National Post (National Edition)
Master at work
MICHAEL CONNELLY NEVER NEGLECTS THE READER WHEN WRITING CRIME NOVELS
In his 29th novel, Michael Connelly proves himself the most ingenious architect of plots now at work among fictional crime writers. In The Wrong Side of Goodbye (Little, Brown), this season’s gift to his readers, he sends his principal detective, Harry Bosch, scurrying down two quite separate narratives at the same time. These are not the main story and the sub-plot, as they would be in the work of lesser writer. They are both big, complicated stories, full of drama, pathos, nuance and (as Connelly readers won’t be surprised to learn) serious potential danger to Bosch.
To make all this work, Connelly gives Bosch a new career, or something like two new careers. Bosch has ended his decades of service with the Los Angeles Police Department, finally retiring after less than genial negotiations. He’s now a private investigator but he doesn’t care to be all on his own. To maintain a badge and some of his connections to officialdom, he’s signed on as an unpaid volunteer at the police department of the poverty-stricken and tiny (but fortunately not crime-free) municipality of San Fernando.
This adds an extra tension to Bosch’s already tense life: If he does some work as a PI, his San Fernando colleagues may feel cheated. But then he worries that his volunteer work will slow the progress of his case as a PI. Connelly ensures that the reader will feel the tension of Bosch’s professional conflicts. We who have followed him through a pile of novels know that he’s a good man whose conscience never quite leaves him alone.
His PI assignment deals with genealogy and an inheritance. A billionaire octogenarian, Whitney Vance, wants to know if he has any descendants. More than six decades before, he had a teen-aged Mexican lover, whom he now regards as the love of his life. She was pregnant and his family forced him to reject her. Vance wants someone to inherit his billions. Bosch must uncover the life of the baby and any offspring. But there are several interests who want the Vance billions. They will fight, and perhaps kill, to get what they want.
In San Fernando, Bosch’s problem is a serial rapist, called the Screen Cutter because he always cuts his way through a screen door to reach his victims. The police have his DNA but nothing else; he wears a mask so that there’s not even a sketchy idea of his face.
Typically, this case makes Bosch think about Maddie, his college-age daughter. He’s the kind of father who visits his daughter’s residence and puts strong locks on the doors. He tells her to leave a dog’s bowl near the entrance, to frighten any roaming rapist. Sometimes he calls Maddie and leaves a message: “Put some water in the bowl.”
As always in a Connelly book, the characters are set firmly in the geographic and human environment. Connelly and Harry Bosch are city-lovers. They are to Los Angeles what Robert B. Parker and his narrator/hero Spenser were to Boston, what John D. MacDonald and Travis McGee were to the Florida coastlines and what Ross Macdonald and Lew Archer were to Santa Barbara. Bosch treats the L.A. freeways as his natural landscape and Connelly never fails to tell us which route he chooses to “jump on” (L.A. usage) as he makes his way through the city.
At certain moments Bosch acts like a detective in one of the stories that readers often refer to as (following the famous critic Anthony Boucher) a “police procedural.” He knows criminal law by heart and knows just how much he can bend the rules — though only in the name of justice. When gathering evidence he’s aware it won’t help his case if it can’t be presented credibly in court. Looking into a public garbage can, he sees a face mask that’s probably been used by the serial rapist. Bosch doesn’t just grab it, however. Before touching it he takes a quick photo, showing just where it was when he found it, a sometimes crucial point in a case.
In doling out the clues discovered by Bosch, Connelly never neglects the reader looking over his shoulder. As an old pro, he knows how to carry us with him. We follow Bosch into a dusty attic to examine the belongings sent back home by the U.S. Navy after a man was killed in the Vietnam war. Connelly takes a few pages to describe how Bosch examines every object, a process that could be tedious in other hands. But Connelly precisely calibrates each of the clues, letting readers discover their value as Bosch does, turning the attic scene into a little story within the larger plot. It finishes when Bosch discovers an important object that the serviceman took care to hide shortly before his death.
Connelly makes a habit of bringing back secondary characters who appeared in earlier Bosch novels. The Wrong Side of Goodbye has a part for Mickey Haller, a criminal lawyer who is Bosch’s half-brother: they refer to each other as “my brother from the other mother.” These performances are never complicated enough to baffle a first-time Connelly reader but they enrich the atmosphere for regulars, creating a feeling that Connelly has built an inter-connected world encompassing a multitude of stories, of which he now and then decides to tell us one, or maybe two.
COMPLICATED STORIES, FULL OF DRAMA, PATHOS, NUANCE.