Welcome to the book show A Celebration of Reading and Writer's. I'm Joe Donnie. The black
box is Michael Connelly's 25th book and 20 years as an author. Mark Vennan in a
versary has laid a story, stars LAPD Detective Harry Bosch and spans two decades.
Michael Connelly started his career as a newspaper reporter, eventually working as a
police and crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times. While there he covered the
1992 riots, a time and place to which he returns in the black box. The book begins in the
spring of 1992 when Los Angeles burned in the aftermath of the acquittal of LAPD officers
and the beating of Rodney King. Bosch is called the scene of the murder of a Danish journalist
that in those wild days of rage and violence goes unsolved. Twenty years later he's
working cold cases when he returns to that case. One that long had lingered in his memory
and starts to work it again. It's a great pleasure to welcome Michael Connelly to this
week's book show. Thank you very much for being with us. A great pleasure. Hey thanks
for having me on being in the rest of this. It is, it's fascinating to me of given the
20 years here and we look at at 1992. How did that event of those riots in Los Angeles
change you as a writer, as a journalist, as a person?
I think a lot, but nothing that, I mean it's hard to put your fingers on it. I was a
working journalist. I spent the first two nights out following assignments and so forth
and was somewhat in the middle of it. Had some, I guess you would say searing experiences
came close to being hurt a couple times. And so it's something that stays with you. It
also came just a few months after my first novel had been published and I was in the stage
of thinking do I want to stay with journalism? Do I want to pursue just writing novels
do both? And that was such a big moment in the history of Los Angeles or at least the
history that I was, while I was there that it made me want to stay on as a journalist
for, to keep going for at least a little while longer.
What was there about the war of the novel that was, that was with you while you were
reporting?
I came to a kind of backwards, I guess you'd say. I wanted to write novels when I was about
19. That's when the light bulb went off. I said, you know, I want to write novels and
more specifically I wanted to write crime novels. And so the question was, well, how do you
get there? How do you prepare yourself for that? What do you know about crime novels? What
do you know about detectives? It was pretty much only what I knew from reading novels.
And so in kind of talking to my parents and huddling up about this idea, I decided to
go into journalism as a hopeful means to that. And also knowing that if that end never
happened, it was a pretty interesting job.
And as far as it being an interesting job, and I mentioned this in the introduction of
coming to the crime aspect of it, of that being your beat, what was it about that that
word you and was it that you were interested in it or good at it or both?
I think it was a little bit, hopefully it was both. What would stron me and I'm still
fixated all these years later, you know, I said the idea came when I was 19. So we're
talking about 37 years later. I'm still fascinated by taking apart crime and writing about.
But not from the aspect of how did they pull this crime off or how did the bad guy do
it or how did the bad guy get away? More from the standpoint of the detective. I'm just,
I guess, infinitely interested in what it takes to do that job right. And it's more than
a sacrifice of time and education and focus and relentlessness because there's a price
to be paid when your job takes you into the underside of a city, the darkness of humanity,
you know, dealing with a very worse kind of people. It takes something out of you and
to keep on doing it and doing it right is I think very unsung and quietly noble. And
that's where my fascination lies. In writing the black box, were you aware that it had been
20 years? And is that something that you were conscious of about the taking out of the
project? Yeah, very much so. Usually I don't. You know, usually I'm staring at the screen
and it's got zero words and I know I need a hundred thousand words. And I, you know,
I start thinking about the stories that I have been carrying around my pockets. This time
I knew I'm about to start writing my 25th novel and it will be published in my 20th year
of being in the industry and it was it was astounding to me that I made it this far that
I ever got this opportunity. And so I wanted to at least note it in some way. So I decided
on the 20 year story. I'd go back to the beginning. So you go back to 1992 and see what can
I draw on and it's pretty clear, you know, as you're ticking through the calendar, you
come to the end of April and it's like the city's on fire or the city's torn apart and
of course that would be a place to start. What do you remember of that time of the riots
and the sense that even helped this book starts in 1992 of what helped in the in the creation
of the overall story? Well, from my own experiences, I saw, you know, the best of humanity I saw
the worst. I mean, obviously there was a collective freak out of most of people doing stuff that
they normally would not do. You know, it was group think, gang think, people looting for the sake of
looting, people burning for the sake of burning. It didn't make a lot of sense. It was very surreal.
But at the same time, you know, my own personal experiences, I got in a situation on one night where
I was surrounded by angry people and was being pushed around. Somebody in that group came out of
the group thinking and decided this is not right and grabbed hold of me and got me to safety.
