Crime Beat

victims of crime, and sometimes to the criminals themselves. When you read the Wilder stories, about a South Florida serial killer who went nationwide, the story that haunts you is about the families whose daughters remain missing after a year. “We haven’t gotten her past that gas station,” repeats the mother of one girl, referring to the last place her daughter was seen. It’s the repetition that gives the words their power to move the reader.
    This combination of empathy and perception creates an authorial position that is both detached and involved at the same time. Usually, the result of this formula is cynicism, and it has long been the bane of journalists and cops alike. Connelly’s creation of Bosch, who avoids becoming a hard-boiled cynic by internalizing the pain he sees, is thus a remarkable achievement, and even more so because of the way Connelly has been able to sustain that position even when writing about Bosch in the first person, as he did to great effect when he switched to the classic first-person narration for the books in which Harry operates like a classic L.A. private detective.
    O NLY ONCE , in The Poet, does Connelly use a journalist as his protagonist. By and large, the press does not play a major part in the Bosch series. In general reporters are treated the way Connelly himself says he was when he first arrived on the crime beat in L.A.: tolerated as an inconvenience you can’t get rid of, like ants at a picnic. Harry has a police reporter he more or less trusts, but he also gets set up by the television news, and shows much less anger about it than I did on his behalf when I read City of Bones.
    The Poet was the first of Connelly’s novels that he wrote end-to-end after leaving the journalist’s trade, his first non-Bosch stand-alone and, perhaps not by coincidence, his first bestseller. He has said that his major motivation was the fact that when he took away his files on unsolved murders, he realized how often killers got away with it, and he wanted to write a book in which the guy would get away and there would never be a sequel. He hadn’t anticipated that audience reaction would be so strong.
    If you’re reading this you probably realize that eventually Connelly came around to the idea of doing a sequel. He attributed it to “recovering from my cynicism,” in large part after the birth of his daughter. He has also moved from Los Angeles back to Florida, and perhaps that has something to do with the change as well.
    Compare the stories written for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel with those done later for the Los Angeles Times and you can sense some serious changes within Connelly. He has said that the newsroom at the Times was older, the veteran journalists more cynical and with a much greater sense of their own importance. You can see why. Los Angeles is a city redolent in crime, and being the backdrop for so many movies, television shows and novels gives every crime within the city more resonance. Americans have headed west for centuries, and wound up in la-la land. Latinos head to El Norte to fulfill their dreams of making a living. Asians came to build the railroads or to flee wars. The choice of the name Bosch made the point metaphorically; The Garden of Earthly Delights ought to hang in the lobby of the Los Angeles Times building.
    Connelly’s attitude is that of an outsider rather than a native Angelino. He says he arrived for his job interview at the Times immediately after a major robbery, which wound up serving as the basis for The Black Echo, and said to himself, “Jeez, this is the place to be.” Being an outsider allows him the little bit of distance he needs to observe all sides of the equation. It gives him the leeway to place the nature of the city, its history and culture, as backdrop to the equation.
    In Los Angeles, his view of the police and of the world of crime itself both broaden. He gains a deeper perspective of the cop’s world, both its good and bad sides. His empathy begins to be extended to the criminals, some of whom become victims themselves in that strange world of the LAPD, a sort of paramilitary bureaucracy headed by a succession of police chiefs who make Donald Rumsfeld look like Jimmy Carter.
    Connelly reports both sides of the story, giving a downbeat counterpoint to the police point of view. A burglar who killed a cop in the struggle for a gun is shot and killed by the police, shot three times in the head. Twice he survives, and