Novelist Michael Connelly is no stranger to the top of best-
seller lists, and deservedly so. His fans are loyal, drawn by a combination of great characters and tight plots. These qualities set him atop the field of crime writers and continue to serve him in good stead.
His latest novel, “The Lincoln Lawyer,” is a departure in that it’s not crime fiction but a legal thriller. And this time he’s not writing about a hero, who is on the side of the angels, protecting those most in need of help. Connelly instead focuses on the work of a defense attorney, a man who works the holes in the legal system to help his clearly guilty clients.
Protagonist Mickey Haller’s customers are usually drug dealers, users and prostitutes rounded up one too many times. He works from the back of a Lincoln Town Car, driven through gridlocked Los Angeles traffic by a former client working off legal fees. When he stumbles into the ultimate plum, a “franchise” client who is able to actually pay his A-list fees, he thinks he’s hit the jackpot. But this pot of gold could cost Haller his last remaining shred of ethics and, perhaps, lives.
Connelly said this novel grew out of his love of legal thrillers. “It’s one of my favorite things to read, and so I’ve always wanted to write one,” he said in a telephone interview from his Florida home. “I write my books thinking, ‘Would I like this book, would I like this story?’ I think many writers will tell you that, about the best thing you can do is write for yourself.”
“The Lincoln Lawyer” is all that Connelly readers have come to expect, fast-moving with unexpected twists. But where his series character, Bosch, is stoic in his dogged pursuit of justice, Haller is a cynic who makes his living exploiting the chinks in the armor of our legal system.
As the story’s narrator he says: “The law was not about truth. It was about negotiation, amelioration, manipulation. I didn’t deal in guilt and innocence, because everybody was guilty. Of something. But it didn’t matter, because every case I took on was a house built on a foundation poured by overworked and underpaid laborers. They cut corners. They made mistakes. And then they painted over the mistake with lies. My job was to peel away the paint and find the cracks. To work my fingers and tools into those cracks and widen them. To make them so big that either the house fell down or, failing that, my client slipped through.”
Connelly has long alternated the installments in the Bosch series with stand-alone novels. The seed for “The Lincoln Lawyer” was planted five years ago, at a Dodgers season opener, when Connelly found himself seated next to a friend of a friend. “We get talking,” he said, “and it turns out that he’s a criminal defense attorney. Knowing something about how that works in L.A., I say ‘Where’s your office; what courthouses do you work?’ And he basically says, ‘Have case will travel. My office is my car.’ He outlined to me how he uses, much like Mickey Haller, a client who’s working off his fees to drive him and he sits in the back and works the phones and works the computers and prints out his pleadings all that stuff. And he makes the best use of that time. He listens to surveillance tapes. His time in his car are billable hours. He’s been able to turn that around. That strikes me, in that moment, this could be a good character for a book,” Connelly said.
Connelly also put judicial contacts to good research use. He said, “I have a friend who’s a judge in Los Angeles and I asked her if I could come out and spend a week in her courtroom, to hang out and just watch stuff. She opened the doors and let me not only be in her courtroom, (but also) be in her chambers. Her bailiff took me into the jail and holding cells, and I got to see everything in how a courtroom works.”
Connelly cites the work of Raymond Chandler as a model for his crime writing, but Harper Lee comes into play with this novel. “One of the most influential books I’ve ever read was ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’ Some people say it’s a literary masterpiece, and it is, and in another sense it’s about a trial,” he said.
It is also one of the first books he ever read purely for pleasure. When he was 12 years old, Connelly’s family moved from Philadelphia to Florida. “Fort Lauderdale is pretty darned hot in the summer. My mom had this job where she was a bank teller, and she would drop me and my two brothers off at this big city park on her way to work and pick us up on the way back. We had to find things to do, but it was really hot and on the corner of this huge city park was a library and it was air-conditioned, so we would go there to cool off. Someone whose name I’ll never know, and I wish I did, a librarian came us to say, ‘You can’t just sit in here and cool off, I want to see you reading books.’
“The librarian gave me ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ and it was the first time I started reading for myself,” he said. It was a resonant lesson. “If I was assigned it through school, I found it very hard to read. If it was something I found in a bookstore or in a library, I was all over it.”
Time passed and Connelly worked his way through Chandler’s works, developing a particular fascination with the hard-boiled-detective form. With “The Lincoln Lawyer,” he has distilled much of his understanding and applied lessons learned to the legal genre.
He said that Haller is the closest he’s been able to get to Chandler’s central character, Philip Marlowe. “Because Philip Marlowe, in Chandler’s books, is a complete outsider. The police don’t like him, most of society doesn’t understand him or treats him suspiciously, and he’s really a loner. He’s an outsider and a loner. I’ve made my career on Harry Bosch, who feels like an outsider, but for 80 percent of the books he carries a badge, so he’s an insider. And so when I’ve finally written this guy Mickey Haller, he’s a criminal defense attorney. He’s a) either despised or b) misunderstood by society.”
Connelly isn’t quite ready to leave Bosch behind, though he also admits that this central hero’s time is limited. He said, “I think (it’s a) realistic thing. Harry was born in 1950 in the book, (and) he ages in real time. It’s not like other writers who keep their characters the same age. It doesn’t seem realistic that he would be a homicide detective much past age 60. That’s what I’m saying now. Maybe it will become too difficult to part with him. But I just don’t see, if I want to keep this realism that I’ve tried to put in the series, I don’t think I have much past age 60.”
That’s hard news for those who treasure Bosch’s adventures, but the ride isn’t over. Connelly’s next novel, tentatively titled “Echo Park,” continues the detective’s work on the cold case squad, this time with a killer in custody.
“He will clear up a number of unsolved murders if they don’t go for the death penalty with him. Harry’s job is to take his confession and confirm the cases,” Connelly said. The book is slated for release in fall of 2006, but in the spring, Connelly’s publisher will issue a reprinted collection of Connelly’s journalism titled “Crime Beat.” Basically, he said, it’s “a collection of the crime stories I wrote that has echoes into my fiction. You’ll read a story and say, ‘Oh, that’s what “Trunk Music” is based on,’ or ‘that’s what “Concrete Blond” is based on.”‘
It’s surely inevitable that Bosch and Haller will someday cross paths. Close readers of “The Black Ice” will realize that the two are half-brothers. “Mickey Haller Jr. has no idea of Harry Bosch, Harry Bosch has an idea of him because of the name. So at some point if they meet, in a story, Bosch will know right away who he (Haller) is, he won’t know right away who Harry is. That gives me something to play around with,” said Connelly.
