Crime Beat: A Decade Of Covering Cops And Killers

AFTERWORD: THE NOVELIST AS REPORTER

by Michael Carlson

Michael Connelly is a reporter. A good one. Not in the tabloid sense of someone who, like a pulp fiction writer, does whatever it takes to twist the elements of a story into a recognizable template that doesn’t stretch his audience’s emotions beyond the certainties in which tabloids deal. Nor is he an “investigative journalist,” the modern term applied to grad school rewriters of press releases when they score a celebrity interview. He’s a reporter in the best sense of the word, able to gather information and see the story buried beneath all those facts, able to sort through the impressions of all sorts of people and see how they affect those facts and, most of all, able to put it all down on paper so his reader can do the same thing.

When I began my career, I had to study the UPI style book. All the things it said about structuring a story – the famous who-what-when-where-why and how – are laid out in Connelly’s stories, clearly and cleanly. He organizes his stories like a reporter should, to make sure the reader sees what he has seen. This is much more than doing a Jack Webb “just the facts, ma’am.” That ability to set a story out clearly serves Connelly’s greatest strengths as a reporter: his perception and his empathy.

By perception I mean the ability to see and to hear, or, better, to listen to what is being said and to see what it means. This involves the greatest skill a good reporter can have, the ability to understand people. You can’t see a good story unless you can see where it is coming from. Too often in our world, journalists move from graduate schools into hermetically sealed newsrooms, protected by security passes and cut off from the real lives of the people about whom they are supposed to report. They’ve grown up in a world where the relationships are clearly delineated, the conflicts take place along a very narrow perimeter and the people they write about exist only as fodder for copy.

This is not the world cops inhabit. Not the ones who are out on the streets.

Cops know that tragedy arises from the contrast of expectations with reality. They know the real lives of the victims they find, and the real effects of the deeds perpetrated by the criminals they pursue. They can’t escape that knowledge, can’t put a story to bed and then go home and sleep soundly.

The most important story in this collection, as it relates to Connelly’s fiction, is “The Call,” in which he spent a week on call with the Fort Lauderdale homicide squad. Connelly says that what he saw informed everything he has written in fiction, and if you read the story carefully you will see how true that is. It is not just the details of crime and investigation, but the way that Connelly the reporter absorbs the mind-set of the cops, internalizes it. Their fatigue becomes palpable. When Connelly sets out the facts about how hard it will be to solve the case, you feel the emotions of the investigators, the frustrations that are part of their everyday life. This, to me, is the starting point for everything we know about Harry Bosch, and the sense of tiredness which pervades the Bosch novels so effectively.

Empathy is not identification; there is a crucial difference. Connelly tells us that, like Bosch, he collected the shell casings from police funerals and kept them in a jar. He rode with cops and examined crime scenes and corpses with them, but he is not a cop. He is a reporter, and he manages to keep a reporter’s distance from his subjects, which allows him to see the bigger picture of the world that they inhabit.

There is a wonderfully understated moment in a story about the LAPD’s Foreign Prosecution Unit, which pursues Mexicans who have returned to their own country as suspects in crimes committed in the United States. Connelly details the differences in Mexican law that cause civil libertarians to assert that suspects traced by the unit to Mexico may not receive the same rights they would have if they had been captured in the United States. He writes, “Ross and his fellow officers contend that a murder suspect who flees to avoid prosecution in Los Angeles is accepting the justice system of the country he runs to. ‘You have to accept the risks that you have incurred by fleeing,’ Moya said.”

I’ll bet that raised more than one wry smile, but it’s the way it is reported with a straight face that makes it work: you understand exactly the cops’ view of the world, especially in the face of criticism you realize they see as naïve, if well-meaning.

Connelly’s empathy extends beyond the police, however, to the victims of crime, and sometimes to the criminals themselves. When you read the Wilder stories, about a South Florida serial killer who went nationwide, the story that haunts you is about the families whose daughters remain missing after a year. “We haven’t gotten her past that gas station,” repeats the mother of one girl, referring to the last place her daughter was seen. It’s the repetition that gives the words their power to move the reader.

