Just doing a little spring cleaning on the PC and I found
this short piece about Michael Connelly I wrote when the Poet
came out, 1996, I think. Nothing very remarkable in my bits,
but it provides some background for new readers and the man
himself has some interesting stuff to say, so here you go.
It's a phone interview by the way, I've never had the
pleasure of meeting him in person.
John
Michael Connolly (GQ)
One might be forgiven for thinking that Los Angeles crime
fiction is stuck in a timewarp. A timewarp where Raymond
Chandler is still the guv'nor and an endless stream of Philip
Marlowe clones still walk those mean streets. A timewarp in
which even the city's finest contemporary writers - James
Ellroy and Walter Mosley - are best known for novels set back
in the forties and fifties.
Well, Michael Connelly is doing his bit to change all that.
His series of LA cop novels featuring the exravagantly
monikered Harry - short for Heironymous, natch - Bosch are as
sharp and convincing as they come. But then, as Connelly
explained to me, his day job gave him something of a
headstart, "I worked as a crime reporter both in Florida,
where I grew up, and in LA, where I"ve lived since I was
thirty, and that's where I got the background for the
books."
Was he not tempted, as so may U.S. crime reporters have been,
to turn his hand to the immensely popular true crime format,
rather than the riskier field of fiction? "Well, I was
writing true crime all the time for the newspaper, and I
guess I assumed some day I'd get my hands on a really good
case which I could turn into a book, but it never happened.
The first Harry Bosch novel, _The Black Echo_, was loosely
based on a real case - a bank job in which the perepetrators
used tunnels - but it was never solved. So I couldn't write a
true crime book about that, but I could use it as the basis
for fiction."
And so he did. In _The Black Echo_ the tunnellers turn out to
be a gang of Vietnam Vets who'd acquired their skills the
hard way, during the war in the tunnels of Cu Chi. And what
follows is both a gripping urban thriller and a subtle
working-out of the legacy of Vietnam on the streets of
America.
So was Connelly himself a veteran? "No, the draft cut off the
year before I would have been eligible. But I went through
high school thinking it was my destiny to go, so it had an
impact on me. And making Bosch a veteran was simply a
reflection of the high number of detectives I knew who were
Vietnam vets. Bosch is an amalgam of many cops I've known.
And he's the opposite of me."
For his latest novel, _The Poet_, however, Connelly has
decided to take a break from Bosch, and has instead written
an unusually thoughtful and unsettling serial killer novel.
One that focusses firmly on the role of the hunters: "I tried
to make the hunt more interesting than the actual killer,"
confirms Connelly, "I didn't want to spend a whole lot of
time with the killer".
And perhaps that's what marks out Connelly from the pack. For
while, in these post-Tarantino times, novelists and
screenwriters seem endlessly obsessed with creating exotic
and charismatic villains, Connelly is firmly on the side of
the angels.
"In my time as a crime reporter:" comments Connelly, "I've
found the cops more interesting than the perpetrators. They
have a very tough job and they only become well known if they
screw up. I think it's kind of a noble calling. While I
think, in reality, criminals are not that interesting.
Writers like James Ellroy and Elmore Leonard can create these
fascinating bad guys, but I don't think there are that many
in real life."
Neither may there be all that many cops named Heironymous or
serial killers, like the Poet, who like to quote from Edgar
Alan Poe, but still Connelly's combination of a novelist's
imagination and a crime reporter's fund of inside
information, look set to make him one of the key names in
nineties crime writing.
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