Michael Connelly says cops call Los Angeles "suitcase city".
"It's a transient place," he says. "People have bags packed ready to go some place else." Or they are arriving, drawn by the glamour of Hollywood and the dreams of stardom. And there's agitation, too. "People wonder, am I
safe?"
Connelly's LA is so central to his fiction that his novels have joined the emerging crime school of "tourist noir". In the way that Edinburgh is a core part of best-selling Scottish writer Ian Rankin's books, Connelly's fictional world plays homage to real- life LA.
A special place for Connelly is high in the Hollywood Hills. He placed detective Harry Bosch's home on Mulholland Drive, where at night the city below is a flat carpet of stars. On Woods Drive, above Laurel Canyon, he made a home for lawyer Mickey Haller, just across the road from the concrete-and-glass Stahl house, a celebrated modernist creation which photographer Julius Schulman pictured at night in a famous 20th century image of LA.
Downtown, Connelly used the La Brea Tar Pits to make connections between California's fossil past and forensic present in his book City of Bones.
A century-old funicular railway called Angels Flight is the scene of a murder in Connelly's mystery of the same name. Closed in 2001 after a fatal crash involving its two railcars, the attraction is due to reopen after private donors - including Connelly - paid for its restoration.
The author's latest bestseller, The Brass Verdict, features - what else - a movie lot, a big-shot film producer with a trophy wife and even a writers' strike.
