The Simple Art of Murder

Michael Connelly is nervous. It’s a Sunday afternoon in Thousand Oaks, and as the 40-year-old mystery writer parks his black Jeep Cherokee, he stares through the windshield toward the bookshop Mysteries to Die For, trying to get a sense of the crowd inside. “This is the most scary part of my job,” he says of the reading and book signing he will do here, his fourth such appearance in the last day and a half. “I never know if anybody is going to show up.”

Briefly, he remains behind the steering wheel, as if drawing inspiration from the engine ticking down. Then he gets out and retrieves a cardboard publicity placard for “Trunk Music,” his sixth novel and the fifth to feature maverick LAPD Det. Hieronymous (Harry) Bosch.

Inside, it’s clear that Connelly’s anxiety is misplaced. The store is packed with admirers--so many that they are pressed against the shelves. He says hello to a number of people he recognizes, and reads a short excerpt from “Trunk Music.” Then he opens things up to questions. As a cautionary note, he warns the audience not to reveal anything about the story’s outcome; the day before, someone gave away an essential plot point, which left the audience angry and betrayed.

This afternoon, however, Connelly’s readers are respectful and intelligent, demonstrating a vast knowledge not only of his work, but of his life. More than once, someone asks about an idea or character developed during the course of several novels, and nearly everyone stops to congratulate him on the baby he and his wife, Linda, are expecting, their first child and an arrival the author seems to anticipate with equal parts trepidation and joy.

Although he’s friendly with everyone who approaches, there’s also a certain shyness, a reticence at being in the spotlight, even in as supportive a setting as this. But away from the crowd, he starts to kick back, discussing the challenges of writing mysteries in a chaotic city like L.A. A bearlike man whose beard and cropped brown hair set off sharp blue eyes, he talks and moves gently, as if considering each gesture. “One of the reasons I like Michael,” says Barbara Peters, owner of the Poisoned Pen bookstore in Scottsdale, Ariz., “is that he’s so thoughtful. He really thinks everything through.”

Connelly’s gentle demeanor may be at odds with the image of a tough guy crime writer, but he has contradicted other people’s expectations for a long time. A transplanted Easterner--born in Philadelphia, he moved to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., at 12 but still speaks with a mid-Atlantic accent--he writes novels that probe L.A. with a native’s insight, which is especially astonishing given the unlikelihood of his becoming a novelist at all.

The second of six children, Connelly says he “always liked mysteries, since the Hardy Boys.” Even so, when he went to college at the University of Florida, it was as a building construction major, the field in which his father worked. In the mid-1970s, he dropped out for two years before deciding to study journalism; after graduation, he worked at the Daytona Beach News-Journal and the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, where he co-wrote an in-depth Sunday magazine piece about a Delta plane crash that was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

“One of the guys I worked with got the FAA file,” Connelly remembers, “and we went around the country and interviewed 27 survivors. It was probably the best thing I ever did in all my years of journalism.”

The story led to a job as a police reporter at the Los Angeles Times. In 1987, he moved to Southern California and soon began to write fiction, drawing on “my observations of how the cops did their jobs.” His debut effort, “Black Echo,” won the Edgar Award for best first crime novel of 1992, and with subsequent books, all published by Little, Brown & Co., he developed a loyal readership, assisted by strong promotion from the mystery stores.

Lately, he has begun to attract more general readers, especially with his fifth book, “The Poet,” which appeared a year ago. That novel spent nine weeks as a Los Angeles Times bestseller; the paperback now sits on national lists. In many ways, “The Poet” set the stage for “Trunk Music,” which, after five weeks, is No. 6 on The Times list. “It’s been a steady progression,” says Otto Penzler, who owns the Mysterious Bookshops and was the longtime publisher of the Mysterious Press. “Michael’s only had six books out, which is less than it took Sue Grafton to make an impact beyond the mystery world.”

In recent years, Floridians Edna Buchanan and Carl Hiaasen have made similar leaps from police reporter to crime novelist. Yet unlike Hiaasen, Connelly hasn’t kept his day job. Instead, he left the Times in 1993 after completing his third novel, “The Concrete Blonde” (1994), and says, “I haven’t missed being a reporter at all.”

He and his wife live in a comfortable Laurel Canyon home he jokingly calls “the house Hollywood built,” a reference to the options taken on each of his books. The couple also has a West Hollywood condo they are trying to sell, but for the moment, he often works there in a small upstairs loft, his computer looking out on a view of the hills.

For all this, however, Connelly’s success has been a surprise to nearly everyone but himself. “Mike was as a great reporter,” says Bob Rector, who as an assignment editor for the Times’ Valley edition worked with Connelly, “but he had problems as a writer. That’s not to say he was a bad writer, but his work wasn’t up to the level of his novels.” Still, Rector notes, “Mike was a junkyard dog when it came to a story. He was very quiet, extremely quiet, in fact. But he was a tireless worker who was not afraid to report a story, to go out and bang on doors.”

