Crime Beat

twice reaches miraculously for conveniently placed guns. The subtext, that he had already killed a cop, is brought to the surface, subtly but unmistakably. A car full of armed robbers shoot it out with the shotgun-wielding cops from the Special Investigations Section, who watched them rob a fast-food outlet and then surrounded them. Connelly reports the incident straightforwardly but saves for the end the revelation that the robbers were armed with unloaded pellet guns, and were thus unlikely to have chosen to shoot it out.
    Harry Bosch lives within these ambiguities. His world cannot be defined, nor understood, without a feeling for the pressure under which the police operate, and the frustration endemic in the job. Understanding that helps explain the cop’s instinct to close ranks and protect one’s own. But cops are also part of a fiercely self-devouring bureaucracy. Think back to Connelly’s original description of working at the Los Angeles Times . He has said that the newsroom was more like a family, with a strict sense of hierarchy, than his Florida paper, where the staff were of a similar age and socialized outside the office. This is the big leagues. So, too, with the LAPD—arguably America’s most visible police department.
    Some of the most satisfying scenes in the Bosch canon involve his clashes with authority, from Harvey “98” Pounds to the Bureau of Homeland Security. Bosch has no time for careerists and turf fighters; he’s too busy trying to keep his integrity as he watches the dividing line between those who keep the rules and those who break them, between order and chaos, disappear. This is what Bosch goes home to. This is why he sits in dark rooms and tries to smooth it over with jazz.
    T HE CRIME WRITERS I most admire are the ones who do something different with the form. Hammett’s accounting of people’s lies, evasions and self-serving testimonies, with no stylistic value judgment coming between the character and the reader. Chandler’s symphonies of simile. Marlowe’s ability to crack wise in ways that don’t occur to real people until the next day. Donald Westlake crafting Richard Stark’s bare, clipped prose, which matches Parker’s bare, clipped view of the world. George Higgins’ ability to narrate through dialogue, where his characters’ storytelling ability tells you more about them than any description could. James Ellroy’s riffing and agonizing alliterative arsenal.
    On the surface, Connelly breaks no new ground. He writes well and cleanly, but look carefully and you’ll see how it goes beyond clean. His prose style is, in fact, an outgrowth of his reporting, hard-boiled without being cynical.
    In the 1930s many people compared Hammett to Hemingway, often suggesting Hammett was there first with hard-boiled prose. This was unfair to Hemingway, because In Our Time is crafted with a bare purity that has rarely been matched. Hemingway attributed that purity to learning “cable-ese,” the pared-down prose necessary to save on the cost of wiring his reporting back to the paper at home. But neither writer has the raw, hard-boiled quality of Paul Cain’s Fast One or Raoul Whitfield’s Green Ice. Look elsewhere in Hemingway or at some of Hammett and you’ll find prose crafted in an almost romantic manner, because they refuse to submit completely to cynicism; they’ve seen too much of reality for that.
    Connelly decided to become a crime writer after seeing Robert Altman’s cynical version of The Long Goodbye and turning to Chandler’s novels, which he devoured one by one. At the University of Florida, he studied creative writing with the novelist Harry Crews. Although he claims Crews’ lifestyle and his success as a writer were more of an influence than his style, I see elements of Crews’ darkness, somewhere between Southern gothic and theater of the absurd, in Connelly’s fiction. I also see, in Harry Bosch, a very Crewsian figure, out of place in his world, and stretched to breaking point trying to make himself fit.
    Bosch is the catalyst that allows Connelly to perform the trick of turning reality into fiction. The art of writing good hard-boiled prose requires a certain detachment, the ability to not let the runny emotional yolk of a story break free.
    But it doesn’t have to be boiled within the shell. The closest comparison I can make in crime fiction is with Ross MacDonald, whose Lew Archer is an observer of social change, almost a reporter, and whose