Confessions of an Epic Indian

I first met Hieronymous Bosch (Harry to those who know him) at Lotus House Books, Bandra.

At that time, Lotus was in its original location, in that kopcha behind the furniture store and the petrol pump. Before the flyover came and the slums and road diversion made it impossible to access the store.

I was on one of my ‘crime’ rampages, in the mood to read something good but exciting.

That’s when Virat Chandok, the manager of the store, recommended Harry Bosch to me.

The latest book was just out in paperback, Trunk Music.

I bought it on his recommendation, read it, and wished I hadn’t.

Because it was the fourth or fifth book in a series.

And I loved it to pieces.

I liked it so much, I wanted to go back and read everything about Harry Bosch.

I couldn’t believe I had lived through the years that the earlier books were being published, without even knowing about them, without even knowing that a writer this terrific, and a series this brilliant, existed.

I couldn’t do much about the time I’d lost already.

But I could make up for lost time.

So I did.

And by the time I had worked my way back to Trunk Music, I was totally sold on Michael Connelly.

I continued with the Harry Bosch series. I still read them, and believe it or not, the books are even better than before.

Unlike other series authors like, say, Jonathon Kellerman or Sue Grafton, who seem to grind down like a blunt knife-edge after a half-dozen books, or worse, the authors who start out brilliantly but then turn into pale parodies of themselves (Carl Hiassen, what the hell happened to Carl Hiassen? How do you go from brilliant to bullshit that fast?), unlike those bozos, Michael Connelly kept his game going, and got better at it.

Somewhere along the way, he brought out a stand-alone novel, The Poet.

This is something that authors of series detective novels usually have to do, often on the advice of their editors, in order to get new readers to sample their wares.

It worked brilliantly for Connelly.

The Poet was a runaway bestseller and won him a legion of fans.

Some of those even crossed over to become Harry Bosch readers.

(The same tactic has worked amazingly well for Robert Crais too, author of the Elvis Cole p.i. novels whose stand-alones are often better than his ongoing series.)

I was hugely grateful to Virat Chandok for his recommendation - one in a long series of similar recommendations, none of which I’ve ever found fault with. Today, I can’t imagine not having read Michael Connelly’s work, and the fact that I have read it, is thanks to Virat.

Today, of course, Lotus is no more and I’ve dropped out of touch with Virat.

(Hey, buddy, if you’re reading this, send me an email and I’ll be glad to meet up sometime!)

But Connelly’s still around, and so is Bosch.

The latest Harry Bosch is due out anyday now (in India, that is, abroad it’s already out). It’s called The Closers, and it promises to be every bit as amazing as its predecessors.

Here’s what’s amazing about the Bosch novels.

They’re police procedurals, a genre which is strictly speaking past its prime.

I mean, think of authors like William J. Caunitz (One Police Plaza, and its sequels), or Ed McBain (the 87th Precinct novels), or Ridley Pearson (the Lou Boldt novels), or Stephen J. Cannell (the Shane Scully series)…

…and a thousand other terrific books with tough-talking, hard-drinking, police detective protagonists who punch, and shoot, and sleep, and drink their way (not all with the same persons!) through a series of conflicts, with their own superiors or colleagues (Internal Affairs) giving them as much grief as their wives, girlfriends, the press, and the bad guys.

They’re great novels but after a while, you start growing tired of the tough, macho, brooding heroes with their drinking problems, issues with women, issues with society, issues with their own self-esteem, and almost always, those old memories of ‘Nam, or some incident buried in the past which keeps coming back to haunt them at 3 a.m. after a night spent drinking Wild Turkey on the rocks in a seedy motel somewhere off an expressway with the neon sign blipping fluoroscent sleaze into the room.

Harry Bosch, I must admit, has all these cliches, and then some.

It even has the skeletons in the closet. The mother who might have been a (whore) loose woman, who might have been murdered, and whose death left little Harry Bosch all alone in the world, friendless and defenseless against the monsters that roamed the big bad city–and his bigger badder mindcity.

But somehow, from this same material, used a thousand times before, Connelly makes gold.

He puts you bang into Bosch’s mind and heart (and the heart is where Connelly really gets you, unlike other tough-cop writers who blather and bluster a lot, stylishly, but rarely move you this profoundly) and takes you on a rollercoaster that is somehow about Bosch himself as much as it is about the case.

Connelly’s books don’t have flashy language. They’re beautifully written, but in an understated spare Hemingwayesque way, that isn’t afraid to say what must be said at times–as with Bosch’s relationships with women–and yet the language never draws attention to itself.

Often, the books read like straight descriptions of this-is-what-happened, and here’s-how-it-went-down…Almost like a crime reporter writing a long leisurely piece in a really good literary magazine, like, say, Vanity Fair, or Esquire.

