Writer Michael Connelly’s Teenage Brush With Crime

[Vanity Fair, march 2015]

As the Harry Bosch thrillers are being adapted for Amazon TV, Connelly discusses how his own experiences have influenced his bestselling series.

John Heilpern

Fans of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch thrillers, and there are many millions of us globally, will doubtless be pleased that his troubled L.A.P.D. detective—the abandoned son of a murdered prostitute—has at last become the hero of his own TV series.Bosch, starring Titus Welliver, begins streaming on Amazon Prime this month, and the unassuming Mr. Connelly met me for lunch in the Grill Room of the Four Seasons restaurant as he passed through New York recently en route to his home in Florida.

“There’s something really decadent about ordering a $38 hamburger,” he remarked, mulling it over as he scanned the menu. A waiter hovered: “My name is Grant if you have any questions.” Mr. Connelly chose the pompano special. “I’m up for that. I caught pompano fishing off a bridge as a kid, and it was a prize catch. We wrapped it in foil and cooked it on a little hibachi grill with some lemon while we fished.” He also requested an iced tea (which he practically lives on, he explained, particularly when writing).

This quiet, contented man appeared to be the antithesis of the hard, damaged detective he christened Hieronymus Bosch—after the 15th-century Dutch artist whose fantastic paintings of the fallen in hell serve as a metaphor for L.A.'s criminal cesspool. “I’ve always thought of L.A. as the modern version of The Garden of Earthly Delights,” he said. “So much of it is physically beautiful—from the ocean to mountains to deserts. It’s all there—but it’s all messed up, you know? It's a town that reaches for the brass ring but always misses it.”

Harry Bosch has been the antihero of 19 of Connelly's thrillers since the first, The Black Echo, in 1992. What do they have in common? “We’re both left-handed, we have teenage daughters, and we like jazz—that’s about it.” Bosch’s uncompromising credo, “Everybody counts or nobody counts,” speaks for the dead and the dregs. But at the bruised heart of the matter, Connelly shares his alter ego’s righteous sense of honor.

He mentioned almost casually that when he was 16 he was a witness to a crime and spent time with detectives. He was working late nights as a dishwasher at a hotel in Florida, when, returning home, he saw a man running and hiding something in a hedge. “It was a shirt wrapped around a gun—the first time in my life I ever held a gun,” he went on. He trailed the man into a biker bar. Police cars were already descending on the neighborhood with lights flashing. The teenage Connelly flagged one over, told them what he’d seen, and described the man. “They said someone had just been shot in a robbery.”

The cops emptied the bar, and Connelly, who was at first fascinated and then fearful, had to look at lineups of bikers to identify the robber. “It wasn’t through a one-way mirror. They could see me.” He was convinced they didn’t have the right guy. But the cops could see he was scared. “I couldn’t convince the detectives that they didn’t have him. They just thought I was this white kid from the suburbs who wouldn’t stand up and do the right thing. It left me feeling very poorly about myself. I was telling the truth. But I was found guilty by those cops and it really bothered me.”

Some 40 years on, it still bugs him. He told of a remarkable coda to the story. When he became a rookie crime reporter for the local Florida paper eight years later, he met the same detective who hadn’t believed he was telling the truth that night. “You probably don't remember this case,” he insisted. “I'm telling you that you didn't have the right guy.” But he still didn't believe him.

Born in 1956, Michael Connelly was raised in Fort Lauderdale, the son of an engineer, and he lives in Tampa with his family. Los Angeles has long since been his spiritual home (where he also keeps a place). He was on a path to follow in his father’s footsteps and become an engineer when, in another decisive moment, he discovered Raymond Chandler.

Connelly was 19 years old when he saw Robert Altman’s 1973 film noir of Chandler’s 1953 novel, The Long Goodbye, on a student-union Dollar Movie Night, and it changed the direction of his life. “I read all of Chandler’s novels in two weeks, and it really turned my head. That’s when I started saying I don’t want to just read this stuff. I want to write it. It wasn’t a decision to become a writer. I wanted to become a writer of crime fiction. I was very specific.”

Encouraged by his father, he wound up a newspaperman, which he remained for 14 years, working mostly on the crime beat. (He was a Pulitzer-nominated investigative reporter before joining the Los Angeles Times.) The crime beat gave Connelly his intimate knowledge of the twilight world of cops like Bosch. But Chandler’s mythic, hard-drinking private eye, Philip Marlowe, remained his touchstone.

He even rented the 1930s High Tower apartment where Marlowe lived overlooking Hollywood in Altman’sThe Long Goodbye. (Marlowe first lived there in Chandler’s 1942 The High Window.) “As a writer, you look for inspiration wherever you can get it,” said Connelly, who moved out of the place after four unfruitful years. (Plus, it didn’t have air-conditioning.)

But whenever he begins a new Bosch novel, he ritualistically reads Chandler’s melancholic homage to Los Angeles in Chapter 13 of his 1949 The Little Sister. And it inspires him every time. “Maybe we all get like this,” Marlowe ruminates darkly as he drives round the corrupt, compelling city. “In the cold half-lit world where always the wrong thing happens and never the right … ”