Fate has been good to crime writer Michael Connelly, if not to those unfortunate enough to provide inspiration for his work. He talks to John Connolly about his latest novel, City of Bones, and a life of eerie coincidences.
It's a strange fact, but other people's misfortunes have been good for the crime novelist,Michael Connelly. Take the case of the Los Angeles sports promoter and businessman, Vic Weiss. In 1979, Weiss had the bad luck to be shot dead and dumped in the trunk of his own Rolls Royce. It would be hard to find a positive aspect to this turn of events - especially if you happen to be Vic Weiss - but Connelly's 1997 bestseller, Trunk Music (slang for a gangland hit), was based, in part, on the Weiss case.
In a similar vein, car-jackings, bank raids and riots have provided inspiration for Connelly's work. Looked at from a certain angle, his output represents the book-shaped silver lining to other folk's clouds.
Connelly is the author of 11 crime novels, eight of which have featured the Los Angeles police detective, Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch, including his latest, City of Bones. When we meet in a Washington DC hotel, he is preparing to deliver a speech to a packed convention of crime readers and doesn't appear to be relishing the prospect. Softly spoken, and under-stated to the point of near invisibility, he has an aversion to the limelight that borders on the pathological. There are small nocturnal animals that are better suited to large crowds in brightly-lit rooms than Michael Connelly.
Born into an Irish-Catholic family of six children - both his maternal and paternal grandparents came from Cork - he always wanted to be a writer, and not just any kind of writer. Connelly wanted to be a crime writer, but what is interesting is that fate appears to have intervened at crucial points in his life to give him a helpful push in his chosen direction, admittedly sometimes at the cost of other people being given a helpful push in the direction of their own mortality.
When he was 11, his family left Philadelphia for Florida, then - as now - a hotbed of crime. He was 16 when he witnessed his first shooting. "I was driving my car home - I had a night dishwasher job at a restaurant on the beach at Fort Lauderdale and I'd get off at about midnight - and I saw the tail-end of a car-jacking. Somebody had tried to take a car and had shot the driver. It went awry and the shooter ran away. I just saw this man running and watched him stick his gun into a hiding-place in a hedge. When the police came I led them to the gun, and then on to the bar that the shooter had fled into.
"That drew me into this world that I knew nothing about. I was taken to the police station and they emptied the bar. It was a biker bar and, civil rights be damned, they just put everybody into the paddy wagon and brought them to the police station. I had to look at this line-up of unsavoury guys and pick the shooter out, but somehow the guy had gone out the back door and they didn't get him.
"It became this thing where the cops thought I was intimidated, so it stretched on for several hours through the night, with my dad trying to intervene. It left an indelible mark on me, this world and its gruff detectives, and kicked my fascination with crime into high gear."
Connelly became a journalist, spurred on not by Watergate, as many of his peers were, but by the reporting of Edna Buchanan and others who had covered the era of the "cocaine cowboys" in Florida at the end of the 1970s. By 1981, he was a crime reporter, but it was an airline disaster that made his reputation and finally set him on the path to becoming a novelist. In 1985, a plane from Fort Lauderdale, Delta flight 191, crashed at Dallas. Miraculously, 27 people survived, and Connelly spent a year interviewing them about their experience. The story earned the 25-year-old reporter and two colleagues a Pulitzer nomination, and led to an interview and subsequent reporting job with the Los Angeles Times, commencing in 1987.
But, once again, bad luck was about to strike at strangers, and Connelly would profit. The day before he arrived for his job interview, a Los Angeles bank became the target of one of the city's most daring robberies, one that remains unsolved to this day and that would subsequently provide the plot for Connelly's first novel, The Black Echo. "It was weird," he recalls. "I arrived in LA for the first time in my life on the day the story broke that would inspire my first book.
