Devil in the details
CONNELLY’S LATEST NOVEL SHOWS WHY HE’S NO.1 IN CRIME NOVELS
People who follow the crime news are by now accustomed to reading about the miracle of DNA saving someone from jail or even execution. A suspect is charged, convicted and jailed until DNA evidence proves the conviction was a mistake. Since 1989, when the first DNA exoneration in the United States took place, 351 people have escaped unjust verdicts in this way. The horrifying aspect of this story (according to the Innocence Project) is that 20 of them were sentenced to death until the laboratory research declared them not guilty. Of the total, 256 were compensated by a city or state for their ordeal.
DNA is an ideal subject for Michael Connelly, the most successful crime novelist of the day — his 29 novels have so far sold 60 million — and one of the best. Connelly, who came to writing fiction from a career as a reporter, is an obsessive detail man. He likes to burrow deep into police work. He rarely fails to tell us what make and calibre gun is being used or how a detective moves upward in the ranks of the Los Angeles Police Department.
His career predates DNA but he’s absorbed it into his narrative tricks. His hero, Harry Bosch, uses it in The Closers, a 2005 book. But his latest novel, Two Kinds of Truth ( Little, Brown), turns into a much more complicated type of DNA story.
Connelly attended a police conference on the uses of DNA and obviously thought about its possibilities for narrative. How would a criminal use it to perpetrate a crime? How would someone steal some of that rich compensation money that the cities have to pay those grievously wronged by the police and the courts? How could the system be turned upside down?
Connelly decided to invent, as the brains of the scheme, a corrupt lawyer who knows how much compensation is being paid and how much the lawyer will get out of it (a third perhaps). Someone will be needed in the lab to set up the evidence, and then the two of them will have to find a case they can exploit. Naturally, the conspirators happen upon a case that Harry Bosch thought he solved long ago.
His mother, the story goes, named him Hieronymus after the 16 thcentury Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch but he prefers to go by Harry. The name Bosch is now the one-word title of a police procedural TV series based on the books, produced by Amazon Studios, with Titus Welliver as Harry. It has run 30 episodes and will soon go into a fourth season.
Bosch is a well- shaped character, a good man but far from easy to get along with. The genuine empathy he feels toward the victims of crime fuels his selfless hard work. But he’s impatient with less dedicated fellow detectives and police bosses who are more interested in their careers than in the work to be done. His taciturn dedication, which his superiors consider surliness, has led him to an embarrassing early retirement from the LAPD. The brass now see him as a trouble-maker and won’t be anxious to help him if he gets into trouble elsewhere — as he most certainly will.
In Two Kinds of Truth he’s working for the poverty- stricken, minuscule San Fernando Police Department as a volunteer detective. Fortunately, though, the SFPD needs him to deal with a double murder connected to the oxycodone plague — a crime story that a Connelly fan ( and perhaps Connelly himself ) will recognize as newsworthy, perhaps even more so than DNA.
Bosch’s altruistic feelings for victims are again awakened and he exhibits his angry courage on their behalf, risking his life while dealing with an international oxycodone king.
No regular reader of Connelly needs to be told the results.