Like his iconic Los Angeles sleuth Harry Bosch, crime novelist Michael Connelly’s musical tastes lean strongly towards jazz. Miles Davis: Kind of Blue. Frank Morgan: Lullaby. John Coltrane: Soul Eyes. Chet Baker, Cole Porter, Art Pepper and many more.
But it’s the words of another timeless musician that leap to mind when surveying Connelly’s own prolific creativity and his ongoing drive to write, to explore, to raise questions while entertaining. Bruce Springsteen, the New Jersey rocker, has repeatedly said of his own long career that he feels like he’s in the midst of a lifelong conversation with his audience.
Philadelphia-born Connelly’s lifelong conversation now includes more than 40 novels, two film adaptations, 125-plus episodes of crime drama streaming, two seasons of a true crime podcast, and more. With more on the near horizon.
Like the Boss, 68-year-old Connelly has grown and evolved over the decades from an exciting breakthrough talent (he scooped an Edgar Award with his 1992 debut, The Black Echo, which introduced relentless LAPD detective Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch) to a pillar of his field who meshed popularity with critical acclaim to a storytelling doyen who continues to try new things rather than rest on his laurels.
Earlier this year, that included Nightshade, a crime thriller set on Catalina Island, a mix of rugged wilderness, resort and small towns an hour’s fast ferry ride from the California mainland.
“It’s a really important part of the creative process for me to not feel like I’m just doing a routine,” says Connelly. “I’m also later in my life as a writer and felt compelled to not just coast out of here with the characters I’ve already established. I wanted to create at least one new main character – I don’t know if Detective Stilwell will be my last one.”
Connelly’s lead characters tend to spring from real experiences. Mickey Haller, main character in the Lincoln Lawyer books, was sparked by conversations former crime reporter Connelly had with real-life Los Angeles attorneys about travelling around a sprawling metropolis to represent clients at different courthouses. Renée Ballard was inspired by real-life homicide detective Mitzi Roberts (a consultant on the hit Bosch TV adaptation starring Titus Welliver) and her experiences as a female detective in a patriarchal police force. Detective Stilwell emerged from Connelly’s curiosity and journalistic tendencies.
“It was really just finding out there’s only one detective assigned to Catalina, and that they pretty much handle everything. The location was unique, but still within the world I’m kind of known for, Los Angeles. It was like a breath of fresh air but without having to travel, almost. I really liked the idea – and I kind of did this with Renée Ballard in her first book, too, The Late Show, where she was on the midnight shift and had to handle many things – that there was this variety of cases I could write about.”
He could find drama in the small details while having big stuff happen, too. In Nightshade, LA County Sheriff’s Detective Stilwell has been banished to Catalina, a land of exiles and misfits, courtesy of department politics and a knack for stepping on the wrong toes. But when the body of an unidentified young woman is pulled from the harbour, he can’t resist encroaching on the homicide investigation, risking his career and more.
Like watching a virtuoso musician who makes things seem far easier than they are perform on stage, there’s a deceptive effortlessness to Connelly’s storytelling that belies the level of craft. Nightshade expanded his fictional universe and underlined his ongoing excellence.
It’s all one big universe across multiple series – a place where Connelly has explored the changing face of LA and US society.
A couple of days before he spoke to the Listener, Connelly was awarded the Thalia Proctor Lifetime Achievement Award at the Capital Crime Festival in London, though he couldn’t attend in person due to a medical issue.
Despite his growing fame, Connelly has preferred keeping his family out of the spotlight. The former crime reporter married Linda McCaleb in 1984 and they have a daughter.
But on the world stage, his lifelong contribution to the genre was recognised in 2018 with the Diamond Dagger, the UK Crime Writers’ Association’s most prestigious accolade. In 2023, the Mystery Writers of America (MWA) made him a Grand Master, alongside the likes of Alfred Hitchcock, Agatha Christie, Elmore Leonard, PD James, James Lee Burke and Aotearoa’s own Ngaio Marsh.
Referencing Harry Bosch’s mantra, “Everybody counts or nobody counts”, in its announcement, the MWA noted: “What those five words have meant to the readers of mystery fiction in the past [30] years can’t be overstated.”