So I had like those kind of experiences high and low and I think it rounded out my view of
of the city, of what happened that day and that course I think would transfer over into any kind
of writing about it. This isn't the first time I've written about it. This is the biggest way
I've written about it. But in several books beforehand, I've touched on the riots and what's
what that's meant to the recent history of Los Angeles. I was going to ask you about that because
it seems to the tentacles are a long, aren't they? Yeah, I mean, you go through an experience that
either personally or as a city is going to affect, you know, and you know, I write crime novels.
There's a puzzle in this book who did it and that's the entertainment of it. But hopefully this
book and other books before it that I've written at least from time to time hold up a little bit of
a mirror, you know, to society or to the city and ask a question in the reader's mind.
And this one, I think the prevalent question is, are where we come in 20 years? Could this happen
again? We were all certainly taken by surprise 20 years ago. Could we be surprised again?
It seems as though in reading the novel and having this discussion that,
that yeah, it could happen again and anything's possible, isn't it? Well, of course, anything's
possible. But you can also look at what was happening in 92 and you can see it in 2012. Of course,
we don't have the overarching running king case that was certainly a lightning rod type of
situation in the city. But to me, that was just a match that set the kindling on fire,
the kindling still there because it was mostly not about any kind of racial animosity. It was about
opportunity, economic opportunity. It was not there in in Los Angeles in 1992. So it was quite easy
to tip a what seemed to be a social injustice into flames and looting and anger. So we, so hopefully
we don't have that match now, but we certainly still have the lack of economic opportunity,
especially for young people in parts of the community, almost all parts of the community.
Michael Connelly is our guest. The new novel is The Black Box. It is published by Little Brown.
What does talk about the character of Harry Bosch who has been part of 20 of those 25 novels?
Did you know from the beginning that this was going to be a character that you wanted to work with
for a while? Was that the idea? I came to crime fiction, loving to read serials,
ongoing characters. But when you have them published a book and you're writing this character,
all you can do is hope. I certainly planted seeds in the first book that I could explore later.
The fact that we're 20 years later in Harry Bosch is still active. I couldn't have
foreseen that. It's beyond anything I actually imagine. But yeah, it started with the hope that I
would get a chance to explore the character at least a few times. What do you think there is about
the character that has that has resonated with readers, that crime readers and general readers
like this guy? I think there's a couple like baseline things about them that everyone can connect to,
that they can read these books and almost surreptitiously nod their head because they're an agreement.
I think one is his relentlessness. The guy just doesn't give up and whether we have that in our life
in whatever aspect, we would hope to have it. I hope I'm relentless about some things and I think
all readers are. The other one is his basic code of fairness. He believes that everybody counts
or nobody counts. And that's a pretty idealistic thing that he tries to stick to. And I'm not even
saying he's able to stick to it through all these books, but he tries. And I think when you get
down to it, basic fairness is something that connects to many people. In that basic fairness and
looking at this character, how similar is he to the cop that you would work with as a journalist
in Los Angeles? Well, he's certainly drawn from a lot of cops I've known. I keep talking about
how lucky I am. I've been doing this for 20 years. And so the first stage of the series was certainly
based on working cops. I knew as a working journalist. I covered crime. I was talking to dozens of
detectives a day and not everything I knew about them or saw about them ends up in a newspaper
story. So there's a lot of stuff that I carried with me and held for my books. I then
retired from journalism and became just a full-time novelist. And I maintained some contacts and
added some new contacts. And so in the latter half of the series, maybe the last eight to ten
books, I've been dealing with a much smaller group. And so I see aspects of Harry Bosch drawn from
two or three detectives I know specifically. You don't live in Los Angeles anymore. Does that make
a difference? I don't know. It makes a difference obviously in writing because I was very,
I guess you would say journalistic or reportorial about the way I would write when I lived there. You
know I would go do an interview or I'd go to a spot and I'd write that section that night. Now
it's not like that. I spent a lot of time in Los Angeles doing a lot of research, meet with a lot
of people. But for the most part when I'm writing about Los Angeles, I'm 3000 miles away in Florida
where I live now. And so it's created a different I guess muscle group for me for creating these
stories. And so it is different. I've written I believe the last ten novels of mine, not living in
Los Angeles. And if you ask me, I think they're a more accurate assessment of Los Angeles because
there's something about that distance of of writing and looking at it from afar. What is there
about the city that is so fascinating to people? It has that glitz and yet it is very different and
very gritty of what we read in the novels. That's the answer. There's glitz and grit. You know and
it's a place it's a destination city. People go there. Most of the people you know there from
somewhere else. And I know there's other cities like that. New York might be like that. For example
South Florida is certainly like that. It's full of people who have come from somewhere else
to make it because wherever they were from they weren't making it. And so it has this built-in hope
to it. And it also has this built-in almost visual difference between the halves and have nots. Those
who came to attain their dream and made it and those who haven't. That kind of creates a friction
that is I think you know the anchor point of pretty good fiction. And whether that fiction is
television movies or books or whatever. And I think that's one thing that draws people to it.
