John Connolly has strong opinions and he likes to talk. A lot. But he’s also articulate, well read, intelligent and — for someone with so much to say — quite insecure.

“I think the minute you commit something to print, whether you do it in the form of ‘This is my secret diary, do not open, if found, burn’, you're immediately writing for an audience. It may be an audience that you cant visualise, but you’re writing for an invisible other party who's looking for these books.

“So there is that tension between who you're writing for, why you’re writing, and it's often quite suspect when you talk about the practicalities of it. And, yet, it's a very recent thing that we've become quite precious about literature,” he says, warming to the subject.

“Dickens and Trollope and people like that felt no concern that they were writing for the masses. Herman Melville was slaving away in the customs office in the States because, when 'Moby Dick' came out, people were going: ‘This is a travesty, this isn’t the great American novel’. Would Herman Melville have liked that it sold a few more copies so that he could write full-time? Damn, yeah!

“You know, you write to put bread on the table, on a level. In some ways it’s a test of the appeal of what we do, that we write something that manages to communicate to the maximum number of people.

“The easiest books in the world to write are those that one person would read. And that's usually your mom!”

Connolly laughs easily.

“To write a book that communicates to more than just a handful of people, where you manage to latch onto some kind of truth about human experience, or you just manage to entertain them for 400 pages or for long enough that they don’t want their money back at the end of reading the book. These are not unworthy things to go for.”

“But there's a section of the literary community that wants to be very precious about these things, that wants to mystify it, and in a sense it's mysterious enough: the appeal of books to readers and the connection between books and readers doesn’t need to be rendered any more complex than it already is. It is an extraordinary thing,” he reasons.

“It's the same kind of mindset that sees a book that's taken 20 years to write as being somehow more valuable than a book that takes a year to write. When did that happen?” asks the spirited Irishman, whose eyes still flash after a long day of interviews.

“Given that Shakespeare in 1599 could knock out about four plays, stealing ideas from all over the world, and father children and do all the other things, we seem to have reached this ridiculous point in culture where you have to quantify everything by the amount of effort that apparently went into it.”

The author best known for the Charlie Parker mystery books has, in seven years, had eight novels and one collection of short stories and novellas published. It would be safe to say that Connolly’s career is a success — and yet he’s not exactly what you might call confident.

“I never did think I'd be doing this fulltime and I'm always still faintly surprised,” confesses the former journalist.

“I still have these visions where publishers come back and send two big guys out in T-shirts to my house and ask ‘Did you buy that with our money?’, ‘Did you buy that with our money?’, and then cart off all my furniture,” he says, only half jokingly.

“I fret constantly about it, whether my books are going to do well or not, because it's like Walt Disney said: 'You make movies so that you can make more movies'. And we can talk about the art of it, and I am certainly not unconcerned with that, but you recognise that at some point your books have to sell if you want to carry on doing this.”

Nevertheless, he’s not afraid to take a gamble. His most recent novel, ‘The Book Of Lost Things’ is a twisted fairy tale for adults that finds the author revisiting his own childhood.

“It's just a book I wanted to write, and I'm glad that I've done it,” he offers simply.

“When you begin writing a book, there's this thing in your mind that you can’t actually explain because it’s all little bits kind of swimming around in there and in the transition from your mind to the page, something gets lost. You never quite manage to capture it.

“But in this one, I nearly did, just a little closer than I came before. I know I'll look at it in six months time and see things that are wrong with the book, but I'll probably see fewer things than I would have before. And so I like it. I'm happy with it.

“And that’s ok for now. It's not a work of genius, nobody's writing for the ages. Sometimes you're just content — and you think 'Yeah, that was as good as I could do at the time'. It's a nice feeling to have. It's not self-satisfied, it's just the sense that you did the best you could,” he admits.

And, although he calls it “an odd, weird little book”, at its core is a message that Connolly feels very passionate about — the power of fiction.

“I get really annoyed with people who say they don’t read fiction, those people who consider reading fiction to be a waste because you don’t learn anything from it. And people who say it’s a selfish pursuit to retreat into a book and lose yourself in it.

“Reading fiction is an amazingly selfless act, because it is a willingness to surrender yourself to the consciousness of an author and to inhabit it totally. And only people who read fiction get that experience.

“Film doesn’t give you that experience, music doesn’t really give you that experience, only losing yourself in fiction and saying: ‘For the duration of this book I will allow myself to see the world as this person sees it and I will open my mind to that person’.

“It won’t happen with every book but it will usually happen with most books that we remember as our favourite books where there’ll be a moment of contact between the reader and the writer. And in that moment the author might make you see something slightly differently to what you have before, or reassert a thought you’ve had but haven’t been able to articulate, or make you question something you’ve taken for granted,” he trails off, having made his point.

“I’ve just got great faith in stories and books and people who read them.”