THE BOOK OF BOSCH
From page to small screen, Connelly reveals details about his detective
The Night Fire Michael Connelly Little, Brown
If you’ve listened to Michael Connelly’s podcast, Murder Book, you know he has a perfect voice for detective stories: gravelly and flat, like he’s delivering very bad news. In person, though, he’s so soft-spoken and bookish he might pass for a librarian.
At a coffee shop in Tampa — Connelly splits his time between there and Los Angeles — the 63-year-old author set aside pages from a script for his TV series Bosch to talk about his new novel, The Night Fire. The book is a fast-paced mystery that weaves together a cold case and a new murder, an unjust charge and a hired killer. It’s the second novel that unites Los Angeles Police Department detective Renée Ballard and longtime detective Harry Bosch, who is (sort of ) retired.
Q In your podcast, Murder Book, you followed a real cold case that involved a killing in Hollywood in which the suspect was brought to trial many years later, and you went to the court to follow the story toward its conclusion. First, why do a podcast? And second, how did it play into your new novel?
A To me, the podcast is hopefully an entertaining story that also is illuminating about our cracked system. And the case was in part chosen because it involved three detectives who have helped me the most in my books. I was able to get the voices of people who have inspired me — and I could get them to tell their story, rather than me fictionalize it in a Bosch book. On the second level, it’s about how I do my research. The podcast was me doing research on wiretaps.
Q Wiretaps and DNA both figure into the podcast and
The Night Fire, but not exactly the way you’d expect.
A I think that’s my duty as a novelist, to take things that seem established — DNA is seen, probably, as the panacea to solving all kinds of crimes, and there’s just a lot more to it than that. So I will purposely look for ways of flipping the convention of what most people will think. In The Night Fire there’s a dead-bang case with a confession and a DNA match, and you can knock down both of them if your lawyer is smart.
Q How does the TV show Bosch affect how you think about your novels?
A Before the show, most of the Bosch books were the single narrative — they’re in his head. And you don’t have that in scripting. One of the first things (the producers) said was, Bosch can’t be in every scene or we’re going to kill the poor guy. We have to spread the story around to other characters, to give them more life. Most of my books since then have had multiple narrators. I’ve spread the storytelling out in my books, as well.
Q How do Bosch and Ballard let you make different kinds of storytelling choices?
A It’s a perfect setup because one has a badge and one doesn’t, so one can do things the other one can’t. But also, Bosch has always been a guy who will go up to a line and put one foot across but not both, but Ballard’s all-in. In all the years I wrote about Bosch as a cop he didn’t do that, and now I’m writing about someone who did — who does. Ballard is ruled by the greater good as opposed to the protocols of the police department.
Q Is it fun working on a television show?
A Well, it’s fun if you wrote the books it’s based on. Because you’re kind of like the unofficial mayor of a little town. The crew’s like 250 people. And it hits me every time. Sometimes we’ll do a scene and I can remember writing that scene in a book, and just crazy to think when I was writing that, I had no idea that 20 years later they would actually film this. It’s been a great ride.
I’m very lucky. Q You’re considering stories for another season of the podcast, you’re going on book tour, you’re writing a script for Bosch while shooting a different episode, and you’re working on a new novel. How do you do it all? A When I write a novel, I get an idea and I think about it, sometimes for years, sometimes very quickly. But I don’t start writing until I have a sense of how it’s going to end. I need that light to go toward. And once I have that light, I can jump off and do something else and come back to it.
It may have come from my days as a newspaper reporter, because on the crime beat you usually write about something that happened, but it doesn’t have a conclusion yet, so you have many things that you want to keep checking on. You have a lot of balls in the air when you’re a police reporter. I have a lot of balls in the air now, but I don’t have daily deadlines, so what I do now is easier than what I used to do as a reporter. And I don’t have the pressure of being right because I write fiction.