8 Quick Questions for Michael Connelly

Best-selling author Michael Connelly’s books have sold more than 80 million copies worldwide and have been adapted into movies and TV series, including Bosch: Legacy, currently on Amazon’s Freevee and Prime platforms, and The Lincoln Lawyer, on Netflix. In the 66-year-old Connelly’s new novel, Desert Star, available Nov. 8, fan-favorite Los Angeles police detectives Renée Ballard and Harry Bosch team up to hunt a brutal killer.  

Do you remember the first book you fell in love with?

Two books that had a really big impact on me were [Harper Lee’s] To Kill a Mockingbird, which I read during a summer in a library. ... I was living in Florida and we didn't have air-conditioning, so I went to the library a lot.  It was the summer I went from [age] 12 to 13. I just went to cool off, and the librarians were pretty smart and said, “You have to be reading a book to stay here.” It was a librarian who gave me that book. In many ways, the stuff I do with The Lincoln Lawyer is a nod to that book. … The other one is Raymond Chandler’s Little Sister. I was a witness to a crime when I was in high school, and I spent time with detectives, and that just made me become a reader of detective novels. I had no thought of wanting to write them. It was almost four years later that I came across The Little Sister, and I thought it was elevated above most of what I’d been reading. There was a cultural reflection in that book, and that’s when I started to think about wanting to be a writer.

You were a police reporter before becoming a crime novelist. Did you ever think about becoming a cop or a detective?

Yeah, I thought about it but not too long, because when I was a kid in the ’70s and ’80s — it’s a little bit different now — you couldn’t just sign up to be a detective. You had to put in your years in uniform, out on the streets, and that really did not appeal to me. I spent some time with a detective, as I said, and that really impacted me, but I don't think I have the personality to be in a patrol car, to get into the middle of fights. It was a quick thought, like, Do I want to do this? Or, instead, do I want to read about it, then write about it?

In Connelly's latest novel, "Desert Star," LAPD detectives Renée Ballard and Harry Bosch work together to catch a murderer.

Little, Brown and Company

Is there any part of you in Harry Bosch?

I was writing about Harry in ’88, so that’s a 30-plus-year relationship. Starting out as a writing exercise, I made him different from me on every level I could, but the book got published and I got lucky, and there was a call for more books with Harry Bosch. So over time that separation disappears and I end up sharing a lot. I think the most obvious thing is we both have daughters that are the same age, giving my feelings and my relationship with my daughter to Harry and his daughter.