Bestselling Author John Connolly To Launch Lit Up Festival In Beverley

For lovers of the silver screen, this year’s Lit Up Festival gets off to a great start on Friday 8 September, with bestselling and award-winning author, John Connolly.

John, best known for the Charlie Parker mysteries and other novels, will be finding time in his hectic schedule to come to the Parkway Cinema in Beverley at 8pm on Friday.

He Irish author will be talking about his latest book, he – his most intimate and personal book to date. He is an extraordinary story about Stan Laurel, one of the greatest screen comedians the world has ever seen.

The event will also include the screening of a Laurel and Hardy short film, ‘The Music Box’.

Connolly is based in Dublin but divides his time between his native city and the United States, where the Charlie Parker novels are set.

He is his first literary novel, although his breadth of writing covers much ground with previous books including The Book of Lost Things, the young-adult science fiction trilogy and his Samuel Johnson children’s books.

In l999, when John Connolly was visiting a friend in LA, a derby hat was mentioned in the course of a conversation – one given as a gift by an ageing comic actor to the friend, who was then a young boy. The hat was lost, but that conversation planted a seed.

he is about a man who knew both adoration and humiliation; who loved, and was loved in turn; who betrayed, and was betrayed; who never sought to cause pain to others, yet left a trail of affairs and broken marriages in his wake… Stan Laurel.

John Connolly said: “I am of a generation that grew up with Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy as part of their lives, as fixtures on morning television and images on the walls of bedrooms and college dormitories.

“Because of the roles they played, I think there is a tendency to sentimentalize them, and confuse the artistry with the reality. But they both led complicated, adult existences with their share of trauma and tragedy.

“What sustained them, I think, was their loyalty to each other, which grew deeper as the years passed.”
Born in Ulverston, Cumbria, Stan Laurel became one of the greatest comedy actors of the silver screen. He was a prodigious letter-writer, but, for someone who composed so many letters, he actually revealed very little of himself.

He was a product of Victorian times, and so kept his feelings largely hidden: about the women in his life, about the losses he suffered, and about Chaplin, with whom he had a very complex, conflicted relationship.

Connolly said:

“I’ve lived with Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy for a very long time. With he completed at last, all I can say is that I now love them more than I ever did, with all their flaws, in all their glorious humanity.”

For the full programme and information about the Lit Up Festival visit www.litup.org.uk