Michael Connelly graduated from the University of Florida with a major in journalism and a minor in creative writing and went on to work for major newspapers in Daytona Beach and Fort Lauderdale. After being shortlisted for a Pulitzer Prize, Connelly was snatched up by the LA Times and began to work the crime beat in the city his literary hero Raymond Chandler had immortalized.

His first novel, The Black Echo, written three years later, went on to win the Edgar Award for best first novel by the Mystery Writers of America. The Black Echo introduced LAPD detective Heironymous "Harry" Bosch, who has gone on to be the protagonist for eight of Connelly's eleven bestselling novels, including his latest, City of Bones.

Connelly's plots are taut and furiously paced and his characterization and description vivid and astute. He is one of the best of his kind. As the Boston Globe says, "Connelly is raising the hard-boiled detective novel to a new level." Yet there is an omnipresent darkness to his novels - "shades of black" as he describes it - an existential angst almost, which haunts Bosch and makes him such a compelling figure.

In City of Bones Bosch is called out on New Year's Day to investigate a bone dug up by a dog which turns out to be part of the human remains of a boy killed twenty years ago. The case escalates, bringing up specters of Bosch's orphanage past, igniting a media furor and leading Bosch into dangerous territory physically, politically and emotionally.

Connelly moved back to Florida recently; it was from there that he spoke with me by phone about his body of work.
 

City of Bones by Michael Connelly "Recalls no one so much as Raymond Chandler...ambitious, skillful, moving, intricate, and clever....Connelly puts his foot on the gas and doesn't let up." Los Angeles Times Your Price: $4.95 (Used - Mass Market) More about this book/ check for other copies A Darkness More Than Night by Michael Connelly List Price $7.99 Your Price: $3.95 (Used - Mass Market) More about this book/ check for other copies Void Moon by Michael Connelly Your Price: $3.50 (Used - Mass Market) More about this book/ check for other copies Angels flight :a novel by Michael Connelly List Price $25 Your Price: $6.95 (Used - Hardcover) More about this book/ check for other copies Blood Work by Michael Connelly List Price $7.5 Your Price: $3.50 (Used - Mass Market) More about this book/ check for other copies The Harry Bosch Novels: The Black Echo, the Black Ice, the Concrete Blonde by Michael Connelly List Price $16.95 Your Price: $11.95 (Used - Hardcover) More about this book/ check for other copies

Georgie: Interviewing a mystery writer creates a bit of problem, in that I don't want to give away too much of the plot line and, in this case particularly, I don't want to allude to the repercussions of the final scene in City of Bones. I thought that perhaps we could talk about your body of work in a more broad way.

Connelly: Sure. And I appreciate that you are protecting the ending. I know that puts you in a difficult spot. I mean, how do you talk about this book without talking about what happens?

Georgie: Exactly. Well we'll see how we go. How long have you been living in Florida?

Connelly: I moved in May of last year, so it's been almost a year now. Right about when I finished City of Bones I moved.

Georgie: Do you think this move will affect your later work?

Connelly: It already has, so far in a number of good ways. It kinda goes to City of Bones, and what we don't want to talk about - but we can sort of dance around it. Basically in City of Bones some things happens with Harry that put him in a new direction, and almost at the same time I went in a new direction. I moved 3000 miles away from Los Angeles and the biggest change is that, although I'm still writing about Los Angeles - I'm writing a new Harry Bosch novel now, and it's obviously set in Los Angeles. I'm not moving him to Florida - now I'm writing about contemporary Los Angeles from memory. Which is a bit of a different way than I used to write in my previous eleven novels. My process was to hang out, observe, research what I was writing about and almost immediately go back to my office and write those sections. So it was a very close transfer between observation and writing.

Georgie: And I think that process is evident in your novels. Like in Angels Flight with the street car/railway. You get this incredible detail down, and as a reader I feel transported there. Do you think that Bosch's character will be working in a different way because of that?