This combination of empathy and perception creates an authorial position that is both detached and involved at the same time. Usually, the result of this formula is cynicism, and it has long been the bane of journalists and cops alike. Connelly’s creation of Bosch, who avoids becoming a hard-boiled cynic by internalizing the pain he sees, is thus a remarkable achievement, and even more so because of the way Connelly has been able to sustain that position even when writing about Bosch in the first person, as he did to great effect when he switched to the classic first-person narration for the books in which Harry operates like a classic L.A. private detective.

Only once, in The Poet, does Connelly use a journalist as his protagonist. By and large, the press does not play a major part in the Bosch series. In general reporters are treated the way Connelly himself says he was when he first arrived on the crime beat in L.A.: tolerated as an inconvenience you can’t get rid of, like ants at a picnic. Harry has a police reporter he more or less trusts, but he also gets set up by the television news, and shows much less anger about it than I did on his behalf when I read

City of Bones.

The Poet was the first of Connelly’s novels that he wrote end-to-end after leaving the journalist’s trade, his first non-Bosch stand-alone and, perhaps not by coincidence, his first bestseller. He has said that his major motivation was the fact that when he took away his files on unsolved murders, he realized how often killers got away with it, and he wanted to write a book in which the guy would get away and there would never be a sequel. He hadn’t anticipated that audience reaction would be so strong.

If you’re reading this you probably realize that eventually Connelly came around to the idea of doing a sequel. He attributed it to “recovering from my cynicism,” in large part after the birth of his daughter. He has also moved from Los Angeles back to Florida, and perhaps that has something to do with the change as well.

Compare the stories written for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel with those done later for the Los Angeles Times and you can sense some serious changes within Connelly. He has said that the newsroom at the Times was older, the veteran journalists more cynical and with a much greater sense of their own importance. You can see why. Los Angeles is a city redolent in crime, and being the backdrop for so many movies, television shows and novels gives every crime within the city more resonance. Americans have headed west for centuries, and wound up in la-la land. Latinos head to El Norte to fulfill their dreams of making a living. Asians came to build the railroads or to flee wars. The choice of the name Bosch made the point metaphorically; The Garden of Earthly Delights ought to hang in the lobby of the Los Angeles Times building.

Connelly’s attitude is that of an outsider rather than a native Angelino. He says he arrived for his job interview at the Times immediately after a major robbery, which wound up serving as the basis for The Black Echo, and said to himself, “Jeez, this is the place to be.” Being an outsider allows him the little bit of distance he needs to observe all sides of the equation. It gives him the leeway to place the nature of the city, its history and culture, as backdrop to the equation.

In Los Angeles, his view of the police and of the world of crime itself both broaden. He gains a deeper perspective of the cop’s world, both its good and bad sides. His empathy begins to be extended to the criminals, some of whom become victims themselves in that strange world of the LAPD, a sort of paramilitary bureaucracy headed by a succession of police chiefs who make Donald Rumsfeld look like Jimmy Carter.

Connelly reports both sides of the story, giving a downbeat counterpoint to the police point of view. A burglar who killed a cop in the struggle for a gun is shot and killed by the police, shot three times in the head. Twice he survives, and twice reaches miraculously for conveniently placed guns. The subtext, that he had already killed a cop, is brought to the surface, subtly but unmistakably. A car full of armed robbers shoot it out with the shotgun-wielding cops from the Special Investigations Section, who watched them rob a fast-food outlet and then surrounded them. Connelly reports the incident straightforwardly but saves for the end the revelation that the robbers were armed with unloaded pellet guns, and were thus unlikely to have chosen to shoot it out.

Harry Bosch lives within these ambiguities. His world cannot be defined, nor understood, without a feeling for the pressure under which the police operate, and the frustration endemic in the job. Understanding that helps explain the cop’s instinct to close ranks and protect one’s own. But cops are also part of a fiercely self-devouring bureaucracy. Think back to Connelly’s original description of working at the Los Angeles Times. He has said that the newsroom was more like a family, with a strict sense of hierarchy, than his Florida paper, where the staff were of a similar age and socialized outside the office. This is the big leagues. So, too, with the LAPD – arguably America ’s most visible police department.

