Michael Connelly

MICHAEL CONNELLY

Connelly Reveals a Whole New Bosch in LOST LIGHT

Los Angeles looks a little different from the vantage point of Tampa, Florida. Just ask Michael Connelly, who relocated with his wife and daughter from the Golden State to the Sunshine State before penning Lost Light, the ninth outing for Hieronymous "Harry" Bosch, hardboiled L.A. detective. Connelly may now be 2500 miles away from the much-mythologized City of Angels, but he feels right at home, having returned to the state where he grew up. What's more, the author's geographical distance from Harry's turf vivifies the series with refreshing new perspectives: Lost Light not only finds Harry retired from the LAPD and striking out on his own as a P.I., but is also the first in the series to be written in the first person. Thus re-energized, Connelly considers his toils on Lost Light "one of the better writing periods I have had," and it shows--the Washington Post calls the new release "one of his best."

"When you go into first person, all bets are off," Connelly told BookPage of the series' radical, invigorating narration switch. The more intimate voice is also Connelly's nod to the private detective classics of Raymond Chandler, which he discovered as an undergraduate at the University of Florida. Instantly inspired to follow in Chandler's footsteps, young Connelly majored in journalism, with a minor in creative writing. After graduating in 1980, he covered South Florida's infamously brutal cocaine wars as a crime reporter for local papers. In 1986, he and two colleagues interviewed survivors of the tragic Delta Flight 191 crash. The resulting piece was short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize, and landed Connelly a high-profile job at the prestigious Los Angeles Times--and a new home in Chandler's metropolis.

Finally parlaying his extensive crime beat work into fiction in 1992, he published The Black Echo, which introduced LAPD Detective Hieronymous Bosch and won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel by the Mystery Writers of America. Even nine installments in, the New York Times bestselling series continues to enjoy the highest of accolades. Newsweek raves that it adds "substance and depth to modern crime fiction," and New York Times Book Review calls Bosch "a terrific, wonderful, old-fashioned hero who isn't afraid to walk through the flames -- and then suffer the pain for the rest of us." Connelly has also written equally acclaimed thrillers outside of the Bosch franchise, including Blood Work, which led to a Clint Eastwood film, and Void Moon which introduced a new protagonist, Las Vegas thief Cassie Black.

Connelly's most ubiquitous character is a composite of numerous fictional and non-fictional cops and detectives he's encountered over the years--plus himself. "The more you read about a character, the more you look inside for attributes and thoughts to give him," he said at his website. As for the oddly familiar name choice of Hieronymous Bosch, Connelly wanted to evoke the 15th century Dutch painter's "landscapes of debauchery and violence and human defilement . . . I saw the metaphoric possibilities . . . to cast my Bosch adrift in a hellish landscape of present-day Los Angeles."

No wonder he's moved away. "This is a fictional conceit!" Connelly pointed out at his website. "I love L.A. and writing about it."

At the very top of his game, Connelly is President of the Mystery Writers of America, and was a Guest Editor of The Best American Mystery Stories 2003 this October.