i think the thing that makes Bosch different in terms of
creative origin is that he was my third swing at the pitch. I
had written two novels that were never published -- never
even sent out for consideration. These were private detective
novels and in these I think I went through that process in
which the protagonist was an idealized version of me. These
were learning experiences but not good enough to be
published. I put them away for good. So when I came to the
third effort -- and it was going to be my last if it was not
published -- I decided to go in a different direction
character-wise. I wrote about a guy who was quite different
from me. On almost every level I went the opposite from me
and so Harry Bosch was born out of that decision. As far as a
long term plan I really didn't have any -- and certainly
nothing like what has happened. I just knew from my reading
in the genre that character is king. So I threw as much into
the character as possible, as much history as I could get in.
This looks now as though I was building the foundation of a
long series. I really wasn't. My idea at first was that I
could write two books. The Black Echo and what would become
The Last Coyote. But the response from my agent and then
editor was better than I expected. They immediately started
talking about it being a sustainable series and advised me to
hold off the Last Coyote story because that sounded like a
potential end to the series -- Harry investigating his
mother's long unsolved murder. So I wrote two books that came
directly and easily out of what I was doing as a news
reporter at the time. I got to go to Mexico with a couple of
LAPD homicide dectectives on a case and I wrote about it in
the paper. I then turned that into fiction for my second
book, The Black Ice. I also spent about six months covering
the civil rights trial of several LAPD cops who had shot and
killed three robbers at a McDonald's. I took much of the
framework of the trial and used it in The Concrete Blonde, in
which Bosch is sued by the family of the Dollmaker, the
serial killer he killed before the series began. The series
after those first three books had moderate but not impressive
sales success. So I wrote The Last Coyote thinking it was the
end of the series. I then wrote The Poet, a non- series
thriller. It had a big jump in terms of sales and success and
my leverage in publishing rose. I was able to get a deal that
would allow me to write one Bosch book and one thriller. So
Bosch was back in business in Trunk Music and the thriller I
wrote was Blood Work. The success of Blood Work guaranteed I
could write whatever I wanted for a while. So Bosch was
sustained and the readers of the stand alone thrillers Poet
and Blood Work started to read the series. The next Bosch
book Angels Flight hit sales on the level of Blood Work and
was a best seller. Harry Bosch was sort of a made man at that
point and sustaining the series was not a matter of sales. It
shifted completely to whether I could creatively sustain it.
And by that I mean, could I spend a year writing a story
about a character I had already written about a lot. Could I
still be excited about writing this character? The answer was
yes but there was at least one point where I thought my
energy was dissapating. So with City of Bones I had Harry
walk out the door at the end with the idea that once again I
was ending the series. It was around this time that I made
some dramatic shifts in my personal life as well and lo and
behold it was Harry who was one of the only things constant
in my life. So I clung to him, re-energized the creativity
associated with him and continued to write about him. So far
since then I have felt very good about the character and the
series. Any day I get to write about Harry Bosch remains a
good day for me.
--- In
rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com, "cptpipes2000"
<cptpipes@...> wrote:
>
> michaelconnelly187@> wrote:
> > i don't remember thinking Donald Southerland.
Maybe now Keifer. But
> > I usually sidestep that question because I have
lived with the
> > imagined vision of Bosch in my head since about
1989. It makes it
> > hard to see anybody else.
>
> Michael, would you share more about how you came to
create Bosch? It
> seems apparent that you had him thought through as a
series character
> with an extensive backstory from the first page of
The Black Echo and
> that you had a vision for where he would go from
very early on. Is
> this assumption correct?
>
> Many hardboiled protagonists strike me as an
idealized version of the
> author, and Bosch does not seem to fit that bill
either.
>
> Thanks.
>
> Chris
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 31 Mar 2008 EDT