Michael Connelly

• Born: July 21, 1956
• Place of Birth: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

TYPES OF PLOT: Police procedural; hard-boiled

PRINCIPAL SERIES: Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch, 1992-

Contribution

In many ways, Michael Connelly’s novels featuring Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch fit neatly into the convention of hard-boiled detective fiction; however, the novels also display the author’s complex plotting skills and his insights into the psychological makeup of both the criminal and the detective. Many of his characters (criminals and sometimes those on the side of the law) are best categorized as “monsters,” social or psychological deviants capable of committing horrific crimes of torture and mutilation: the Dollmaker, the Poet, the Follower, and the Eidolon. For Connelly, often the psyches of these characters and that of Bosch are more interesting than the actual solution of the crime. Connelly views almost all pathological actions to be the result of social and familial forces; the born killer seems not to exist in his world. His protagonists must heed philosopher ’s warning, loosely paraphrased by a character in Lost Light (2003), as “whoever is out there fighting the monsters . . . should make damn sure they don’t become monsters themselves.”

Connelly won an Edgar Award for Best First Novel for The Black Echo (1992); Anthony awards for The Poet (1996), Blood Work (1998), and City of Bones (2002); a Nero Award for The Poet; Barry Awards for Trunk Music (1997) and City of Bones; and a Shamus Award for The Lincoln Lawyer (2005). He was twice elected president of the Mystery Writers of America (2003 and 2004), the only writer ever to be accorded this honor, and in 2018, the Crime Writer's Association awarded Connelly the Diamond Dagger for his contribution to the genre. Connelly also received the RBA Prize for Crime Writing for his novel The Black Box (2012), which was considered one of the most lucrative crime fiction awards from 2007 to 2018.

Biography

Michael Joseph Connelly was born in Philadelphia on July 21, 1956, and spent the first eleven years of his life there. His mother’s extensive library, especially the works of and , opened the world of the mystery story to him. His family moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and he spent the rest of his formative years in that state, eventually attending the University of Florida and graduating with a degree in journalism. At the university, he was introduced to the works of by one of his mentors, novelist . Connelly knew from that moment he wanted to be a novelist, but unlike many reporters-turned-crime-novelists, he thought that crime-beat reporting would be the best apprenticeship to the world of crime fiction and majored in journalism with an eye toward future fiction writing. His first jobs after graduation were as a beat reporter in Fort Lauderdale and Daytona Beach. In 1985, he covered the crash of Delta Flight 191, interviewing the survivors, most of whom were from the Fort Lauderdale area. A subsequent magazine article based on this coverage was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and soon after, he was hired by the Los Angeles Times as a crime reporter.

Connelly published his first novel, The Black Echo, which introduced Harry Bosch, in 1992, basing it on a murder that occurred the day after he arrived in Los Angeles. After that came The Black Ice (1993), The Concrete Blonde (1994), and one of the central novels in the Bosch series, The Last Coyote (1995), the first book he completed after leaving reporting to write novels full time. Originally intended as the final installment in the series, The Last Coyote concerns Bosch’s attempt to find his mother’s murderer and solve the case long relegated to the cold case files by the Los Angeles Police Department. Connelly’s next novel, The Poet, introduces Federal Bureau of Investigation agent Rachel Walling in the pursuit of a serial murderer who preyed on children. After Connelly became a father, he said that he probably could not or would not write about such a character again.

By Connelly’s own admission, the Bosch character was too interesting for him to drop, and in 1997 he returned to Bosch in Trunk Music. He continued to write approximately one Bosch series novel each year, as well as nonseries novels. His further Bosch series novels include The Reversal (2010), The Crossing (2015), The Law of Innocence (2020), and The Waiting (2024). He also published a collection of his earlier journalism, Crime Beat: A Decade of Covering Cops and Killers (2006), as well as two other works of nonfiction, 26 Miles to Boston (2020) and Fenway 1946: Red Sox, Peace, and a Year of Hope (2020). Connelly and his family moved to Florida in 2002. In that year, Clint Eastwood produced, directed, and starred in a film based on the novel Blood Work, which famously changed the ending and the identity of the murderer. The publication of The Lincoln Lawyer in 2005 introduced a new protagonist for Connelly, cynical lawyer Mickey Haller, who the author planned to use in future novels. In 2006, two events marked watersheds in Connelly’s career: the serialization of a new Bosch novella, The Overlook (published in book form in 2007) in The New York Times, and his selection as one of the five mystery authors to host a personally chosen installment of Court TV’s true-crime series Murder by the Book in 2006 and 2007. Several of his works were adapted to the screen, including his 2005 novel, The Lincoln Lawyer, which became a Netflix series by the same name in 2022. Connelly also hosted a true crime podcast from 2018 to 2020 entitled Murder Book.

