Beyond the Yellow Tape

The allure of Los Angeles — as depicted by the likes of Raymond Chandler — brought Michael Connelly to L.A.

That, and the offer of a job as a reporter at the Los Angeles Times. But he gave up his press pass when his first novel, The Black Echo,  featuring police detective Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch, was awarded the Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America.

Twenty-five years later, Connelly is still writing novels, and he’s now an executive producer of Amazon Studios’ Bosch, which stars Titus Welliver in the title role. The show, which begins its third season April 21, has already been renewed for a fourth.

While the series streams on, Connelly remains a novelist first and foremost. He’s kept to publishing a book a year and, even with the extra hours on Bosch, has no plans to slow down. He spoke recently with emmy’s Kathleen O’Steen.

You’ve said that Harry Bosch is part Dirty Harry, Philip Marlow and Frank Bullitt. How is he different on TV than in the novels?

I still think he’s comprised of these characters — I would throw in Lew Archer, too — in the TV show as well as the books. On TV, Bosch is 15 years younger than he currently is in the books — he’s a Gulf War veteran on the show and a Vietnam vet in the books. So there’s a big separation field when I sit down to write a book and when I sit down to write a script.

I think all the ingredients are still there in the TV version, and I think Titus is aware of that. He has brought that into the character as well.

When it came time to cast the character for the Amazon series, what were your must-haves?

The show is not about how a cop works on a case, but how the case works on the cop. So we needed an actor who could show that, subtly. I think I needed to see something behind his eyes. Harry Bosch is not a guy who says a lot or shows a lot. That’s a very difficult transition from page to screen. So we were looking for someone who could carry something in his eyes.

How did Titus Welliver come to mind for the lead?

I had seen Titus in the pilot of the Kiefer Sutherland show Touch. He played a Gulf War veteran who had PTSD. I threw his name into the first meeting  with casting directors and producers. It took a while, because he was making a movie in Hong Kong at the time.

We didn’t even get a chance to talk to him about the role for almost two months, but we were taking our time. This  project was going to live or die with [the actor] who played Harry Bosch. Now we’re committed to four seasons, so I think we got it right.

What does he bring to the role that you didn’t expect?

He’s a less-is-more actor. I love that about him, because that’s very much Harry Bosch. He can say a lot with a look. Whenever I look at scripts, I always think the less Harry says, the better.

Season three incorporates a storyline from your first Harry Bosch book, The Black Echo.

Yeah, the season includes stories from two very important books. This goes back to season one when Eric Overmyer, the showrunner, and I were thinking about how we would introduce Harry Bosch. We decided not to start with the first book because the story was very internal. There were other books where Harry is more on display.

In The Concrete Blonde, he’s in court answering questions about himself — we decided to start with that, as it was the best way to bring him out. Harry doesn’t walk around saying what’s eating him or what kind of torment he’s into.

Now, two seasons in, we felt confident that we could tackle that first story — if we wedded it with a very character-driven story, which was my tenth book, A Darkness More Than Night .

Why did you set the Bosch stories in L.A.?

I never stepped foot in Los Angeles until I was 30, when I came out for an interview with the L.A. Times. By that time, I was so steeped in the fictional lore of the city through Raymond Chandler, through countless movies — Chinatown, for example.

It was wonderful to come to this place where my favorite writers had written. My most influential writers — Raymond Chandler, Joseph Wambaugh and Ross Macdonald — all wrote about the southern California landscape.

I was fired up to come out here. And I was a reporter. I had a press pass that got me into places in the city that most people don’t get to go. I would have been a fool to not use that in my fiction writing.

At the Times, you were on the police beat for six years and for another year you covered the courts. Is there one case from that time that still stays with you?

There’s an image that always pops into my head, of this mother who killed her three kids and then herself — a murder-suicide because of what appeared to be financial reasons.

I remember the detectives, who came out to the media lines to say that [the presumed killer] wasn’t an invader — it was the mother. That always hit me, that one scene, in all the years of being a police reporter. Four people were dead, but it was just a one-day story.

Are you a disciplined writer?

I think it goes back to my journalism days, where there’s no such thing as writers’ block — especially on the police beat, where you are writing multiple stories a day. It really gave me a work ethic that has served me immeasurably as a novel writer.

What other projects are you working on?

I don’t have a lot of spare time. I’ve been able to write one novel a year for 25 years — there’ve even been a few years where I wrote two. Now I’ve taken on almost a full-time job in the TV show. It’s left me with less time to write my books.

I have to make up that time to keep to that one-a-year model, not only because of what publishers need and want, but also because these books are a wonderful opportunity for me to reflect on what’s going on. I like them to be very contemporaneous, usually set in the year they’re published. I want to keep that going, but it hasn’t left me a lot of time for other pursuits.

L.A. has changed quite a bit since you were a reporter. Does that influence your writing?

I haven’t been a reporter for 22 years, but I still feel like a reporter. I’m no creative genius — my books are full of true stories, and I know how to throw out a big net to cops and lawyers and people I need. I’m a good gatherer of good stories. In that process, I hope my stories are reflective of a contemporary Los Angeles.

Where is Harry in your latest book, The Wrong Side of Goodbye?

He’s now a private eye who’s 66 years old, which is quite different from the Harry Bosch with a badge. He goes looking for a missing heir, and the hunt takes him on a time-travel odyssey. He has to retrace events to the 1950s, which takes him across his own life, retracing his experiences through the Vietnam War.

This is a book full of anecdotes about Harry’s experiences in Vietnam, and I didn’t make any of them up. I gathered them from real people who went to Vietnam and served. They’re very poignant stories.

How do you now perceive the evolution of Harry Bosch?

I think I’ve shown some of the evolution of the city of Los Angeles through the evolution of Harry Bosch. You know, if it was just about being a whodunit, I don’t think I could have gone on for 25 years. You’ve got to reach for a brass ring, and I’m not saying I do it every time, but I hope in some of these books there’s another level of reflection of what’s going on in our world.

This article originally appeared in emmy magazine, Issue No. 3, 2017