Every Dead Thing was published by Hodder & Stoughton in 1999 and introduced Charlie “Bird” Parker — a character who would sustain one of the most ambitious series in contemporary crime fiction, now spanning over twenty novels. Parker is a former NYPD detective whose wife Susan and daughter Jennifer were murdered and mutilated by a killer known as the Traveling Man — a figure of almost mythological evil who flays his victims and poses them in tableaux.
The novel follows Parker from New York to Louisiana as he hunts the Traveling Man, picking up allies who will recur throughout the series: Louis, a gay Black assassin of elegant lethality, and Angel, his petty-thief partner. The investigation leads through the world of the New Orleans underworld and into contact with forces that exceed the merely criminal — intimations of supernatural evil, of patterns in murder that suggest something beyond individual psychopathy.
Connolly’s achievement is to write literary prose — dense with allusion, poetic in its imagery, unafraid of beauty — in the service of crime fiction that is genuinely disturbing. The violence is never gratuitous but always terrible; the supernatural elements never diminish the human evil but amplify it. Parker is not simply solving a murder but confronting the existence of evil as a metaphysical reality.
Collecting Every Dead Thing
First edition (Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1999): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- UK first edition, fine/fine: $200–$600
- Very good: $75–$200
- US first (Simon & Schuster, 1999), fine/fine: $75–$200
- Connolly’s debut — highly sought by series collectors