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Interview by Ron Hogan

City of Bones is the eighth novel by Michael Connelly featuring Los Angeles homicide detective Hieronymous "Harry" Bosch. He's also written several other books outside that series, and the protagonists of those novels appear with Bosch in A Darkness More Than Night. During a recent phone call with Connelly, I raised the possibility that he was introducing longtime Bosch fans to his other characters in order to test the waters for other series. "Even though the character I'm most interested in is Harry," he countered, "the stand-alone thrillers sell better. So maybe it was more like I was introducing Harry Bosch to those readers."

Ron Hogan: Why did you first start writing about Harry?

Michael Connelly: The character comes from all over, largely from several different LAPD homicide detectives I knew as a reporter. But he was definitely influenced by fictional characters as well, especially the private eyes of Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald. Even though Harry's a cop with a badge, he carries a lot of the aspects of those loner detectives.

My goal from the very beginning was to be as honest as I could about the character, and about the real world. I grew up loving private eye novels, but the reality was that in fourteen years as a reporter, I never wrote an article about a private eye solving a murder. So I decided to write about a detective, somebody who would legitimately encounter murders and solve murders. And because I'd seen what that kind of regular exposure to death does to a person, I wanted to write about it as realistically as possible. It took me a while to encapsulate it, but in A Darkness More Than Night, it comes up as a variation on the physics principle that for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction. When your job is to go into the darkness, some of that darkness has to go into you. There's a price that must be paid, and part of what the Harry Bosch series is is an exploration of what that price is.

Did naming him Hieronymous Bosch come to you early on?

I hit upon the name about halfway through.Before I wrote one word of the first book, I was very conscious of the fact that what made the books I liked work was character, so I instinctively knew that whenever you get a chance to brush on a stroke of character, you do not miss that chance. You don't call your character Joe Smith if you can call him Hieronymous Bosch. I was consciously searching for a name with resonance, with a metaphoric quality.

In the first draft, I called him Pierce, from something I'd read, I believe it was Raymond Chandler, about the private detective being able to pierce through all veils, all the layers of society, to go where the case took him. But at some point during the second draft, I'm not sure when, I changed his name to Hieronymous Bosch. Years earlier, in college, I had studied the painter, so I was familiar with his work, and the name became, depending on how much the reader knew about Bosch, either an obvious or obscure metaphor for Los Angeles as the contemporary garden of earthly delights.

But you held off from making the connection explicit for seven books, until Hieronymous Bosch the painter became a central part of the case in A Darkness More Than Night.

That was one that I always knew I could do. When I started writing the series, I didn't think it was one that I should do early on, but when I came to realize that Harry was going to have a fairly good run, I knew that I would eventually be able to explore the connection between the character and the painter.

It took you two or three books before you knew deep down this was going to keep rolling?

It's a funny contradiction -- in order to make it as a writer, you have to have a strong ego. You have to believe your stuff is good and worthy. At the same time, though, you can have a lack of confidence about whether it will last. Even if you've been invited to the party, you wonder if you'll be asked to stay. So I finished writing my third book before I quit my day job, even though I could have afforded to do it before then. I just wasn't sure yet about the possibility of a long, healthy career.

I still have those kinds of doubts now, not on the financial level, but I still feel like you never know when it can all crash. The basis of your career as a writer, your creativity, is so ephemeral, and you end up asking yourself things like, will it last? If you have it once, do you always have it? Those are questions that really don't have answers, so they end up giving rise to a voice in the back of your head suggesting it won't last.

How do the elements of a Harry Bosch case come together for you?

I know three things before I start a novel. One is the inciting moment that will bring Harry, or another character, into play, get him involved in the case. I know the ending, who committed the crime. And I know what I want to do with Harry as a character, what sort of personal journey I want to put him through. I get those three things and then I start writing. I don't outline my books; I find it more enjoyable not to.

You can trace back the crime in City of Bones a a few years back, when I was taking a symposium on forensics at UCLA. I was actually studying computer forensics, but in the classroom next to mine, they were studying forensic anthropology, so during my class breaks, I went next door and gathered up the handouts for that class. When I read them later, I came across a case involving the bones of a twelve year-old child, detailing what the forensic anthropologist was able to tell the detectives and how it helped solve the case. That was fascinating to me on a scientific level, but at the human level, too, it was heartrending what had happened to this kid. I knew as soon as I was done reading it that I would write about it; it just took me a few years to understand how I would write about it, how I would incorporate it into a Bosch story.