From page to screen
Not just readers. After being stuck in Hollywood development hell from the 1990s to early 2010s, Connelly’s most famous character has now entranced millions of viewers all over the world since 2014, brilliantly portrayed by Titus Welliver in Amazon Studios’ first crime drama series.
At the London premiere of Bosch season 1 in 2015, Connelly praised Welliver for immediately grasping the essence of Harry Bosch. He isn’t a supercop, he makes mistakes, but he’s dogged and driven, with an internal sense of justice.
Welliver credited Connelly with creating a character with tremendous humanity. “So many characters that are police characters, they’re either completely heroic and slightly unrealistic or they’re the darkest of the dark,” said Welliver. “What appeals to me about Harry is that he’s an attainable character, a human character … We want to know what it is in his past that haunts him, that defines him, that drives him. For me as an actor, it’s the richest character I’ve ever been able to play in my career. He’s greatly nuanced.”
Welliver went on to play that rich, nuanced character for 10 seasons across Bosch and Bosch: Legacy, with the final episodes of the final season shown in April. But as one Connelly sleuth walks off screen for now, another walks on with this month’s launch of Ballard, the screen adaptation of Connelly’s Renée Ballard novels, starring Maggie Q in the lead role.
“I don’t know if anyone has benefited more than me from the advent of streaming entertainment,” says Connelly as he reflects on the past decade, during which the Mickey Haller books also made it to the screen in Netflix’s The Lincoln Lawyer – three seasons and counting.
“It’s been pretty amazing. Harry Bosch was on a shelf in Hollywood, basically nothing was happening, then people started streaming. Here I am 10 years later, and I think we’ve accomplished something: 98 episodes to tell the Harry Bosch story.
“I think Bosch has been a really good show, a really good snapshot of Los Angeles. So, any goals that I would have had for a screen adaptation have more than been achieved.”
It must be tough juggling so many projects. This year alone, they have included the publication of Nightshade, the final season of Bosch: Legacy, the third season of The Lincoln Lawyer (and work on the fourth season), and the first season of Ballard, along with another Mickey Haller novel, The Proving Ground, coming out in October.
Connelly says despite what some people may think, he’s not “Mr Hollywood”. “I think people think I’m on television sets all the time, but I’m really not,” he says, before being briefly distracted by a rare American eagle soaring outside his window; only the second he’s seen in eight years.
“I always want to dispel the idea I’m on all these TV shows. What my job is in Hollywood is to find the people I can trust my stuff with … I’ve always felt like I have an audience to my books, so I want to satisfy that core audience.”
Although he’s been a consultant and producer on the shows made from his books, and wrote some episodes of Bosch in earlier seasons, his main focus is still his crime novels. He began writing a new one on June 15, the day before our interview and Father’s Day in the United States.
“The plan is to do more Harry books. Yesterday – Father’s Day is usually when I start writing a book – I began a second Stilwell novel.”
With Bosch, Ballard, Haller and journalist McAvoy all operating in the same space in Connelly’s books (and to some extent on screen), he admits it’s highly likely Stilwell will interact with some of his other characters sooner rather than later.
Mastering the universe
It’s all one big universe across multiple series – a place where Connelly has explored the changing face of LA and US society more generally through the prism of crime fiction.
“When I have a new character, the times I’ve done it, usually the first book is somewhat of a standalone,” says Connelly. “Then it’s in the second book where I do a hard bridge to the rest of the universe and where they start crossing paths with the other characters.”
While he works on the next Stilwell book, however, audience attention will be on the premiere of Ballard. Connelly has seen the show and is hugely impressed by Maggie Q’s portrayal of Renée Ballard, his fierce female detective of Hawai‘ian descent. Like Welliver as Bosch, she embodies the role.
“I haven’t written a Ballard book since we filmed Ballard. I think Maggie Q is so, so good, and also her real-life background is very similar – coming from Hawai‘i, her father being a Vietnam vet.
“So, I think I’m going to start thinking in terms of Maggie Q when I write the next Ballard book. I just have a hunch about that. The new show is following the same path of my books, where everything is kind of blended together. Characters know each other and cross paths in different books. And that’s going to happen in the Ballard show as well.”
After all, everybody counts.
Nightshade, by Michael Connelly (Allen & Unwin, $38) is out now.
Ballard is streaming on Prime Video.