Analysis

Michael Connelly’s supreme creation is the haunted and tormented Los Angeles Police Department detective Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch. Through the character of Bosch, Connelly is able to portray much of the loneliness and despair of living in a violent, decadent, and surrealistic Los Angeles that is in many ways a modern embodiment of the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights.

Much of the corruption Bosch finds in his investigations is in the actual institutions: the Los Angeles Police Department, the press, and the film industry. It seems that the only way Connelly can expose this corruption is with an insider who is also a loner and a renegade: Hence the character of Harry Bosch. Many of those in the police bureaucracy are corrupt—guilty of cover-ups, shoddy investigations, and outright criminal behavior. The mentality seems to be to seek political gain rather than honesty or justice, and this is especially grating to a detective like Bosch.

One of the most common themes in Connelly’s writing is the warning issued by Nietzsche: “He who fights against monsters should see to it that he does not become a monster in the process. And when you stare persistently into an abyss, the abyss also stares into you.” Dealing with society’s monsters, Connelly seems to say, places one in great danger of becoming a monster. This is evident in Bosch, who, though not a monster, is an emotional train wreck. He has one goal in life—to catch criminals—and everything else in his life is subsumed by this. Bosch has lived much of his life believing his mother’s murder would never be solved, and when he solves it in The Last Coyote, the double trauma of knowing the details of his mother’s murder and the fact that it was related to high-powered political cover-ups causes Bosch to seriously consider retirement. He stares at the monsters, and he fears that he may become one, or already has.

Connelly is justly praised for his complex plots, surprise endings, and the clarity and power of his style, honed at his reporter’s desk. The amount of research he does is well known. Each of his novels has the ring of gritty truth, derived both from his own years of experience as a crime-beat reporter and from additional research into forensics, technology, autopsies, weapons, jazz performers, or whatever else is required by his plots. Plot details, even the most minute, are meticulously accurate and give an unusually heightened sense of reality. Especially noteworthy is Connelly’s Los Angeles: Many authors set their crime stories on the streets of Los Angeles, but Connelly’s detail—street names, highways, buildings, architectural types, neighborhood characteristics, and the archaeology of the La Brea Tar Pits—is unusual in its comprehensiveness and accuracy.

The Last Coyote

The Last Coyote, originally intended to be Harry Bosch’s swan song, has become one of Connelly’s most critically acclaimed novels. After throwing his commanding officer through a plate-glass window, Bosch is placed on extended leave and required to take anger-management classes before he is reinstated. With spare time on his hands, he resurrects a cold case from thirty years before that the Los Angeles Police Department had never solved: the murder of prostitute Marjorie Lowe, Bosch’s mother. In the course of tracking down the killer, Bosch again and again sees a lone coyote in the woods surrounding his house—a rare sighting, Bosch thinks, because civilization has all but driven out these creatures. It is no stretch to assume that Bosch himself is the last of a breed.

Paralleling Bosch’s investigations is a subplot involving the psychiatrist assigned to his case. Through this plot device, the reader is given a deep look into Bosch’s troubled mind. Bosch is angry, rebellious, and resentful of authority. He reveals his stern, almost self-righteous moral code in the first session: “Everybody counts or nobody counts.” This is the code, the religion, that Bosch lives by, and he is unyielding in its observance.