Connelly: Yeah, I'm changing a lot about the way I'm writing, and the way I write about him. In fact the book I'm writing now I'm writing in first person. So that is almost a new direction for me in terms of writing about him. I appreciate that you mention Angels Flight, because that would be an example. When I was writing that I would go down there three or four times a week, just hang out, ride the street car a few times and then go home and write about it. Now that I can't do that kind of research the challenge is that I am now required to pull it out of my..."creative memory," I guess you'd call it. So it's been fun. I've written one book since I've been down here and now I'm onto the Bosch book. It's been a new type of writing for me and I think it's been pretty successful - I've been pretty happy with what I've written so far.

Georgie: The finished novel that isn't about Bosch, does that have other characters we may have seen before, such as Terry McCaleb?

Connelly: No - it's a thriller, but it's a stand alone with a new character. Another aspect of this move is that I've left my old intrusions. I moved to a place in Florida where I've never lived, and I happened to know only one person here before I moved. So it's been much more a concentration on the work, staying in my office rather than going out. I had a big network of friends and people in the book business and so forth in Los Angeles, which I don't have at the moment in Tampa, and so my productivity has increased. I've written this new novel called Chasing the Dime fairly quickly compared to my previous process, so it's coming out sooner. They are going to bring it out in October.

Georgie: You've used Las Vegas in Trunk Music and Void Moon, but predominantly your work has been Los Angeles centered hasn't it?

Connelly: I wrote a book called The Poet which is set in a lot of cites - Chicago, Baltimore, Denver and Florida - so that one was kind of a travelogue. But even the books that are set elsewhere all have Los Angeles in them.

Georgie: I know that you worked as a crime reporter before writing novels. And a lot your books discuss the media. In City of Bones and Concrete Blonde in particular, you show aspects of corruption in the media, or the media interfering in a problematic way. But then in other novels, such as The Poet, you are more on the side of the journalist. How do you currently feel about the media?

Connelly: I've a confusing view of it, I guess, because I did work in it. I have seen where the media has acted irresponsibly, and I've seen where it's acted quite responsibly. It's like any kind of entity - there is going to be good and bad about it. I think Los Angeles is a place where media is concentrated to an extreme point and therefore the smallest things can become media circuses. And then the bigger things do as well. It is a fascinating thing. Primarily I use the media in my books as a vehicle for conflict; as a foil or an obstacle for Harry Bosch. In City of Bones there are bones found buried on a hill. It is his job to find out who this person was and who did it to him. But the media drops in - they have a duty to report - and are immediately jumping to the idea that there is more than one body and they are trying to intrude into the investigation. It's really a device. The books turn on Harry Bosch overcoming the conflicts or the obstacles put in his path. And his two major obstacles are his own department and concerns about the media. Like... what do you tell the media?... and the media blowing things out of proportion.

Georgie: You've often used contemporary events such as the Los Angeles riots as well as state or city politics and how the changes to state regulations and governments affect Harry's bureaucracy.

Connelly: I don't know if I'd call it state politics. I think what is great about the mystery genre is that - and I'm not just talking about myself, there is a lot of great stuff that is being written which holds up a mirror to society - issues and illnesses of society are being explored in this genre by a lot of good writers. And I'm trying to be a good writer, so I try to do that as much as I can. Hopefully my books become contemporary reflections of life in Los Angeles, or life in our world. And so if there is a riot in Los Angeles, or if there is an OJ Simpson trial, an earthquake, it ends up in my book. Mostly it's contained to what is happening in Los Angeles. Although you may want to note, the interesting thing about City of Bones was that it was done, it was copy edited, it was basically locked down and ready to be published when September 11 happened.

Georgie: I noticed when I read the advance reader two tiny references to it.