"Los Angeles is basically a desert, and underneath it are 600 miles of storm-water tunnels in case of flooding. Just like you can drive all over LA on the streets, you can also drive under LA in tunnels. A group of burglars - they think it took at least four of them - had these little Honda ATVs, and they drove three miles into one of the tunnels to a point where they were within 150 feet of a bank. They dug their own tunnel underneath the vault, broke in over a weekend and emptied all the safety deposit boxes, and then were gone.
"They were never caught. The closest they ever came to catching them was about a year later, when one of the utility guys in LA was checking the tunnels and he noticed a piece of plywood on the wall of the tunnel painted to look like concrete. He pulled it away and found another tunnel. They had come back and were in the process of digging another tributary towards a bank so they could hit LA again. But this tunnel was going under Wilshire, and the police got stuck with this situation of whether they should let them finish the tunnel and ambush them in the vault or, since Wilshire was a major road and might collapse, fill in the tunnel. They went with safety and filled it in, and I guess the guys saw the activity and never went back."
Gifted with a plot from real life, and influenced by the work of writers such as James Lee Burke, Lawrence Block and James Ellroy, Connelly began work on The Black Echo, the first of the Harry Bosch novels. Highly acclaimed upon publication in 1992, he followed it up with The Black Ice and The Concrete Blonde, finally quitting journalism upon completion of the third book. Bosch is a classic troubled hero: anti-authoritarian, unlucky in love, tormented by the murder of his mother and driven by moral outrage to investigate the crimes he encounters in the course of his work.
Connelly's prose sometimes betrays a journalist's distrust of over-ornate writing, but there is a real power to his books that derives from its central character, and the depth and insight with which Connelly portrays him and the city in which he works. This is especially true of City of Bones, a slow, brooding novel which uses the discovery of a child's bones in Los Angeles as the starting point for a meditation on love, duty, and family loyalties and betrayals.
Like most of the great Californian crime writers - Chandler, James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald - Connelly is a transplanted citizen, not a native, and shares their fascination with his adopted city both with his predecessors in the genre and with his own main character.
"Harry is hopeful and cynical at the same time about LA, and he's disappointed because LA is a physically beautiful place but it can't get itself together. There is always something awry in Los Angeles. If LA was a person you'd start thinking, what is wrong with me? Every time I get close to the golden ring it slips away.
"People who write about LA write about it because they can't put their finger on it. A lot of it comes from being a destination city. It's a place people gravitate towards in the hope of having a shot at achieving their dreams. In LA, as in life, not everybody gets those dreams. It becomes a gathering point for people who wear their hopes on their sleeves. It's beautiful, but it has this dark side. As somebody once told me, it's a sunny place forshady people."
Connelly is now a father (his daughter has just turned five) and admits that the experience has changed him. He would not now, he says, write a novel like The Poet, in which part of the story is told from the point of view of a child killer.
Yet, interestingly, the two books that followed his child's birth, Angel's Flight and Void Moon, both feature young girls either murdered or in peril of their lives.
"In a way, it was some subconscious thing that came out of being the father of a young girl. You write about stuff that scares you. When I became a father then, either subconsciously or not, I wrote two books about child endangerment. I was probably exorcising demons, my worst fears."
Connelly believes that the events of September 11th may have given crime writers a new set of demons to confront, for no other genre is so passionately concerned with issues of good and evil, of living and dying in the shadow of violence. City of Bones makes explicit reference to the terrorist attacks, while Connelly has shelved plans for a stand-alone novel in order to pursue the issues raised by the attacks through the medium of Harry Bosch.
"I think what happened will affect all of us. It will be in our minds as we write. It's weird to try to find a positive thing in something so horrible, but I just think it's going to raise the level of our art, of what people do in this genre. I feel like it's almost a duty now to explore this type of thing. I don't mean writing novels about terrorists, but more of a duty to try to explain the world. We explain the world in our work, but now the world has this big gaping hole in it and it's got to be understood."
City of Bones is published by Orion, priced €13.99