Best-selling author Michael Connelly has a well-earned reputation for realistic, hard-boiled crime fiction. His stories grow from legitimate roots; he spent years as a crime-beat journalist, first for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and then for the Los Angeles Times. His experiences are reflected in 16 novels, which alternate between the Harry Bosch series and stand-alones. “Crime Beat,” a collection of Connelly’s journalism, offers readers a behind-the-scenes look at some of what fuels his creative engine.
“Crime Beat” is divided into three sections – “The Cops,” “The Killers” and “The Cases.” Each provides a different insight. In the first, Connelly’s stories reflect both the best and the worst of the police he has covered. In “The Call,” he recounts the experience of spending a week riding with the homicide division of the Fort Lauderdale Police Department. It’s an in-depth piece, and Connelly’s storyteller grasp of minor but telling details brings the story as close as any of his fiction.
The subtext of “The Call” is admiration for cops fighting a battle to bring the guilty to justice, but Connelly isn’t a guy who thinks the police always are on the side of the angels. “Death Squad” tells of a 1990 incident with a particular L.A. police squad, the Special Investigations Section. Officers shot and killed three of four men after watching them force their way into a closed McDonald’s. Follow-up stories, documenting a lawsuit that grew from the incident, reveal police vigilantes at their worst.
The section on killers is perhaps the most unsatisfying: not because of Connelly’s writing, but because these are news pieces. In his foreword, Connelly writes that suspected serial killer Jonathan Lundh used to call him from jail. “I remember hanging up the phone each time and feeling lucky that we were separated not only by the phone line but by the concrete and steel of the jail as well. No person I have ever spoken to in my life was creepier than Jonathan Lundh.” Yet in the “The Stalker,” the story Connelly wrote about Lundh’s trial, there is (appropriately) no hint of the man’s creepiness. Still, it leaves the reader wondering just what it was about Lundh that made him so memorably evil.
The book’s final section, “The Cases,” is the most difficult reading, again because Connelly’s eye for detail brings the stories home. Fans will find echoes of his novel “Trunk Music” in the section by the same name, about the gangland-style killing of Vic Weiss. And inspiration for Bosch’s work in the open-unsolved unit could easily have found its start in the story of the killing of John Willers on the night of the L.A. riots that grew from the Rodney King verdict.
Will “Crime Beat” universally appeal to fans of crime fiction? It’s a large question. Fiction allows the writer to explore character and psyche in a way that a journalist cannot and by its very nature erects a safety barrier between the reader and the events of the novel.
There is no wall between the reader and the violence in “Crime Beat.” This is a book that probably should not be digested in a single gulp; the tragedy is relentless. The work demonstrates Connelly’s skills in a different arena, and fans will see the genesis of more than a few novels. The stories are printed as they were originally run, which results in some unavoidable repetition in follow-up stories.
“Crime Beat” resonates with the eye and voice that win Connelly droves of fans. It offers revealing insight into the formation of an author whose writing stands a cut above most of the genre fiction topping the best-seller list.
That said, the book should come with a caution label. It is much closer to a work of true crime than to its crime fiction offspring. Unlike the fictional Bosch, and the killers he pursues to bring justice to the victims, these cops, killers and cases are not works of the imagination. You cannot dismiss them. They are the real deal.
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer who reviews books for The Denver Post and Buzz in the ‘Burbs.
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Crime Beat
By Michael Connelly
Little, Brown, 375 pages, $25.95