Harry Bosch is going to enter the realm of television? I hope so. You know it's we're just talking
about LA Hollywood. It's the big if. But Harry has been on a shelf for more than a decade and I
finally got him back. And what was good about that is doing that decade more books were written
about Harry Bosch and there's a lot of material. So when I got control of the character back it just
became a no-brainer to me that you know do you want to try to get cover this guy and what we know
about him in a two-hour movie or do you want to try a longer form that it would be television.
Hopefully over multiple episodes and multiple seasons. And so that's the direction I'm taking you
and I've made some partnerships and kind of created an effort that has I think a good production
company and a really good television showrunner slash writer and we'll probably know in the next
month or two whether Harry has a shot. How much of that do you want to be a part of? Do you want to
be involved and hold on to that character or as Robert B. Parker once described to me that he
learned painfully in the process that you just take the money and run. Well I agree with him that
it is a painful process and we all learn from it. What I learned from it was I used to be that I
wanted to write everything you know if this is based on my character then I want to write it. And I
you know as Clint Eastwood said a man has no his limitations. I want to be the best book writer I
can be and that's what I got to concentrate on. But Harry Bosch has been with me for 20 years so
I'm very protective of him and I want to make sure that you know the integrity of the series is
captured in any kind of television series. So I'm involved in terms of approvals and decision-making
that will set up the series but it's unlikely I'll ever be a writer on the show or joining that part
of it. It's more like you know like in my deal I made sure it was in the contract that it has to
be shot in LA. Harry Bosch and LA are together they're one and so you can't shoot it in the Vancouver
or you know New Orleans and try to make it look like LA. If you want to make a story about Harry Bosch
and LA it's got to be shot in LA. So those type are the type of controls that I'm hopefully
going to have over anything that would come to pass. The other project you're working on is
Sound of Redemption which is a documentary film. The subtitle being the Frank Morgan project
you're an executive producer of the film. How did that come about? Well Frank Morgan is a
um saxophonist who passed away a few years ago he has a pretty amazing story of
failure and redemption. He was the protege of Charlie Bird Parker. His first album came out in
the early 50s and then soon he went down a path of drugs and crime to support drug habits and
the next thing you know he spends 28 of the next 35 years in prison. He came back from that
and created and recorded some of the best jazz music of the last quarter century. There's 35
years between his first and second album and he came out he didn't blame anyone. He was a gentle
soul with a really good message about not following the path that he was on. I got to know him a
little bit. He's Harry Bosch's favorite musician mentioned a lot in the books and you know after
he passed away it just seemed like this is a story that I think could be inspiring for people whether
they're into jazz or not. Music is mentioned a lot in the books. Is that a conscious effort and
a result of even your writing process? Yes. I think you know what you're endeavoring to do
in every book is deliver a character to the reader and you got to find any way you can to
brush on strokes of character. And so a baseline thing I believe in is give each major character
you're writing about a musical identity. And so with Harry Bosch for example it's been jazz and so
that required a certain kind of research and finding the kind of music that Harry would listen to.
It's weird in a book you can't hear the music you can describe it but it doesn't come close to
actually hearing it. So you really kind of shift to what the music does for the individual and the
story and what they get from it. And from that you can start delivering character to the reader.
So it is important. And as I say I give each character a musical identity and so more often
not I'm listening to that music when I'm writing that character. So Harry Bosch I'm listening to jazz,
Mickey Hall or the lawyer listening more to blues and rock and roll. And that's how I've chosen to
try to delineate these characters. But if you're reading Harry Bosch book and it mentions
Art Pepper on this page and the song Patricia for example taking a one from the new book.
Well that's what I was listening to when I wrote that page. That's how it goes.
Do you put it on intentionally or does it come on in a mix?
Usually comes on a mix. For example in this book Art Pepper is pretty prevalent through it because
in it he gets a gift from his daughter of these five discs of Art Pepper playing live at different
places in the world. That mirrors someone having given, excuse me, Art Pepper's widow gave me those
discs to listen to. And so I started listening to them as I was writing this book and they found their
way in. Looking at the 20 years obviously 20 years allows you to reflect but it also let you look
forward as well. Is there anything that you still want to accomplish that you want to change?