Connelly: Yeah, I talked to my editor and said that it is kind of a hallmark of my work that I reflect what is going on in society, in Los Angeles at least, and this book is set in January 2002, three and a half months after September 11, and don't you think that it's inane that there's no reference to September 11 in this book? So I asked if I could get it back. I didn't know at the time how much or how little I would put in, but to their credit they pulled the book back and let me have it for about three weeks to let me do what I wanted to do about it. At that point I had to walk the line of not being exploitative about it all. The whole horror was very fresh. And so I ended up putting two, what I thought were subtle commentaries about it, basically through Bosch. He talks about it in order to show the ripple effect going across the country and how it would affect someone like him and his trying to do a good job in the shadow of such a catastrophic thing in our lives.

Georgie: I thought it was very subtle - it worked very well.

Connelly: The risk is that things change. I don't know if you noticed in the ARC that he makes a reference to six thousand people being killed. That's the way it looked in early October. Luckily we were able to change that so that when the book came out it was more accurate. But that shows what can happen when you are trying to do that.

Georgie: Yeah, a friend of mine was in the middle of her Masters thesis on the literature division between East and West Berlin when the Wall came down. She was devastated and I don't believe she ever finished it. Have you ever found that there have been times in your life when things like this have happened or things in your personal life that interfered to the point where it changed the plot of your book? Or are you so well plot-constructed when you go in that nothing can really interfere with that?

Connelly: I think that happens all the time. The main thing is I'm not well plot-constructed going in. I basically start knowing the ending and the beginning. If you know the beginning and the ending a few things in between are going to come naturally to you - a few of the moves or a few of the things that are going to turn the story in the right direction. But essentially, it comes to me as I'm going along. And you're always filtering things in from your own world that are going on, whether it's subconscious or not. A few of my books have reflected things that are of concern personally to me. Take Angels Flight - with that book I knew the beginning and the ending and then I just started writing it. And in it there is a crime that ultimately leads Harry Bosch to another, that of the murder of a nine year old girl that happened much earlier. I wrote Angels Flight during my daughter's first year of life, and I think it was very clear that I was working out a fear within my own life, that of the preciousness of life, and that I brought this life into the world and I'm responsible for it, and what's the worst thing that could happen? And it ends up being in the book I'm writing about. It was never, "Hey, I'm now going to write about the worst fear of my life." It just sort of came out."

Georgie: In City of Bones you talk about the La Brea Tar Pits and the bones found in them. Was this your source of inspiration for this novel?

Connelly: Well, I've been to the La Brea Tar Pits many times in my life, especially with my daughter, and I've always seen the display of the remains of the one human being that's been found there. Since I write about homicides in Los Angeles I always thought, now that's something I'll find a place for in one of my books, because it's Los Angeles's oldest unsolved case.

Georgie: In your novel Blood Work, Terry McCaleb has a heart transplant. You seem to know an incredible amount about the repercussions of a heart transplant. Are McCaleb's experiences based on someone you know?

Connelly: Yeah, that was another story with some kind of personal upbringing. A friend of mine had a heart transplant a number of years before the book came out, and I knew him while he was on the waiting list and after he had the transplant, so I had a good idea of his emotional and spiritual and medical journey. And something about that tapped into the writing and reporting instincts I had. I felt it was something I wanted to write about at some stage. This person was not an FBI agent, did not investigate murders, and so forth - that was all imagined or brought in. But he was a friend and he went through this, and it was something I used - obviously with his permission. Actually, once I got to the point where I wanted to write about it, and had got his permission, we really started to spend a lot of time together, getting the exact details of his day to day life, etc.

Georgie: I don't know if you are familiar with the British writer Philip Kerr who wrote Berlin Noir amongst other books?

Connelly: Yes

Georgie: He wrote a book called Dead Meat which is set in Russia, and in researching his book he lived with a police officer in Russia for a year. An extreme example of research, but how do you research your detectives' personal lives? Do you spend a lot of time with police officers or FBI agents?