(Connelly was in fact a crime reporter in LA before he turned to writing novels full-time.)

But I can promise you, by the end of the very first book, you will be hooked on Bosch. And Connelly.

And both author and protagonist will work their magic on you.

Connelly’s other, non-Bosch novels are even better than his series books.

And yet, interestingly, all roads lead to Rome.

If you’ve read, say, Jonathon Kellerman’s Alex Delaware novels as well as his stand-alone thriller The Butcher’s Theatre, then you won’t know what I’m talking about here.

Kellerman, like Robert Crais, and most other series detective authors when they write stand-alones, usually makes them as different from their series novels as possible. And the result is usually tailor-made for the Hollywood execs who are wary of series novels (where do you start? with the first book? the third? the last book?) but love stand-alone thrillers.

(Crais’s stand-alones are not just terrific reads–in my opinion, better fun than his Cole novels–but they also translate well into blockbuster movies. Like the most recent one, Hostage, starring Bruce Willis.)

Connelly, on the other hand, mines much the same territory in his stand-alones.

Take his Void Moon for instance.

Even though he has a completely different protagonist–a woman, a feng shui practitioner, and a classy burglar as well, to boot–yet she comes off as being almost a sister to Bosch.

Partly it’s that brooding internalized style he favours, which works so well capturing the inner mindset (and heart set) of the protagonist, building a connection more profound and powerful than any other crime series novelist I’ve ever read, but it’s also more than that.

It’s a worldview.

An intelligence at work behind the words that sees and thinks and has a finely developed sensibility.

A sense of naturalism.

A sense that while this is a detective thriller, a story to be read, enjoyed and then put aside, it’s also an opportunity to reflect on, study, and explore the darker side of human behaviour.

To explore the moral issues underlying these violent, often brutal, always wrenchingly honest tales of death, dying, and killing.

This sensibility is what elevates Connelly’s work far above that of his contemporaries.

In Void Moon for instance, he doesn’t just use feng shui as a gimmick, he makes us believe that the heroine herself believes in it.

So when things go wrong for her, we believe that the signs she saw earlier, the indications of bad feng shui, really meant something.

You don’t just suspend disbelief when reading a Michael Connelly novel.

You acquire belief in the fiction he’s creating.

I could go on and on, extolling his virtues, as a prose stylist, or tell you how he created another series character, Terry McCaleb (played by Clint Eastwood in the film Blood Work adapted from the book of the same name by Connelly) and how he then went on to brilliantly, shockingly, combine both his series characters–Bosch and McCaleb–in a single novel, A Darkness More Than Night. (He even wove in a strand and a character from his earlier stand-alone The Poet, in an impressive display of authorial control and skill.)

And this experiment, instead of turning into either a showoffy attempt at ‘look-ma-I’m-a-terrific-writer-too’ egotism, or an utter disaster as might happen in the hands of a lesser talent, actually produced one of the greatest crime novels ever written, in my humble opinion.

I could tell you how Connelly’s books function on your mind and memory the way good single-malt scotch does on your palette, even though I don’t touch alcohol, have never tasted single-malt scotch in my entire life, and would rather throw a bottle across a room than take a single sip!

But I won’t.

Instead, I’m going to just list all Connelly’s novels here. Tell you which ones are Bosch books, which are stand-alones, and otherwise.

And then leave you to pick them up, one at a time, or all at once, and discover one of the greatest crime novelists ever.

What I can tell you, though, before I get to the list, is that I’m not exaggerating.

Michael Connelly is one of the finest crime novelists ever.

And that’s something I won’t pretend to be humble about. It’s just a fact of life to me.

And I have Virat Chandok and Lotus House Books to thank for that. Thanks, man, for tuning my ear to Trunk Music.

Now, get off this web page, get off the net, off your comp, and go buy yourself a Michael Connelly novel, or ten of them.

You’ve wasted enough time reading this blogpost, when you could be reading the real thing instead!

The Harry Bosch series
in chronological order

THE BLACK ECHO
THE BLACK ICE
THE CONCRETE BLOND
THE LAST COYOTE
TRUNK MUSIC
ANGEL’S FLIGHT
A DARKNESS MORE THAN NIGHT
CITY OF BONES
LOST LIGHT
THE NARROWS
THE CLOSERS (forthcoming)

The Terry McCaleb novels
BLOOD WORK
A DARKNESS MORE THAN NIGHT (Tie-in)

Stand-alone thrillers
THE POET
A DARKNESS MORE THAN NIGHT (Tie-in)
VOID MOON
CHASING THE DIME
THE LINCOLN LAWYER (forthcoming)