Connelly's Books Show Real-time Characters

Orange County Register

The sentences are short. The dialogue "means something," as the author says.

And the characters are living in actual time.

Michael Connelly has written 21 books, several of them featuring the same characters.

In every book, they get older. The world around them changes. They're forced to adjust.

Just like real people.

Just like us.

Connelly's books have long fascinated me, as much for their thriller aspect as the way the characters deal with reality.

They age. They can't do as much physically. They need to think about health insurance and retirement benefits and pensions.

There's detective Hieronymous "Harry" Bosch, introduced in 1992 in "The Black Echo." In 2003, Harry was back in "The Lost Light," the ninth book in the Bosch series.

He'll come back again in October in "9 Dragons," only now he's been a cop for 28 years and it's time to think about bailing out and living off that pension, Connelly tells me.

Admittedly, from my perspective, "The Scarecrow," his latest book, is more on point.

Jack McEvoy, the Los Angeles Times cop reporter featured in his 1996 novel "The Poet," is back. But this time he's been pink-slipped as part of the newspaper's downsizing.

For Connelly, 52, himself a former Times cop reporter now living in Tampa, Fla., writing in "real time" is an advantage and a challenge.

"It gives me a better lens to look at the world," he says. "Southern California ages at the same time as the characters.

"But little did I know, in 1992, that Harry would be viable and around in 2009. He's facing the wall in terms of age and the character soon begs the question of reality: Will he be doing this much longer?

"He's hit the ceiling on his pension. He can't earn any more."

At least Harry has a hefty pension. There doesn't seem to be much future at all for Jack, the cop shop writer in a dying business. Replaced by a "mojo," a youngster who works for cheap.

The demise of newspapers is a sidebar to the thriller's main topic - the web a digital master can cast over lives and futures. But it is the fast breakdown of newspapers that surprised Connelly.

When he starts a book, he knows where the plot is going, from A to Z, he says. But in the first draft of "The Scarecrow," Jack gets a job offer from The Rocky Mountain News. That had to be rewritten when the Denver paper printed its last edition Feb. 27.

Connelly says "I think I'm a journalist moonlighting as a novelist. The news business is my identity. It got me into the world I write about now.

"I knew hundreds and hundreds of detectives, and my books come from the stories they tell me. Stories that turn the light bulb on for me."

He is a man of his time - most of "The Scarecrow" was researched on the Internet, he says.

And he is a man of reality. Younger readers are a small part of the audiences he speaks to on book tours, he says.

"Harry speaks to an older generation," Connelly says. "A generation that grew up with books."

Does that mean books - like newspapers - are destined to disappear?

"Sounds impossible," Connelly says. "But three years ago, if you had told me there would be no newspapers, I wouldn't have believed it.

"I think it's a death spiral."

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