Connelly: I spent a lot of time with them as a reporter. I haven't been a reporter since 1994, when I finished my fourth book, but up until that point I spent a lot of time with them. Since that time I've spent less. I have many acquaintances and many people who help me with my books - homicide investigators and so forth. But outside of being a reporter I've never really done that type or thing where I live and breathe their world. I've gone to Mexico with homicide investigators, and that turned up in Black Ice. I've spent time with a homicide squad and had a beeper so that when they got paged I got paged and so forth. So I've seen how they work over an extensive time as a reporter. But I don't do that anymore for a couple of reasons. One thing is, I don't like to do research. I'd rather just write. And the other thing, and this is the main reason: I really concentrate the most on character. I think the procedure and the details - all that is like window dressing on the character. So I really concentrate on developing a character and putting a character through moves and so forth and then adding that other stuff.

Georgie: I'm intrigued by the idea of reading Harry Bosch through first person. I really liked the way that in A Darkness More Than Light you got to see Harry through McCaleb's eyes. You have also crossed over with characters in other novels. It's an interesting device to see your character in a different light. Although in Darkness, as a long time reader of yours, I found myself thinking, "C'mon McCaleb! Harry couldn't possibly be a crooked cop."

Connelly: Yeah, well, I've written these one-offs and so forth, but my main emphasis is on Harry Bosch and I want to try to keep him as fresh as I can. So, as much as I enjoyed doing it, it was just another device. It was another way of looking at Harry Bosch, hopefully another way of making him interesting to the reader, because it made him interesting to me. Doing the first person is another way of doing that too. I don't think I've switched to first person for Harry forever. I plan to do the next two books in first person and then switch back.

Georgie: No plans to kill him off yet then? I'm glad to hear it.

Connelly: Well, he is tied to a time. One of the books says he was born in 1950. So it's not like he'll be around forever. But I think there are about three, four or five books left in him. I would love it if I could get five.

Georgie: I hope so. Actually, I just found out yesterday that Michael Dibdin's detective character, Aurelio Zen, is still alive! In his last novel he seemed to be killed off, so I'm much relieved. He's one of my favorites. What about you? Do you have any favorite detective fiction?

Connelly: I read less and less of it, as I write more and more of it which is kind of like the disappointment of my life. I'm writing these kind of novels because I love them, but once you start writing them you kind of see behind the curtain at Oz, and you know how it works. It becomes more difficult to read these kind of books and to escape into them. So I find myself gravitating towards nonfiction. But having said that, there are people out there, like George Pelecanos, who I traveled around with last year, who are doing really great stuff, so I try and keep tabs on them by reading their books. Dennis Lehane, people like that.

Georgie: I don't think I've read any Dennis Lehane

Connelly: He had a big break out book called Mystic River last year.

Georgie: Hmm, have to check it out. Your work has excellent continuity - all the loose ends are tied up perfectly Do you have readers to make sure this occurs or is this an editor's job?

Connelly: Yeah, I've always had great editors and copy editors. And also, one reason that I am doing this is because I love mystery novels, and the reason I first loved mystery novels is because my mom did, and so she will go over them all at an early stage and help me with that. I also have several informal readers who help me tie up that sort of stuff.

Georgie: I've read some reviews of this last novel City of Bones, and many are saying it's your best novel yet. I'm tempted to agree with them. It is possibly one of my favorites, too.

Connelly: I have favorites for different reasons but I've always liked the Last Coyote a lot, and Angels Flight. But I like this one a lot. I like it because it's the story of how he is trying to pick himself up after the down time of A Darkness More Than Night. I think I like Harry better in this book than I have in other books. So I'm pretty happy with it.

Georgie: Some are saying it's the darkest yet, but I have always thought of Harry as a pretty dark character.

Connelly: Well, yes, when someone says this is the darkest one, well...it's shades of black I guess. He's a dark character. All the books are dark. Trunk Music was the only one I would say ended in happy or uplifting note for him. And I'm not saying that they all end sadly. Most of them end with some kind of resolve and redemption for him which is what I'm shooting for. And this one, I wouldn't say this one ends on a happy note - not at all - but I would also say that it ends with redemption and a new direction for him. And you can find a lot of positive energy in a new direction.

Michael Connelly visited Powell's on April 18, 2002. This interview took place via phone two weeks earlier.