Inside investigation

Michael Connelly has written more than a million words about Harry Bosch. Over 12 of Connelly’s hard-bitten crime fiction novels, the cocky Los Angeles detective has investigated his mother’s murder, fallen for a comely FBI agent and brooded over botched investigations. So it’s understandable that some readers, after all their investment in following him, take Bosch’s exploits quite personally.

“One time, at a book signing in Paris, this woman stood up and said, ‘I’m very worried about Harry Bosch,’ as if he were a real person,” Connelly said. “I remember thinking, ‘I live halfway across the world in Los Angeles and whatever I’ve done in my little room near the 101 Freeway makes this woman worried about a character that doesn’t exist.’ ”

That sort of emotional attachment to Bosch likely comes from Connelly’s attention to the detective’s tumultuous internal life. For every fiend he catches, there’s been a long-lost daughter or a rough breakup for him to come to terms with. “Echo Park,” Connelly’s latest and his 17th novel, puts his emotional turmoil front and center, even more than the case he’s trying to solve.

The novel’s central crime, a young woman’s murder that Bosch couldn’t crack, is nearly a decade old when the narrative begins. A serial killer comes forward to confess, and Bosch is forced to examine where he went wrong the first time, while uncomfortably reuniting with an old lover assisting on the case.

The novel’s reverse narrative, with the crime apparently solved in the book’s first few pages, isn’t all that radical in crime fiction. The real mystery of “Echo Park” is if Connelly can reveal something original about guilt and regret without the hook of a puzzle novel. Released earlier this month, initial reviews have been positive, and Connelly feels that the new approach is a natural extension of Bosch’s personality.

“When I was thinking in terms of Bosch, I had written about him 11 times,” Connelly said from his writing studio in Tampa, Fla., where he moved from L.A. five years ago. “I wanted to try and see him in a new light. Harry is often sure of himself and his instincts to the point of being arrogant about it. One thing I hadn’t explored with him was self-doubt.”

The tropes and cliches of the hard-boiled detective yarn are present but now largely beside the point in Connelly’s fiction. The grimy street scenes and grizzled cop jargon feel straight off the LAPD police blotter. But in “Echo Park,” the particulars of the casework are a way into Bosch’s mind. Connelly still keeps close contacts within the department, and that continues to inform Bosch’s evolving fictional world. “I was friends with a couple of cops that got shifted into cold case, so I had an entree into that world,” Connelly said. “When [LAPD Chief William] Bratton came in, he was familiar with my work and he kept the door open. My access for research to the cold case squad is sometimes astonishing to me.”

Though Connelly usually spends around four days a month in Los Angeles for research, he admits that the city sometimes changes faster than he can keep track of from across the country. Connelly rewrote several major passages and plot points of “Echo Park” even after the galley editions had been pressed. He had a hunch that his descriptions of the once-dangerous but now rapidly gentrifying neighborhood lacked the color and detail that make Los Angeles such an essential character in his novels. “I try to be as accurate and current about the city as I can be, and that reflects well on Harry and it helps me delineate his character,” Connelly said. “I wasn’t happy with the descriptions of Echo Park. When I write about Los Angeles, I’m 3,000 miles away, and I was four to five years behind on the way I viewed Echo Park. The last thing I want is for anyone to read one of my books and say, ‘This guy doesn’t live here anymore.’ ”

In addition to “Echo Park,” Connelly has also completed a new novella, “The Overlook,” which the New York Times’ Sunday magazine has been publishing in weekly installments since September. In it, Bosch investigates a murder with ties to terrorism and chemical weapons smuggling. The politically charged subject matter raises the stakes, and potential risks, for Connelly as an author concerned with evildoing in the modern world. “It’s hard to do that well; the last thing you want to do is be didactic about anything,” Connelly said.

The novella is likely to raise Connelly’s profile among audiences unfamiliar with crime fiction. But Connelly’s editor thinks the Bosch novels often have a contemporary feel. “I think crime fiction can be compelling without necessarily making direct references to current events,” said Asya Muchnick, senior editor at Little, Brown. “The plots of the books are in no way ‘ripped from today’s headlines,’ which might quickly feel dated, but Harry Bosch sometimes does catch cases that reflect what’s going on in the wider world.”

The hot-button issues of “The Overlook,” however, are still secondary to Connelly’s exploration of Harry Bosch’s internal life, which after a dozen books is now strikingly similar to Connelly’s own. “At this point, we’ve got a lot in common,” Connelly said. “A few books ago, he discovered that he had a daughter and that certainly changed him. That came because of me; I have a kid that same age and I wanted to use some of my same feelings about fatherhood....

“The best books in this genre are the ones that have raised the book to a greater level. Yes, they’re puzzles and entertainment and whodunits, but it’s the writers who can use that as a lens to look at something else, to explore some kind of social or political angle, who are the ones I like the most.”

Connelly has already started sketching out his “Echo Park” follow-up, a novel that will likely take Harry Bosch to Hong Kong and other foreign locales. Though Connelly may live on the East Coast and set his next novel in a different hemisphere, as long as there is Harry Bosch, Connelly will eventually have to bring him home to Los Angeles.

“I still feel like I’m from L.A.,” Connelly said. “I’m sure I’ll be moving back sometime. Florida doesn’t hit me that way. I’m tied up with Harry Bosch and I’ve always tried to make him connected to the city of Los Angeles. It wouldn’t work to move Harry to someplace else.”

august.brown@latimes.com