Chasing the Dime

Chasing the Dime (2002) was sparked by an actual incident in Connelly’s life: He was issued a phone number that belonged to a woman who had disappeared. Though not a Bosch series novel and not received as well critically as some of Connelly’s other novels (ironically because the plot turns on an almost Hitchcockian device thought to be improbable—the wrong phone number), Chasing the Dime is important in Connelly’s works because it reinforces many of the major themes of the Bosch novels, particularly the effects of obsessiveness in the face of a mystery. In the novel, Henry Pierce, a chemist and chief executive officer of his own startup company, is about to become a multimillionaire as soon as certain patents are granted and funding is acquired, but his whole life—business, professional, personal, and romantic—is derailed by an obsession to discover what happened to the woman, a prostitute, who previously had his phone number and is now missing. Betrayed by friends and business partners and framed for murder, Pierce becomes adrift in a world of evil that he only slowly begins to understand. He solves the mystery and absolves himself of the murder charge but in the process is nearly killed by a severe beating and loses his fiancé (whom he incorrectly suspects of being in on the plot to destroy him), his best friends, and the financial backing for his business. Nearly everything Pierce once believed is turned upside-down, and he knows he will live with deep suspicions for the rest of this life.

Lost Light

Lost Light (2003) was Connelly’s first Bosch novel written after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. As such, it shows Connelly’s increasing interest in the social and political issues of the day, though the focus remains strongly on the psyche of Bosch. It is also the only Bosch novel written in the first person (although the Bosch segments of The Narrows, 2004, are also written in first person), allowing the reader an insight into the mind of Bosch not possible with more objective third-person approaches.

Fed up with the Los Angeles Police Department bureaucracy at the end of City of Bones (2002), Bosch retires. At the beginning of Lost Light, Bosch is a freelance private detective, free of the department but also stripped of the status and security that a gun and badge afford. He chooses to concentrate on cold cases, the ones that got away while he was on the force, and starts with the case of Angella Benton, an apparent innocent bystander in a botched robbery on a motion picture set that resulted in the deaths of a number of bystanders and participants. Bosch is haunted by the placement of her hands in the crime scene photos, innocent and almost prayerlike. He resolves to find her killer and, in the process, uncovers more bureaucratic corruption and cover-ups in the Los Angeles Police Department, the treachery of friends and colleagues, the depths of venality in the film industry, and the almost unlimited power granted to law enforcement and intelligence agencies by the Homeland Security Act, power that begs to be abused.

In a rare moment of joy and happiness, Bosch discovers at the end of Lost Light that his first wife had given birth to a daughter whose existence has been kept from him, and Bosch feels for perhaps the first time in his life a sense of salvation, of pure happiness. In true Connelly fashion, however, all this happiness is crushed even before the opening of the next Bosch novel, The Narrows.

Principal Series Character:

• Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch, named for the fifteenth-century Dutch painter of sins and earthly degradation, is a Los Angeles Police Department homicide detective constantly in trouble with the department bureaucracy for his inability to take orders and his “cowboy” attitude toward murder investigations. Orphaned at eleven when his mother was murdered by an unknown assailant, he sees his mission in life as the pursuit of criminals. His obsession with his cases causes him to solve them in his own way, ignoring the consequences. He is twice divorced, drinks heavily, has few friends, and manages to alienate nearly everyone with whom he comes into contact, including a series of partners on the force, nearly all of whom grudgingly respect his police skills. His experience in the Vietnam War as a “tunnel rat,” trained to enter Vietcong tunnels and crawl along in total darkness to find and eliminate the enemy, left indelible marks on his psyche. Images of groping in the dark and searching for the light dominate Bosch’s interior mental landscape.

Bibliography

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Bertens, Hans, and Theo D’haen. Contemporary American Crime Fiction. Palgrave, 2001.

Fine, David M. Imagining Los Angeles: A City in Fiction. U of Nevada P, 2004.

Gregoriou, Christiana. "Criminally Minded: The Stylistics of Justification in Contemporary American Crime Fiction.” Style, vol. 37, no. 2, Summer 2003, pp. 144-59.

Kreyling, Michael. The Novels of Ross Macdonald. U of South Carolina P, 2005.

"Michael Connelly’s Biography." Michael Connelly, www.michaelconnelly.com/about. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024.

"Michael Connelly." Good Reads, www.goodreads.com/author/show/12470.Michael‗Connelly. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024.

Oates, Joyce Carol. Uncensored: Views and (Re)views. HarperPerennial, 2006.