Are there story ideas that you come up with, decide that they aren't really right for Harry, but want to do enough to develop them for another character?

That happens a lot. There's always lots of ideas. Sometimes I don't think they're good enough for any of my characters, or that they aren't good for books but maybe might work as a movie. Whenever I think about a story idea, I ask myself if this is something that I'll be able to sustain the interest necessary to write about every day for a year.

By the end of City of Bones, you've put Harry Bosch in a position that gives you a lot of options for what happens to him next.

I left my options open deliberately. The ending of this book shakes up Harry's world a lot, but it isn't the end of Harry Bosch; I'm about to start the next Harry novel now. And I felt that I should shake things up for myself as well, so I'll be writing that book in the first person, which I've never done before. You've become very familiar with him over the course of eight books, but it's still daunting to get so fully inside his head like that.

Absolutely. I'm not doing this on a lark. It'll be very difficult, but I think what's helped me before is making these challenges to myself and then face them. And right now it's still a plan; maybe I'll start, realize it's awful, and have to go back to the third person.

Those eight books -- or really seven and a half, since he's only in half of A Darkness More Than Night -- are definitely in his world, and you see it from his perspective. But they're still in third person, which gives me a step-back position where the reader doesn't know everything that Harry knows. In the first person, there are additional issues of not cheating the reader out of any information. Any important information Harry has, the reader has to have. So that'll be a substantial change for me to face.

Harry's world is very keyed into the real world, and City of Bones has several references to September 11th, showing how the characters' states of mind are affected by those events.

The novel was actually finished and had been fully edited and copyedited before September 11th happened. When it did happen, one minor effect, way down on the charts below the real tragedies that occurred that day, was a flatlining in the book industry. Some publishers started pushing publication dates back while they gauged the market. That happened to City of Bones. My publishers told me they wanted to delay putting it out, and since I'd been wanting out of the January publishing cycle anyway, because of the difficulty of book tours in winter, I immediately agreed. I also asked them to give me the book back so I could tastefully layer in some mention of what had happened.

The book startes on January 1st, 2002, less than four months after September 11th. It's about a criminal investigation, but it's also about a man evaluating his place in the world, looking for the validity in what he does. If you have a character going through that process at that moment in time and he isn't thinking about September 11th, I think it's an artistic crime. It had to be mentioned, but I had to think carefully about how to do so in a valid way that wasn't exploiting what had happened. And so it comes up through Harry talking about it with other people.

You'll see references like that more and more in fiction, and you'll see it first in crime fiction. Crime fiction has always been our more immediate reflection on contemporary times. Eventually it will get into literary fiction. It affected everybody in the world, so of course it will affect our books and our writing.

Harry talks about it because he's asking himself some difficult questions about his life. That element of introspection strikes me as a very important part of your crime novels, and those of other writers, almost if not as important as the crime itself.

I don't want to go as far as some people, who say that these novels are only about crime by happenstance, that they're really about this or that theme. My novels are definitely crime novels; on some level they have to function as entertainment, and I'm always very conscious of that. Having said that, I've found that what makes me able to spend a year on a story is not mulling over the clever plotting. It's mulling over the character stuff. That's what keeps me involved and able to go the distance. If I didn't have the characters, I wouldn't be able to go through with it.

You mentioned some classic crime writers that inspired you early on. Do you read much contemporary crime fiction?

I read less and less of it because I write it fulltime, and there's periods when I'm writing where I don't read it at all. When I do read it, I try to jump around, find out what's good, and try to find something that I can escape into, which can be hard. I write hard-edged police procedurals, so those are the last thing I want to read. I gravitate towards private eye stories and character-focused books by writers like George Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane, Lawrence Block, and James Lee Burke. I also like a lot of British writers, like Val McDermid, Peter Robinson, John Harvey, and Ian Rankin. Some of them write procedurals, but just the fact that they're set in another country makes it possible for me to escape into them.

City of Bones

Search for all Michael Connelly's books on BookSense.com

Ron Hogan is the editor and publisher of Beatrice.com, a collection of interviews with authors of contemporary literary fiction and nonfiction.

Further Reading:

S.J. Rozan
James Sallis
Keith Snyder
Jasper Fforde
Michael Connelly's website

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