Bosch is now P.I., city cop

Michael Connelly.

PHOTO BY MARK DELONG

By Peter McDermott

Crime novelist Michael Connelly has argued that almost all of us are natural storytellers, particularly when relating a personal experience. His job is to listen in – which he does frequently with police officers, lawyers and others with specialist knowledge, such as his scientist brother.

The information gleaned from these conversations is one real-world “anchor” for his novels. Another is Los Angeles, just as it had been for his literary hero Raymond Chandler.

Sign up to The Irish Echo Newsletter

Sign up today to get daily, up-to-date news and views from Irish America.

He discovered Chandler’s novels at college and overnight decided to give up his engineering studies. He told his father, who built houses, that he wouldn’t likely be joining the family business upon graduation. He would write mystery novels. To his great surprise and relief, the elder Connelly supported the new plan. He had once wanted to be an artist, but that was before he had a growing family. Now, he encouraged his son to follow his dream.

Connelly’s most famous character, former LAPD Det. Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch, was named as an infant in honor of a Dutch painter who died 500 years ago this year. In the latter half of his terrific 29th novel, “The Wrong Side of Goodbye,” the writer introduces – in perhaps a nod to his late father – a character who is a professional artist, and along the way there is some discussion about the city’s art scene.

But, before all of that, indeed right at the beginning, Connelly eases the reader in by using the real-world L.A. as an anchor in two ways for his two-track story.

First, Harry is summoned by a former colleague to his office at the 59th floor of the U.S. Bank Tower, the tallest building west of the Mississippi. It’s soon to be surpassed, the reader learns, by the Wilshire Grand Center, which is what happened on Sept. 3, a couple of months ahead of this week’s publication of the novel. The Wilshire became the tallest building in the U.S., outside of New York and Chicago, when a spire was placed atop its structure.

The ex-colleague is Creighton – an overbearing bureaucrat whom his fellow officers called “Cretin.” He’s doing well in the private sector and one of his clients, an 85-year-old billionaire named Whitney Vance, would like Harry to contact him. Our hero is in the private sector, too, albeit self-employed and Vance, a godson of Howard Hughes as it happens, hires him to find out if he has an heir or heirs. As a college student Vance had a passionate love affair with a Mexican girl. When she became pregnant, his father blackmailed him with her underage status. And so he cut off all contact with the girl and has been haunted by regret ever since.

But second, Harry Bosch still also has a cop’s badge, thanks to the San Fernando Police Department. Connelly explains that San Fernando is an “island city within the megapolis of Los Angeles.” It was never annexed with all the other towns and cities in the valley because it didn’t need L.A.’s water. If water wasn’t an issue 100 years ago, finance has been since the 2008 crash and Bosch is helping out as an unpaid reserve officer. Soon he determines that they are contending with a serial rapist.

Harry is touched by the plight of one of the victims in particular, an undocumented immigrant “whose path to this country had not been easy.”

The narration continues: “Politicians could talk about building a wall and changing laws to keep people out, but in the end they were just symbols. Neither would stop the tide any more that the rock jetties at the mouth of the port did. Nothing could stop the tide of hope and desire.”

"The Wrong Side of Goodbye" is published by Little, Brown and Company, 400 pp.; $29.

 

Donate