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Madeleine Brand: Michael Connelly is a crime reporter turned novelist and L.A. is his beat.
His 25 books have sold 45 million copies around the world.
At the heart of many of those stories is L.A.P.D. detective Harry Bosch, and he's
front-and-center again in Michael's latest. It's called "The Black Box."
Welcome to the program.
Michael Connelly: Thanks for having me on.
Brand: Now the backdrop
to this novel takes place 20 years ago during the L.A. riots. Why did you
choose the L.A. riots?
Connelly: Well, the book - I knew before I wrote a single word
that the book was going to be my 25th novel in 20 years and
so I decide to make it a 20-year story and so I went back to 1992
looking for what's
something I can bring forward, and it was pretty clear
that you didn't get past the end of March because of what was going on in the city,
and then, so I rooted the story in the riots.
Brand: So you rooted the story in the riots and how much uh... actual research did
you do into the riots, and how much of that did you bring into - how many of the
real events did you bring into this novel?
Connelly: Well I think a lot - I mean I was a newspaper reporter and I covered the riots
20 years ago, so I have my own experiences, but I tracked down four
different
homicide detectives with the L.A.P.D. - two who are still active and two have retired -
and just kind of mined their experiences, their anecdotal stories about what it was
like to try to um... investigate uh... *** during those very strange and
dangerous circumstances and, and so the beginning of the book is really about
one
flawed crime scene, where they're trying to investigate
um... the *** of a young woman um... under those kind of difficult
circumstances.
Brand: And that young woman is a Danish
reporter? Connelly: Yeah.
Brand: And
she's white?
And I'm wondering why you chose a white victim, when in reality many of the
victims in the riots
were, were not white.
Connelly: Um... actually quite a few were white, but most of them were not. I would say
that.
The reason I did it was I wanted to create a situation in this book where I
could talk about uh... racial politics, uh... bureaucracy - kind of where these things
collide. So I would set up a situation where
uh... the Detective Harry Bosch is coming close to solving a case,
and that is a question: what's it gonna look like if the only case we solve on the
20th anniversary of the riots is a white victim? And, and so that kinda
political uh...
issue plays out in the upper echelons of the police department while Harry
Bosch has his head down just trying to do his job.
Brand: So he's very much a moral absolutist,
and he doesn't really cotton to playing politics or to releasing shades of gray.
Does he ever go too far in his moral absolutism?
Connelly: I think over the course of the books, he certainly has at some times.
Uh... he just is - basically his baseline fairness - his code - is
everybody counts or nobody counts, and so
he's not seeing the dimensions of uh... of racial politics and so forth. He's
thinking, "This is a victim who has
not seen any justice. Her family's had no justice for 20 years, and
what's it matter who she is or where she came from or what color she is? We
should find out who did this. And, in that way, he is an absolutist. Brand: Now,
how much time do you spend with
actual detectives in the L.A.P.D. researching your novels?
Connelly: I think I spend a fair amount of time uh... a lot of it though is, you know,
through Internet and email and so forth - phone calls. I don't live in Los Angeles.
Uh... I have a
view that I should always be writing, and so I'm not someone who spends two
months researching and then it's time to write. I start writing,
and I fill in as I go. And so I'm out here a lot in Los Angeles. I spend time
with
detectives. I spent a lot of time with detectives over this past weekend, and
uh... you know it's a lot, a lot of it is just still being a reporter, although I
haven't done that in 15 years. It's just asking questions and
sitting back and hoping for good stories in the answers. Brand: Is there a real Harry
Bosch?
Connelly: Um... that would be very hard for me to say there's one guy who's more important
to Harry Bosch than others. I've spent so many years talking to
detectives that
uh... he really comes from all over.
Brand: Now, he is also a jazz fanatic, Harry Bosch, and I guess you are as well?
Connelly: Uh... Sort of. I mean, I was not, I grew up with other music.
Uh... but I wanted Harry Bosch to
be a jazz guy, and so I learned it. And so over the years, 20 years, I've come
to love it, and
uh... I guess I'm a fanatic. I just don't want to say, like, I'm an expert on
it.
I know what I like. Brand: Right.
And one of the artists you like is Frank Morgan. Connelly: Yes.
Brand: And you have, also, another project you have is producing a documentary on Frank
Morgan.
And we have a little clip of that. Let's take a look.
Frank Morgan: I thought the, the
the ***, and the bepop, and
the whole lifestyle thing went together.
I felt that, uh... one had to use *** to play.
Voiceover: Frank was a bank robber.
He robbed and then sold anything that he could get his hands on of value.
Eric Gladstone/Friend: The L.A. musicians, they used to
dedicate the late night jazz shows
to the greatest living alto saxophone player in the world, Frank Morgan.
But if you want to hear him, you got to go listen to the warden's band in San Quentin.
Brand: Frank Morgan - why is he important to you?
Connelly: Um... you get a little bit of it there. He is a marvelous story of redemption. Uh... he
went 35 years between his first and second album,
and those 35 years were spent in, mostly in, prison because of the
crimes he committed to support
a drug habit.
And he went through that hell and came out and recorded some of the best music of
the last 20 years.
And uh... and what more so than that was the personality he had. He didn't blame
anybody for what happened to him.
Um... and he had a
non-stop message when he got out about don't follow the path I did.
And uh... I got a chance to see him play several times, got to know him a little bit,
and it just seemed to me that that's uh... a story that's worth telling.
Brand: Now, Harry Bosch I think would be a natural for Hollywood
as a character. Why hasn't he been made into
a movie? Or why haven't those books
been made into movies?
Connelly: Well, there was an effort early on in the '90s and it
didn't go anywhere, and so consequently he's on the shelf for a number years, more
than a decade. But
just recently I got the rights back to him, and I'm,
in the meantime there's been so many books, there's so much
material, I don't really think it uh... a movie would cover it, so I'm pointing
towards television, trying to develop a uh...
a uh... television show about Harry Bosch. Brand: And who would play him?
Connelly: Uh... I hope to get into
a position where that's the kind of task I have to face, but until then, I say I
don't know, because I have an image in my head and it's very solid and it's not an
actor or anything, so we gotta find somebody who uh...
I think can
maybe not be that well-known but can really embrace the character and be
Harry Bosch.
Brand: Someone old and grizzled
but not Clint Eastwood?
Connelly: No, not Clint Eastwood, and not necessarily old and grizzled, because the books
span 20 years, and so I think we'll,
you know, knowing what the
target audience is on TV,
they'll look for someone less old and less grizzled. Maybe somebody in
their early 40s.
Brand: Well, Michael Connelly, thanks so much for coming in. Connelly: Thank you.
Brand: Michael Connelly. His new novel is called "The Black Box."