KING OF THE ROAD! Lawyer thriller a new high for the ‘greatest’
author Michael Connelly revealed he was “amazed” that 60 million people watched The Lincoln Lawyer during its first month on Netflix.
This made the TV reboot of his book series about defence lawyer Mickey Haller – who works out of his chauffeur-driven Lincoln Navigator car instead of an office – the most watched show on the streaming giant.
It came just seven days after the release of Bosch Legacy on Amazon Freevee – a spin-off from acclaimed police drama Bosch – which also began as a book series by Michael and ran for seven series on Amazon Prime Video.
But The Lincoln Lawyer marked a new career high for the author of 36 thrillers featuring four interlinking lead characters that have sold more than 80 million books globally.
Michael, who has been dubbed America’s greatest living crime writer, visited the UK for the first time in five years this weekend to receive an Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction award at the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate, which is supported by the Sunday Express.
After receiving the prestigious lifetime achievement award on his 66th birthday, he says: “It’s my first time back in Harrogate for 10 years and it’s amazing to see how big the festival has become.
“To get the award was pretty special. Having 700 people sing me
Happy Birthday, you can’t beat that or explain how cool that was, even though I was deeply embarrassed.”
His Lincoln Lawyer series started in 2005. The first book was adapted into a Hollywood blockbuster, starring Matthew Mcconaughey, in 2011.
Manuel Garcia-rulfo has taken on the role in the 10 episodes released on Netflix in May, supported by Scream star Neve Campbell and Ugly Betty actor Becki Newton as Haller’s first and second wives respectively.
Michael says: “It was pretty amazing to get ‘most watched show’ on Netflix when The Lincoln Lawyer came out.
“I think I speak for everyone on it that we knew we had a solid show and we hoped it would be successful, but when the numbers came out it was like ‘wow’.
“Amazon doesn’t really share its data on viewer numbers, they just say whether they’re happy or not.
“But for Netflix, the numbers are on a website, and for the first month 30 million accounts had watched The Lincoln Lawyer, and generally we think an average of two people per account watch a show, so the numbers are quite staggering. That was reflected in the book sales of all my Lincoln Lawyer books, so it was a really gratifying process.”
Michael, who is a former NEWSPABEST-SELLING
per crime reporter, got the idea for The Lincoln Lawyer from a chance meeting at a baseball game.
He says: “The guy sitting next to me, a lawyer I did not know, I talked to him during a game and he told me how he worked out of his car.
“So that was one of the luckier breaks of my life, sitting next to a guy who randomly gave me the idea for a story franchise.”
After the success of the Hollywood film, from which Mcconaughey, 52, appeared in adverts for Lincoln cars in the US for years, Michael admits that allowing the character to be
rebooted on TV with a different cast was a gamble. He says: “It was a really good film, did a lot of good stuff for me in terms of bringing new people to my writing but, as much as I’d liked that movie, it was not the whole book.
“With everything that has changed in TV in the last 10 to 20 years there is much more appetite for storytelling and the serialisation of characters. So when we got the opportunity to tell The Lincoln Lawyer story again, but in a longer form, I jumped at that, as any writer would.
“It was a little bit of a risk as I had that movie out there that I was proud of. The risk was you make something inferior to that but I’m very happy that we didn’t, we made something that is just as good, if not better, and it’s more about the character as there are so many more minutes and hours in which to tell his story.”
The author, who also created the Renee Ballard and Jack Mcevoy series, adds: “I am a book writer and I want to be involved in all the Hollywood stuff. But at the end of the day I don’t know a whole lot about it, so the important thing for me has always been to give my stuff to people who will cherish it and not say ‘how can we change the story’.
“A lot of that is luck, but in the two TV shows I have had they have been very good in taking care of the books – the plotting and the characters have been very close to what I put in my book.
“In [the Lincoln Lawyer] the character is Mexican American. One of the first things the director gave us was let’s do what’s in the book, let’s find a Mexican-american actor who can handle this role, and that’s what they did. They found someone who is so good as Mickey Haller, in the same way that Matthew Mcconaughey was, but Manuel Garcia-rulfo made it his own.”
Michael, who married Linda in 1984, is also proud of the way actor Titus Welliver made the role of world-weary but relentless detective Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch his own.
The second series of Bosch Legacy, in which the retired detective’s daughter Maddie, a rookie police officer portrayed by Madison Lintz and defence attorney Honey “Money” Chandler, played by Mimi Rogers, have greater roles, starts filming on Tuesday.
The Lincoln Lawyer will also return with a second series due to start filming in the autumn.
Michael says when writing, he sees his own images of Bosch and Haller in his mind, but hears the voice of Welliver for Bosch.
He says: “The actors inhabit the characters so well and kind of own them now. I have no objection to that, so when I say I don’t see them in my head I hope it’s not taken or perceived as anything negative about it.”
His 37th novel Desert Star will be published in November and features young detective Renee Ballard with Bosch.
Michael reveals: “I’ve been talking to the Amazon folks a lot about bringing Renee Ballard into the Bosch Legacy series.
“Ballard is keeping me able to write about Bosch (who is now 72 in the book series) and that could be a good trick for keeping the Bosch TV series going, so I hope that happens.”
‘We hoped it would be a hit but when the numbers came out it was “wow”’