MICHAEL CONNELLY is the creator of iconic LAPD detective Harry Bosch, along with ‘Lincoln Lawyer’s Mickey Haller, Renee Ballard, among others.
In the wake of Michael being awarded the Thalia Proctor Lifetime Achievement Award to go alongside his Diamond Dagger and MWA Grand Master for outstanding contributions, he spoke with Good Reading’s foreign correspondent CRAIG SISTERSON.
The final season of ‘Bosch: Legacy’ screened earlier this year. What’s it like to reflect on a decade of Harry Bosch onscreen?
It’s been pretty amazing. There’s a couple of bumps in the road, but how can you complain about 10 years of a show, 98 episodes to tell the Harry Bosch story.
I don’t know if anyone’s benefited more than me from the advent of streaming entertainment. Bosch was long on the Hollywood shelf, then people started streaming. Here I am 10 years later, and I think we’ve accomplished something really good. ‘Bosch’ has been a good snapshot of Los Angeles, so any goals I would have had for a TV show have more than been achieved.
It’s not over yet, really, as we transition to ‘Ballard’ now. It’s kind of following the same path as my books, where everything is blended together, characters know each other and cross paths in different books, and that’s going to happen in the new ‘Ballard’ show as well. It’s going to extend the storytelling of my characters.
Earlier this year Nightshade introduced a new California sleuth, Detective Stilwell. What was the inspiration behind that book?
It was really just finding out there’s one single detective assigned to Catalina Island, and they pretty much handle everything. The location was unique, but still within the world that I’m kind of known for, Los Angeles. It was like a breath of fresh air, but without having to travel too far. I really liked the idea – and I kind of did this with Ballard when she first came out in The Late Show, where she was a detective on the midnight shift and handled lots of different things, so there was variety in what I could write about.
That’s what struck me about the lone detective on Catalina Island.
I could try to find drama in the smallest details, then I could also have the big stuff happen as well. That’s just a really important part of the creative process for me, not to feel like I’m doing a routine.
It seemed there was still a wink or two in Nightshade to your other characters; I imagine Detective Stilwell is in the same universe?
I definitely agree. I’m not finished writing about Stillwell, I know I’ll come back to him, and that’s where I’ll most likely do a hard bridge to the rest of the universe. That’s usually how I do it, when I’ve done it with a new character before; the first book is somewhat of a standalone, then it’s the second book where they start crossing the paths of my other characters. •
Read a book review of Nightshade by Michael Connolly
**********
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Connelly was born in Philadelphia, PA on July 21, 1956. He moved to Florida with his family when he was 12 years old. Michael decided to become a writer after discovering the books of Raymond Chandler while attending the University of Florida. Once he decided on this direction he chose a major in journalism and a minor in creative writing – a curriculum in which one of his teachers was novelist Harry Crews.
After graduating in 1980, Connelly worked at newspapers in Daytona Beach and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, primarily specialising in the crime beat. In Fort Lauderdale he wrote about police and crime during the height of the murder and violence wave that rolled over South Florida during the so-called cocaine wars.
In 1986, he and two other reporters spent several months interviewing survivors of a major airline crash. They wrote a magazine story on the crash and the survivors which was later short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. The magazine story also moved Connelly into the upper levels of journalism, landing him a job as a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times, one of the largest papers in the country, and bringing him to the city of which his literary hero, Chandler, had written.
Michael is the bestselling author of over 40 novels. With over 89 million copies of his books sold worldwide and translated into 45 foreign languages, he is one of the most successful writers working today.
He is also the executive producer of both Bosch and Bosch: Legacy TV series, and The Lincoln Lawyer.
His very first novel, The Black Echo, won the prestigious Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best First Novel in 1992. In 2002, Clint Eastwood directed and starred in the movie adaptation of Connelly’s 1998 novel, Blood Work.
0 Comments