his recollections of life chez Gotti. For the best part of four years, that was how I worked. I read, I travelled back and forth to the US, I asked around, I spoke to people who knew other people, and everything I found out went into a notebook. I took notes on language and speech, on towns and streets and buildings. By the end, there were a lot of notebooks.
In the beginning, it seemed like a good idea to write an Americanset thriller. Irish detective novels, with a few honourable exceptions, had not worked terribly well or, like Eoin MacNamee's fine Resurrection Man, had used aspects of the detective novel to explore the situation in Northern Ireland, something I didn't want to do (although I sometimes think that explorations of terrorist violence and its repercussions are Ireland's contribution to crime fiction.)
Instead, I wrote an American novel, because I had been greatly influenced by the fiction of Ross Macdonald and a number of others - compassionate, complex, witty novels, which managed to be both literary and populist (a grievous sin in the eyes of some critics, even then). I also thought I could do something new with the form by bringing a different style of writing to it, and an outsider's view.
There was another reason for attempting it. In 1997, 875,000 cases of missing or abducted children were reported to the US Department of Justice, an increase of 535 per cent on 1985 figures. The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention has advised parents to retain their children's milk teeth and strands of their hair in order to provide DNA evidence in the event of their abduction. "A great many of these children will never be returned," its report concludes.
In Ireland, as in the US, the distances between people - not merely between the rich and the poor, but the emotional, personal distances between those ostensibly living close to each other - are becoming greater. When that happens, those at the margins become vulnerable.
Twenty or 30 years ago, the possibility that murders might no longer shock us, or that young women and children could simply disappear and not be found again, would have been unthinkable in Ireland, but not now. There are those who are willing to exploit the growing distances between people in our society, like water entering and widening a crack. That exploration of vulnerability, of those who are willing to harm the weak and the defenceless, of the gradual, insidious corruption of a people and their society, has always been the preserve of American crime fiction.
With corruption in mind, it seemed only natural to travel to New Orleans, where corruption is a way of life and the idea of setting up a tribunal to investigate payments to politicians would seem as absurd as counting the leaves on the city's trees: in the week I arrived, there were ongoing investigations into a former governor of Louisiana, the conduct of the State Senate elections and the criminal behaviour of assorted police officers. It was not, I gathered, an unusual week.
Strangely, some people quite liked the fact that corruption in the city and the state was so well organised. "In New Orleans, everybody knows what has to be paid," one Texan businessman, a friend of a friend, told me. "If a guy wants to put a parking lot in front of his store, he knows exactly who has to be paid and how much to pay him. If I want to build an office block, I pay two or three guys and they take care of everyone else down the line. Nobody can get too greedy." He went into the notebook as well.
As in Maine and New York, I checked with police forces in Louisiana, but generally I stepped lightly in the state, since advice on how to deal with police in Louisiana tended to involve the use of the words "don't", "screw" and "with", usually followed by a horror story about cells and a guy called Bubba. It didn't seem like such a good idea to tell them that I was writing a novel which climaxed in Louisiana and used, as part of its backdrop, corruption in the NOPD.
But mostly what I did was check locations, walking or driving along routes and taking notes as I went. I took notes in Honey Island swamp near Slidell, Louisiana, while the guy steering the boat fed marshmallows to alligators and tiny buzzing insects called "no-seeums" fed on us. I made notes in a canoe in Maine, at the edge of the Great North Woods, while the canoe slowly filled with rainwater and a moose watched me curiously from the riverbank. I even made notes at a Long Island railroad station while police removed the body of a man who had fallen, or been pushed, onto the tracks.
After four years of research and writing, and a year of pre-publication, it seems strange to think of Every Dead Thing as book on a shelf. The British advance reviews have been good, the single Irish comment less so, but I'll settle for that ratio. Someone wrote that I had gone for the easy money by opting for an American novel. True, there was money at the end, and a lot of it, but I didn't know that when I started. I looked at the notebooks, at the research books, and recalled the motel in Maine where I woke up with my legs covered in tiny bites that itched for days and I thought, no, it wasn't easy.
But I did it.
Every Dead Thing by John Connolly is published by Hodder and Stoughton at £10