Michael Connelly
Michael Joseph Connelly (born July 21, 1956[1]) is an American author of detective novels and other crime fiction, notably those featuring LAPD Detective Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch and criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller. Connelly is the bestselling author of 38 novels and one work of non-fiction, with over 74 million copies of his books sold worldwide and translated into 40 languages. His first novel, The Black Echo, won the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best First Novel in 1992. In 2002, Clint Eastwood directed and starred in the movie adaptation of Connelly's 1997 novel, Blood Work. In March 2011, the movie adaptation of Connelly's novel The Lincoln Lawyer starred Matthew McConaughey as Mickey Haller.[2] Connelly was the President of the Mystery Writers of America from 2003 to 2004.[3]
For other people named Michael Connelly, see Michael Connelly (disambiguation).
Michael Connelly
Early life[edit]
Connelly was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the second eldest child of W. Michael Connelly, a property developer, and Mary Connelly, a homemaker.[4] He is of Irish ancestry.[5] According to Connelly, his father was a frustrated artist who encouraged his children to want to succeed in life[6] and was a risk taker who alternated between success and failure in his pursuit of a career. Connelly's mother was a fan of crime fiction and introduced her son to the world of mystery novels.[4]
At age 12, Connelly moved with his family from Philadelphia to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where he attended St. Thomas Aquinas High School. At age 16, Connelly's interest in crime and mystery escalated when, on his way home from his work as a hotel dishwasher, he witnessed a man throw an object into a hedge. Connelly decided to investigate and found that the object was a gun wrapped in a lumberjack shirt. After putting the gun back, he followed the man to a bar and then left to go home to tell his father. Later that night, Connelly brought the police down to the bar, but the man was already gone. This event introduced Connelly to the world of police officers and their lives, impressing him with the way they worked.[4]
Connelly had planned on following his father's early choice of career in building construction and started out at the University of Florida in Gainesville, at the Rinker School of Building Construction, studying construction management. After earning grades that were lower than expected, Connelly went to see Robert Altman's film The Long Goodbye (1973). The film, based on Raymond Chandler's eponymous 1953 novel, inspired Connelly to want to become a mystery writer. Connelly went home and read all of Chandler's works featuring Philip Marlowe, and decided to transfer to the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications, major in journalism, and minor in creative writing.[4]
Early career[edit]
After graduating from the University of Florida in 1980, Connelly got a job as a crime beat writer at the Daytona Beach News-Journal, where he worked for almost two years until he went to the Fort Lauderdale News and Sun-Sentinel in 1981. There, he covered the crime beat during the South Florida cocaine wars.[3] He stayed with the paper for a few years and in 1986, he and two other reporters spent several months interviewing survivors of the 1985 Delta Flight 191 plane crash, which story earned Connelly a place as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.[7] The honor also brought Connelly a job as a crime reporter at the Los Angeles Times. He moved to California in 1987 with his wife Linda McCaleb, whom he met while in college and married in April 1984.[4]
After moving to Los Angeles, Connelly went to see High Tower Court[8] where Raymond Chandler's character Philip Marlowe had lived (in his 1942 novel The High Window), and Robert Altman had used for his film The Long Goodbye (1973). Connelly got the manager of the building to promise to phone him if the apartment ever became available. Ten years later, the manager tracked Connelly down, and Connelly decided to rent the place. This apartment served as a place to write for several years.[6][9]
After three years at the Los Angeles Times, Connelly wrote his first published novel, The Black Echo (1992), after previously writing two unfinished novels that he did not attempt to get published.[6] He sold The Black Echo to Little, Brown to be published in 1992 and won the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award for Best first Novel.[7] The book is partly based on a true crime and is the first one featuring Connelly's primary recurring character, Los Angeles Police Department Detective Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch,[3] a man who, according to Connelly, shares few similarities with the author himself.[6] Connelly named Bosch after the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, known for his paintings full of sin and redemption, such as the painting Hell, a copy of which hangs on the office wall behind Connelly's computer.[2][4] Connelly describes his own work as a big canvas with all the characters of his books floating across it as currents on a painting. Sometimes they are bound to collide, creating cross currents. This is something that Connelly creates by bringing back characters from previous books and letting them play a part in books written five or six years after first being introduced.[4]
Connelly went on to write three more novels about Detective Bosch—The Black Ice (1993), The Concrete Blonde (1994), and The Last Coyote (1995)—before quitting his job as a reporter to write full-time.[4]
Awards and honors[edit]
Connelly has won nearly every major award given to mystery writers, including the Edgar Award,[18] Anthony Award,[19] Macavity Award,[20] Los Angeles Times Best Mystery/Thriller Award,[21] Shamus Award,[22] Dilys Award,[23] Nero Award,[24] Barry Award,[25] Audie Award,[26] Ridley Award, Maltese Falcon Award (Japan), .38 Caliber Award (France), the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière (France) and Premio Bancarella Award (Italy).[27] In 2012, The Black Box won the world's most lucrative crime fiction award, the RBA Prize for Crime Writing worth €125,000.[28] He received the Cartier Diamond Dagger in 2018 from the Crime Writers' Association.[29]
Writing techniques[edit]
When starting a book, he says, the story is not always clear, but Connelly has “a hunch” as to where it is going.[6] The books often reference real-world events, such as the 1992 Los Angeles riots and the September 11 attacks. Events that might seem of minor significance are included in some of the books, because of Connelly’s personal interest in them. For example, City of Bones, in which Detective Bosch investigates the murder of an 11-year-old boy, was written during Connelly's early years as a father of a daughter, and it hit close to home. According to Connelly, he didn't mean to write about the biggest fear of his life; it just came out that way.[30] David Geherin states that Connelly "deliberately avoids ornate language, the kind that makes the reader stop and savor the choice of words or elegant phrasing. He doesn't want anything to inhibit the forward momentum he is working to create."[31]
Detective Bosch's life usually changes in harmony with Connelly's own life. When Connelly moved 3,000 miles across the country, Bosch's experiences sent him in a new direction in City of Bones, written at that time. According to Connelly, his "real" job is to write about Bosch,[30] and he brought McCaleb and Bosch together in A Darkness More Than Night in order to look at Bosch from another perspective and to keep the character interesting.[30]
Connelly often changes perspectives between characters in his novels. In Void Moon, Connelly frequently alternates between following protagonist Cassie Black and antagonist Jack Karch. In Fair Warning, Connelly outright changes the overarching perspective of the book on occasion, regularly following protagonist Jack McEvoy in a first-person point of view while occasionally branching away from his story to follow the antagonists in third-person.