Well I feel like I've been given a just an amazing opportunity with Harry Bosch. Not forcing that he
would last this long. It's now been if you added all up more than two million words about this
character. And so the further this has gone the more sacred that opportunity has gotten to me.
And so it's really about safeguarding that and bringing it eventually as I will eventually have
to stop writings at some point in my life. But bringing it forward with me taking care of it
and bringing it to some kind of fulfilling conclusion that's fitting of all the books before it.
You mentioned Mickey Huller. Obviously a very interesting character as well. A character I assume
you want to continue. Mickey Huller is a good counterpoint to Harry Bosch and you know that's why
they're half brothers kind of flip side of each other especially on the justice system their
positions in the justice system. Mostly what I'm about as a writer is Harry Bosch. He's the guy who's
going to stand for me but I can't write about him all the time. I think that's dangerous. It's
dangerous so you can go tired. The series can go static. And so really just by instinct I decided
various times to write about someone else. And Mickey Huller is a great one to go to is you know I
think in terms of looking at a blank screen and knowing I got in the next 10 months right about
a hundred thousand words. Who do I want to do it with? Who do I want to spend that time with?
Harry's no brainer. I can always spend that time with him. But when it's time to give him a break
it's very easy to look at Mickey Huller and say yeah I could do the next 10 months writing about him.
Is that kind of the cracker between the wine tastings in the sense that you know
it clears the palate and let you do something else? In a way it is. I mean because because usually like
I say it's just instinctive you think I need to take some time off from Harry but then I realize
as I'm writing another book I didn't really need to take that much time off and so by the time I'm
done writing a book like the poet or Lincoln lawyer so charged up and I can't wait to get back
to Harry Bosch. It really has served a good purpose. Obviously you're you're in the promotion phase
and that is put in the schedule at some point. Do you enjoy that process of doing the events,
of going to meet the readers and what do you find out from that? I do and I guess there's a
contradiction in that possibly because you would think that you know the the words on the page,
the book should stand for what you've done and that you shouldn't have to answer questions or offer
additional information so people would get it but I can't help it. I mean it's an introvertile's
life you know I go in a room by myself and write a book for about 10 months so one month a year
I'm a you know a public person and it's a good relief and on top of that you know there's much
to be gained I think by talking or communicating with people who are reading your books and hopefully
liking them seeing what they're getting out of it and is that what you intended. It's a good
experience. The travel is wearing but once you step into a bookstore or have a conversation like
this it's all good. It fascinates me how rabid fans are of this particular genre. Talk to a lot
of writers that read a lot of different subjects but there's something about the reader of crime
fiction that seems to be and I guess the same could be said for science fiction as well but they are
very keen and and quite frankly not jaded exactly but certainly experienced. Yeah I mean it's not
like selling cars where you get one a year or one every three years. Generally what I found is
people and it comes from myself I'm a racist reader of crime fiction so it's likely that most of
the people who are consuming my books are also a voracious and so they they read across and most
of them know the secret that there's more to these stories than just who did it. You know there's
good character studies there's good social reflection so there's many different touch points of
fulfillment to be had in these books and so in a way I think it's no wonder that so many people
are keen on on reading these books and staying with them. So the obvious question people listening
who's saying who does Michael Connelly read? Well I try to read all over the place I mean there's
some great masters at work here I'll throw James Lee Burke I mean he's a writer that you know I
continually learn from as I read his books there's people who are I think pretty fearless writers in
terms of not staying with the same old same old you know people like Dennis Lahane who you really
don't know from book to book what he's going to explore even though it could generally be under
the umbrella of crime fiction. I like a lot of writers from overseas because it's more escape from
me because there's just a little bit different people like Denise Mina I love Ian Rankin then down
South Africa Deon Mayor great writer so I'm always looking all around you know you find inspiration
where you least expect it so I'm always keeping an eye out for somebody new. Michael Connelly's new
book is The Black Box it is published by Little Brown Michael Connelly thank you very much for
being with us congratulations on the 20 years and the new novel as well great pleasure to have
you here. Thanks for having me. We enjoy hearing from our listeners about the show you can email us
at book at wamc.org you can listen again to this or find past book shows at wamc.org. Sir LaDuke produces
our program this edition was recorded at Argo Studios in New York City book markets for next week
and thanks for listening for the book show I'm Judan Ew.