Some of the most satisfying scenes in the Bosch canon involve his clashes with authority, from Harvey “ 98” Pounds to the Bureau of Homeland Security. Bosch has no time for careerists and turf fighters; he’s too busy trying to keep his integrity as he watches the dividing line between those who keep the rules and those who break them, between order and chaos, disappear. This is what Bosch goes home to. This is why he sits in dark rooms and tries to smooth it over with jazz.

The crime writers I most admire are the ones who do something different with the form. Hammett’s accounting of people’s lies, evasions and self-serving testimonies, with no stylistic value judgment coming between the character and the reader. Chandler ’s symphonies of simile. Marlowe’s ability to crack wise in ways that don’t occur to real people until the next day. Donald Westlake crafting Richard Stark’s bare, clipped prose, which matches Parker’s bare, clipped view of the world. George Higgins’ ability to narrate through dialogue, where his characters’ storytelling ability tells you more about them than any description could. James Ellroy’s riffing and agonizing alliterative arsenal.

On the surface, Connelly breaks no new ground. He writes well and cleanly, but look carefully and you’ll see how it goes beyond clean. His prose style is, in fact, an outgrowth of his reporting, hard-boiled without being cynical.

In the 1930s many people compared Hammett to Hemingway, often suggesting Hammett was there first with hard-boiled prose. This was unfair to Hemingway, because In Our Time is crafted with a bare purity that has rarely been matched. Hemingway attributed that purity to learning “cable-ese,” the pared-down prose necessary to save on the cost of wiring his reporting back to the paper at home. But neither writer has the raw, hardboiled quality of Paul Cain’s Fast One or Raoul Whitfield’s Green Ice. Look elsewhere in Hemingway or at some of Hammett and you’ll find prose crafted in an almost romantic manner, because they refuse to submit completely to cynicism; they’ve seen too much of reality for that.

Connelly decided to become a crime writer after seeing Robert Altman’s cynical version of The Long Goodbye and turning to Chandler ’s novels, which he devoured one by one. At the University of Florida, he studied creative writing with the novelist Harry Crews. Although he claims Crews’ lifestyle and his success as a writer were more of an influence than his style, I see elements of Crews’ darkness, somewhere between Southern gothic and theater of the absurd, in Connelly’s fiction. I also see, in Harry Bosch, a very Crewsian figure, out of place in his world, and stretched to breaking point trying to make himself fit.

Bosch is the catalyst that allows Connelly to perform the trick of turning reality into fiction. The art of writing good hard-boiled prose requires a certain detachment, the ability to not let the runny emotional yolk of a story break free.

But it doesn’t have to be boiled within the shell. The closest comparison I can make in crime fiction is with Ross MacDonald, whose Lew Archer is an observer of social change, almost a reporter, and whose prose brings the reader a clear perspective on what Archer sees, freed of cynicism and ornamentation.

This is exactly the sense in which I think of Michael Connelly as a hard-boiled writer, and one of the most successful. He has been able to achieve that detachment without losing the emotional center, without sacrificing empathy. He is able to sustain a paradoxical sense of distance and involvement in his fiction – like a reporter, sharing the experience of cops without becoming one himself, balancing the grief of victims, the nature of victimizers, the frustrations of cops. He learned to do it in the pieces collected here.

Perhaps you noticed I began this essay by saying Michael Connelly is a reporter. Not was a reporter. Is.

The would-be novelist stuck in a career as a newsman is an old cliché. I don’t see Michael ever being stuck. I don’t know if he went to his first crime scene and gathered his notes with the idea of finding material for his books. You will certainly see in these stories the raw materials – the crimes, the criminals, the cops and the city – that make up his fiction. But what these pieces do show is that Connelly was a hell of a good reporter. And that being a hell of a good reporter was a great start for becoming a hell of a good novelist.

Michael Carlson was born in New Haven, Connecticut, and lives in London with his wife and son. He has written about Michael Connelly for the Spectator, Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, Perth (Australia) Sunday Times, Shots and Crime Time, where he also edits the film section. His studies of the directors Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood and Oliver Stone were published in the Pocket Essentials series.