We are trying to settle on a location in which to interview John Connolly and the Westin Hotel is suggested. "Oh, it's a bit posh, isn't it?" he texts and proposes the upstairs café in Waterstones on Dawson Street instead. It's not that he dislikes the hotel, he explains later on, but in his former life as a journalist, he spent a substantial amount of time in hotels doing interviews ("Usually the Shelbourne…"). Now that roles have been reversed, and he is interviewer turned interviewee, he prefers a less formal environment.

The reason for this meeting is that Connolly is the subject of RTE's Arts Lives this Tuesday. The programme documents the 40-year-old's rise from freelance journalist to bestselling crime writer – he was awarded the largest ever advance made to an Irish writer, £1.3m (€1.45m). Shot in Dublin, Baltimore and Maine (the location of his novels), it features interviews with The Wire creator David Simon as well as the crime writer George Pelecanos. "I was really quite wary, I suppose because, you know those lifetime achievement awards that come just before you die?" he says. "I didn't feel that what I did justified that. How did I fit into this?"

He has little to be modest about. His 12 novels have been on the bestseller lists and although he has written books in the supernatural genre (The Book of Lost Things and The Gates) it is his creation of Charlie 'Bird' Parker, anti-hero and private investigator, that has made him one of crime fiction's literary lights. He has sold 10 million books world wide, a fact he wasn't aware of until he saw a preview of the documentary. "I don't think writers should look too hard at that. If you can pay your bills and if your publisher is not threatening to dump you then that's all you need to know."

Connolly grew up in Dublin's Rialto and went straight from school into a job in Dublin Corporation. He saved to study English at Trinity College Dublin and did a masters in journalism at DCU before doing a five-year stint at the Irish Times. He got into journalism because he liked writing but says he didn't have the hunger to be a news reporter, preferring features, interviews and colour pieces. "I liked being a journalist. I loved the Times. It was really good to me, really was. And I wasn't the greatest journalist who passed through their doors. They were very tolerant: I made a lot of mistakes," he remembers. Such as? "Well I was sued at one point – I think I'd left by that stage. But it as horrible, it was just the most awful experience. And it made me very careful – probably a bit late, but especially with the novels – about researching and getting things right."

In 1996 he was sent to the scene of Belinda Pereira's apartment on Liffey Street, Dublin. She had been killed in her apartment (the murderer has never been caught). It was the first murder Connolly had covered. When it emerged that the young Sri Lankan woman had been working as a prostitute, he felt very strongly about the fact that attitudes to her death became less sympathetic, as if she had brought her violent death upon herself. Belinda inspired the character of Rita Ferris in his second novel Dark Hollow, where Parker hides the fact that murdered Rita has been working as call girl, so that her death will not be diminished in any way by it.

Connolly still does some journalism and often interviews author but finds the situation quite odd. "I'm sitting here between the two – the journalist doing the interview and the author being interviewed and part of me goes 'I wouldn't ask that question' and the other part of me goes 'Well I wouldn't have answered it anyway'. It's a sort of weird schizophrenic state but I enjoy it." He does, however, get annoyed if he interviews a writer who won't play ball. "I found Kathy Reichs difficult and she was somebody that I had met socially and got on perfectly well with," he says. "But as soon as it became a formal interview she was someone who clearly didn't enjoy the process and was not going to cooperate particularly."

He has a condo in Maine and he visits there a few times a year. He is often asked why he chose that area in which to set his books as opposed to Ireland or even our closer neighbours, Britain. He had visited this area of the States as a student and explains: "I chose the place because of the wonderful changes in the season and it wasn't entirely dissimilar to where I came from so it wasn't completely alien in the way that Nevada would be." Crime writing, he says, is so tied up in with the geography and physicality of a place.

"They're novels that have a forward momentum and they have a quest so they tend to move across a physical landscape in a way that a romance novel wouldn't. There's a detective, there's a process that takes place in a physical landscape. What happens, if it's done right, is that physical landscape becomes a reflection of the psychological landscape." He uses the recent popularity for Scandinavian crime novels as an good example, because we have an impression of it as being a barren, snowy, slightly threatening place. "You can put a crime novel there but if you put a happy clappy contemporary women's fiction novel there, not quite the same."

His next book, The Whisperers is out next month and with it will come the necessary task of promoting it, after which he says he'll just want to come home, sit down and not talk for a bit. "I lead a really dull life – I walk my dog, I go to the gym, I spend time with my family [he has two stepchildren]. When I have a book out, I'm promoting it from the start and I'm home for one week between the start of May and beginning of July."

He says he feels completely disassociated from his books when he sees them in bookstores – as if they're the publisher's and not his. He's not even curious to see if anyone is checking out his books as he leaves Waterstones after the interview.

"Ah, you don't want to do that. When my first book came out, I was in Dubray Books on Grafton Street and a woman picked it up, looked at it, made a face and put it back. I don't need to do that," he laughs.

'Arts Lives: John Connolly, of Blood and Lost Things' is on RTE One on Tuesday, 10.15pm

Continental Drift: Fout of the Best Crime Writers You Mightn't Have Heard of Yet

Ryan David Jahn

A screenwriter as well as novelist, Jahn's first book last year, Acts of Violence, heralded a bright new voice in crime fiction. Based on the true story of Kitty Genovese, whose murder in New York in the '60s was witnessed by almost 40 people who failed to help, this is gritty stuff. His second novel, Low Life is out in July.

Johan Theorin

Theorin, a Swedish journalist is hugely popular in Scandinavia on the back of only two books. The first, Echoes from the Dead is the story of the unsolved disappearance of a young boy, presumed drowned in 1972. The Darkest Room was voted best Swedish crime novel of 2008 and is the story of a couple who move to a house with a sinister history.

Jo Nesbo

One of Norway's most popular writers, he's had an unusual career path. He started out as a journalist, then turned to stockbroking and then fronted a Norwegian rock band before establishing himself as a crime writer. Harry Hole, a hardworking detective who battles murderers and criminals on Oslo's mean streets is the star of his eight book series.

Simon Beckett

Strangely relatively unknown in Ireland and the UK but massive in Germany, Holland and Sweden, where his books feature on the bestseller charts. Sheffield- based Beckett is the creator of the Dr David Hunter series; Hunter is a forensic anthropologist and was inspired by a trip to the infamous 'Body Farm' in Tennessee