The Poet
The Poet
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The buzz among many fans of crime suspense fiction is that Michael Connelly, author of the highly acclaimed Harry Bosch novels, has the goods. With each of his four previous thrillers featuring the gritty LAPD detective, he has shown an uncanny ability to transcend the police procedural genre with intense character-driven plots, artful narrative, and sudden spurts of action that smack painfully true to real life. In his latest outing, The Poet, Connelly features a new hero, Jack McEvoy, a police reporter seeking to unravel a bizarre case of a shrewd serial killer with a yen for the dark poems of Poe and a warped need to slay cops.
Much of the background material for the current novel comes right from Connelly's career as a crime beat-scribe with over 14 years experience for the Los Angeles Times and a handful of Florida newspapers. Speaking on the telephone from a New York City hotel, the 39-year-old writer explained the parallels between McEvoy and himself, two souls grown weary from the daily grind of covering the blood-and-guts tales yanked from the police blotter.
"A lot of the details on the police reporter's life was taken from my own experiences of writing stories about the most traumatic experiences in people's lives," Connelly says candidly. "I got out before I suffered emotional burnout and became overly cynical. I've seen it happen with other reporters and especially with cops. This is what happens with Jack McEvoy, who is a frustrated novelist and has stayed in the job far too long. Unlike Jack, most reporters seek change to stay revitalized by jumping from paper to paper, city to city."
Similar to his acclaimed Bosch novels, including the Edgar-winning The Black Echo, the current Connelly sleuther again showcases a main character, McEvoy, who is a maverick battling the close-mouthed police fraternity. In The Poet, McEvoy's twin brother, a Denver homicide detective, has allegedly killed himself, but all evidence points to a madman who is cleverly murdering officers under the guise of suicide. Like all police departments, this one is slow to admit that there is an epidemic of supposed police suicides or that there may be foul play. This does not hinder Jack McEvoy's search for truth.
Connelly, who never wanted to be a cop, says he is fascinated with them and their high-pressure job of maintaining the peace. "Being a cop is a noble job, but I couldn't be one, " he adds. "There is too much paperwork and large blocks of boring time when nothing happens."
Connellyıs writing style breaks with the past and the brutal Spillane approach to mystery fiction. He wants the reader to get inside the complex minds of his characters, much like two of his popular contemporaries Lawrence Block and James Lee Burke. Weaned on the mysteries of Raymond Chandler, Ed McBain, and Ross McDonald, Connelly reads fewer thrillers now, reserving his time for true-crime nonfiction by notables such as Ann Rule and Nick Pileggi.
"Probably there is an evolution toward better books, a move away from flashy action," Connelly suggests. "You see it with the work of Block, Burke, and Crumley. In fact, Burke has become a best-selling author which shows there is a market for this type of writing. Like Burke, I try to move the mystery from A to B while moving the development of the character from A to B as well. The best books revolve around character serving as a key basis for plot."
In the fabled Bosch mysteries that earned him the reputation as a young master of the form, Connelly says he followed a blueprint for the genre left by Chandler, the wizard of detective fiction, over 50 years ago. Both Bosch and McEvoy are outsiders with an insider's job, wary but noble, struggling to remain somewhat removed but keeping up the good fight. Or as Chandler wrote in his classic essay, "The Simple Art of Murder": "If the mystery novel is at all realistic, it is written in a certain spirit of detachment; otherwise nobody but a psychopath would want to write it or read it." In all of Connelly's novels, he submits to Chandler's credo with a narrative vision that is all-seeing, penetrating but coolly detached with just the slightest hint of sentiment.
"My goal is to strive for accuracy," Connelly says. "I studied how crimes are done and how they are solved. I knew a lot of homicide cops in LA and Florida. I constructed my stories so they run linear to let the reader see how the main character handles his world. Sometimes I lead him down the road, throw him a curve, back him up, and then move him on to the clues that will solve the crime."
After four years of producing Bosch installments, Connelly tackled the McEvoy novel as "a mental health break to recharge his batteries from doing the police procedurals." In the new book, he successfully mines two difficult issues: the heavy emotional loss suffered after the death of a family member and the taboo subject of the escalating number of police suicides. Even though some police departments nationally, Connelly notes, have instituted counseling programs to combat this problem, they tend to downplay its seriousness, seeing it as bad publicity.
Now a full-time novelist, Connelly writes in the morning and evenings, with the afternoons off for errands. It takes him about ten months to produce each thriller, with the books often overlapping one another. Married with no children, he says he knew during his college days at the University of Florida Gainesville that being an author was in his blood. "Writing is still a mystery to me," Connelly muses. "I often wonder how I come up with the ideas. Each time I try to do it better. With different books, I try different things, experimenting with new ways of delivering the story. Readers want stories with more meat on them, and I'm doing the best to give them just that."
A police reporter for more than ten years, Robert Fleming is a freelance journalist in New York City.
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