Connelly’s 13 years as a reporter seem to have enabled him to be both moved by and detached from the stories he reported. He says simply, “One of the cynical things about journalism is the best stuff you remember is the worst for other people. It’s murders and plane crashes, things like that.” In “The Poet,” his only non-Harry Bosch novel, Connelly’s narrator, journalist Jack McEvoy, touches on a similar theme. “As a police reporter,” he declares, “I was a tourist of the macabre. I moved from murder to murder, horror to horror without blinking an eye.”

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The character of Harry Bosch also seems motivated by this sense of detached engagement in his work. A loner in a Police Department that likes to think of itself as an extended family, an individual whose past is so disturbing that he has forcibly cut himself off from it, Bosch is a true detective for the l990s, an existential hero confused by the shifting parameters of a society that has lost its moral compass.

Even his name is representative. Chosen by his prostitute mother because she liked the painter, it functions as a vivid symbol for Harry’s self-described mission in a city Connelly calls a modern-day “Garden of Earthly Delights.”

This idea of Los Angeles as metaphor plays a big role in his fiction--indeed, it was part of his reason for becoming a crime novelist at all. After going back to college, he recalls enjoying Robert Altman’s movie of “The Long Goodbye,” then reading Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald and Joseph Wambaugh.

“Maybe what drew me or what keeps me here is the same thing that made these guys write about Los Angeles. It’s a great place to write about because there’s such randomness here. It has social fractures and geologic fractures; it’s just a place where anything can happen. So many great crime writers came from Los Angeles, it was the goal I set--to someday come to L.A. and write about it. It’s the kind of goal that’s such a longshot you never even talk about it.”

Over the last five years, the city has endured enough disturbances, man-made and natural, to sustain a legion of novelists, and those events have found their way into his work. His second novel, “The Black Ice” (1993), begins as Bosch watches firefighting crews put out brush fires in the Hollywood Hills from the deck of his Laurel Canyon home, a home that will be torn down during “The Last Coyote” (1995) due to damages sustained in the Northridge earthquake, and rebuilt by the time “Trunk Music” begins.

Then, there are the crimes Bosch investigates, some of which grew out of stories originally reported--by Connelly and others--in The Times. “Black Echo” was inspired by a 1987 robbery in which thieves infiltrated storm drain tunnels beneath the city’s streets and dug into the vault of a bank. “Trunk Music” (Mafia slang for a hit) is based loosely on the unsolved murder of Encino businessman Vic Weiss, found shot to death in the trunk of his Rolls-Royce 17 years ago.

Despite their evocation of Los Angeles as a contemporary city on the brink, Connelly’s novels operate very much within the tradition of local detective fiction dating back to Chandler. The Poisoned Pen’s Peters, in fact, believes Connelly “is the Raymond Chandler of our time, the only person I’ve ever said is the heir of Raymond Chandler.” That’s an assessment Connelly shrugs off, although he readily admits the influence, stating that “in the formation of my central characters, I religiously use the blueprint that Chandler provided in his essay ‘The Simple Art of Murder.’ ”

Asked to elaborate, he explains, “I thought it would be an interesting turn to take a guy with the sensibilities of Philip Marlowe and put him in the Police Department. That’s why, in my books, Harry Bosch has a lot of problems with the hierarchy of the department. He is an outsider.” Later, he adds, “Everything is derivative. And maybe Harry is a detective who strikes familiar chords in the reader. I don’t want to say he’s the new Philip Marlowe; I wouldn’t dare say that. But at the same time, I think there’s some kind of lineage that goes back to him.”

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Connelly’s prose lacks the epigrammatic quality of Chandler’s best work, and his plots at times have a few too many twists and turns. What the two writers share, however, is a disdain for authority, an abiding distrust of the mechanisms of power that run throughout this city like hidden faults.

Such attitudes are apparent not only in Bosch’s constant run-ins with the brass, but also from the way Connelly structures his stories, where authority and malevolence often go hand in hand. His stories eclipse the line between cop and criminal, good and evil. In “The Last Coyote,” for instance, Bosch’s investigation of his own mother’s long-unsolved murder leads him on a circuitous journey through the underside of L.A. politics, where morality crusaders and Hollywood lowlifes are just two sides of the same coin.

Where Connelly updates the formula is in the way his books connect. Philip Marlowe did not change from case to case; but part of Connelly’s appeal is the way Bosch develops from the solitary, nightmare-riven Vietnam vet of “Black Echo” to the more vulnerable man “The Last Coyote” and “Trunk Music” reveal.

