Crime Beat

takes to twist the elements of a story into a recognizable template that doesn’t stretch his audience’s emotions beyond the certainties in which tabloids deal. Nor is he an “investigative journalist,” the modern term applied to grad school rewriters of press releases when they score a celebrity interview. He’s a reporter in the best sense of the word, able to gather information and see the story buried beneath all those facts, able to sort through the impressions of all sorts of people and see how they affect those facts and, most of all, able to put it all down on paper so his reader can do the same thing.
    When I began my career, I had to study the UPI style book. All the things it said about structuring a story—the famous who-what-when-where-why and how—are laid out in Connelly’s stories, clearly and cleanly. He organizes his stories like a reporter should, to make sure the reader sees what he has seen. This is much more than doing a Jack Webb “just the facts, ma’am.” That ability to set a story out clearly serves Connelly’s greatest strengths as a reporter: his perception and his empathy.
    By perception I mean the ability to see and to hear, or, better, to listen to what is being said and to see what it means. This involves the greatest skill a good reporter can have, the ability to understand people. You can’t see a good story unless you can see where it is coming from. Too often in our world, journalists move from graduate schools into hermetically sealed newsrooms, protected by security passes and cut off from the real lives of the people about whom they are supposed to report. They’ve grown up in a world where the relationships are clearly delineated, the conflicts take place along a very narrow perimeter and the people they write about exist only as fodder for copy.
    This is not the world cops inhabit. Not the ones who are out on the streets.
    Cops know that tragedy arises from the contrast of expectations with reality. They know the real lives of the victims they find, and the real effects of the deeds perpetrated by the criminals they pursue. They can’t escape that knowledge, can’t put a story to bed and then go home and sleep soundly.
    The most important story in this collection, as it relates to Connelly’s fiction, is “The Call,” in which he spent a week on call with the Fort Lauderdale homicide squad. Connelly says that what he saw informed everything he has written in fiction, and if you read the story carefully you will see how true that is. It is not just the details of crime and investigation, but the way that Connelly the reporter absorbs the mind-set of the cops, internalizes it. Their fatigue becomes palpable. When Connelly sets out the facts about how hard it will be to solve the case, you feel the emotions of the investigators, the frustrations that are part of their everyday life. This, to me, is the starting point for everything we know about Harry Bosch, and the sense of tiredness which pervades the Bosch novels so effectively.
    Empathy is not identification; there is a crucial difference. Connelly tells us that, like Bosch, he collected the shell casings from police funerals and kept them in a jar. He rode with cops and examined crime scenes and corpses with them, but he is not a cop. He is a reporter, and he manages to keep a reporter’s distance from his subjects, which allows him to see the bigger picture of the world that they inhabit.
    There is a wonderfully understated moment in a story about the LAPD’s Foreign Prosecution Unit, which pursues Mexicans who have returned to their own country as suspects in crimes committed in the United States. Connelly details the differences in Mexican law that cause civil libertarians to assert that suspects traced by the unit to Mexico may not receive the same rights they would have if they had been captured in the United States. He writes, “Ross and his fellow officers contend that a murder suspect who flees to avoid prosecution in Los Angeles is accepting the justice system of the country he runs to. ‘You have to accept the risks that you have incurred by fleeing,’ Moya said.”
    I’ll bet that raised more than one wry smile, but it’s the way it is reported with a straight face that makes it work: you understand exactly the cops’ view of the world, especially in the face of criticism you realize they see as naïve, if well-meaning.
    Connelly’s empathy extends beyond the police, however, to the