“If you look back at the 1960s and 1970s, a guy like Ross Macdonald, he’s a classic, but his character Lew Archer you know almost nothing about,” Connelly says. “In my books, though, the mystery feeds off the character. ‘The Last Coyote’ and ‘The Concrete Blonde’ are mysteries that Harry has to solve himself. They have personal ties to them, it’s not like an everyday case.”

Indeed, emphasis on character development is one of the reasons mysteries have enjoyed a renaissance in the last 10 or 15 years, rejuvenated by writers like Lawrence Block, Sara Paretsky and Robert Crais, who have brought the sensibilities of literary fiction to what was once a shopworn form. By all accounts, Connelly is in the forefront of this “second golden age of the mystery.”

Sheldon McArthur, who manages West Hollywood’s Mysterious Bookstore, groups him with James Lee Burke and Walter Mosley at the top of the class of new mystery writers. McArthur cites Connelly’s ability to “totally evoke Los Angeles,” as well as the way he has taken a tried and true form--the police procedural--and turned it on its head.

What Connelly has done is to take several classic elements of the private eye novel and merge them with the police procedural. This makes sense, considering Connelly’s fascination with hard-boiled detective fiction and his experiences as a police reporter. “I made Harry a cop out of convenience,” he says. “It was the edge I thought I’d have. Although I was influenced by Chandler and Macdonald, I felt that in the 1990s, the natural heir to that type of detective would not be a private eye. I thought he would be a real cop. I wanted my books to be grounded in reality, and the reality is that private eyes aren’t running around Los Angeles solving murders every year.”

Given the times in which we live, when even the mildest iconoclast is labeled a malcontent, Bosch’s insider/outsider persona may be Connelly’s most brilliant move. Certainly, it’s a posture to which most readers can relate, from the standing-room-only crowd at Mysteries to Die For to the president of the United States.

Not long after “The Black Ice” was published, President Clinton summoned Connelly to a late-night encounter on the runway at LAX. “He came down from Air Force One,” Connelly says of the high-level meeting. I was at the bottom of the stairs, and his handlers told me to say, ‘Welcome to Los Angeles, Mr. President.’ Then I walked with him toward his limo, and for 30 seconds we talked. I gave him one of my books, and he told me he’d read the other one.”

With even the president a die-hard fan, there’s no question about mysteries’ hold on the public imagination. But while booksellers like McArthur and Peters see the form as representing a kind of modern morality play, Connelly goes one step further. In “The Poet,” after Jack McEvoy is held hostage by a suspected serial killer, he is sought out by the tabloid TV shows. When he asks why they’re interested, he’s told it has to do with the primacy of his experience: “You’re a celebrity, Jack. . . . You went face to face with the devil and survived. People want to ask you how that felt. People always want to know about the devil.”

What that means, Connelly believes, is simple. “Mysteries,” he says, “bring order to disorder. They reassure us about the malevolent forces in the world. Los Angeles, more than any other place, has a lot of things that don’t make sense, a lot of instances where it seems the criminal justice system doesn’t work. So along comes the mystery book, and it presents a world where all the pieces of the puzzle eventually fit, good triumphs over evil. And when you finish the last page, you should be reassured, even if it’s only subliminally, that things do work out. That’s part of the art, to take somebody into a world that might be scary to them, and still be able to back out and close the door, and have everything be OK at the end.”

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Michael Connelly

Age: 40.

Background: Born in Philadelphia in 1956; moved to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in 1968; came to Los Angeles in 1987 and now lives in the Hollywood Hills.

Family: Married for 12 years to Linda McCaleb Connelly, who works as his manager; they are expecting their first child.

Passions: “Passion is a pretty strong word for me, and writing is one of the few things that qualifies. But lately, I’ve been reading books about parenting and childbirth, stuff like that. I’ve also spent the past few years restoring a red 1974 Triumph convertible TR-6 in my garage. 1974 is the year I graduated from high school, and this is the car I wanted then but couldn’t have. There’s some kind of significance in that, according to my wife. She calls it my midlife crisis car.”

On his relationship with Los Angeles: “My books are rooted in the city, and I don’t think they would have the same appeal if they weren’t. At the end of ‘The Last Coyote,’ Harry went to Florida, and I went off to write another book that had nothing to do with him. During that period, I was thinking, ‘What do I do with Harry Bosch now? Do I keep him in Los Angeles?’ But in the end, L.A. is a character in my books, and I decided to keep Harry in the place he knows.”

On taking a break from Harry Bosch: Connelly plans to step away from Bosch on a semi-regular basis; “The Poet” was motivated by this intention, and he is now at work on another stand-alone novel about a retired FBI agent who investigates a murder on his own. “As a writer, my long-term goal is to keep writing about Harry Bosch. But to keep him interesting, I want to take periodic breaks and write about other things.”