|
Crime Beat Reviews
The many fans of perennially bestselling mystery author Connelly will certainly lap up this collection of his articles written during his former life as a crime journalist
in Florida and California. In three sections, "The Cops," "The Killers" and "The Cases," Connelly presents a wide variety of stories from the 1980s and early '90s, ranging from local
crimes to national sensations such as the serial killer Christopher Wilder, one of the FBI's Most Wanted. With Wilder, for instance, readers watch Connelly build a portrait of a man who gained access to women in the
Florida modeling and fashion scene by posing as a professional photographer with "cunning charm, smooth talk and money.". Connelly tells tales of double lives, failures of the criminal justice system and
the shooting death of a 245-pound L.A. prostitute. The format of the book may disappoint some, as the inclusion of multiple reports about the same crimes often contain repetitive language. The author is strongest
bringing quiet moments to life, such as the despair of parents hoping that a missing child will still turn up, or the patient, resigned professionalism of weary detectives. Devotees of Connelly's fiction will enjoy
tracing the real-life roots of some of his plots.
— Publishers Weekly
Connelly, best-selling and Edgar Award–winning writer of the Harry Bosch mystery series, writes about cops, criminals,
and cold cases with an authority that stems in part from his first career, as a crime reporter for two newspapers: the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and, later, the Los Angeles Times. This is a collection
of 22 of his nonfiction crime stories for those papers. The collection is divided into three sections: "The Cops," "The Killers," and "The Cases." A fascinating introduction dissects the moments in Connelly's
reporting career that helped form him as a writer, with an emphasis on the importance of the telling detail. The crime stories that follow are filled with telling details, as in the tattoo of blue tears at the
corners of the eyes of a cop who carries out body bags. The reader moves from Connelly's account of a week during which he was granted full access to a South Florida homicide squad, through a series on a serial
killer who preyed on would-be models, to a consideration of victims, including a rookie LAPD officer shot to death and the parents of missing children, who can't get past the last place their daughters or sons were
seen. This volume works on several levels: as a source of insight into Connelly's craft; as a collection of compelling true-crime stories; and as a great primer for journalists.
— Connie Fletcher, Booklist
Connelly (The Lincoln Lawyer), one of the more literary of the neonoir novelists, got his start as a crime beat reporter in Los Angeles and Florida. Here he reprints the stories that inspired his award-winning
crime fiction. From the body found in a trunk, which he used in his novel Trunk Music, to the insights on cops and killers that would inform The Poet and the character of detective Harry Bosch, these collected articles show that the truth can be as strange-and even stranger than-fiction and every bit as compelling. Through it all, Connelly displays the discerning eye and compassion that characterize his best work. The one problem with the format is that the stories and their follow-ups are printed verbatim; as a result, there is much repetition among articles on the same crime. This is a distracting but minor point in a book that is otherwise a treat.
— Deirdre Root, Library Journal
Before he was a best-selling crime novelist, Michael Connelly was a working journalist. He covered the crime beat for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in the early 1980s and for the Los Angeles Times from 1987 until the early 1990s. During his last few years at the Times, Connelly also wrote and published the first several entries in his acclaimed series featuring LAPD detective Harry Bosch. In 2004, many of Connelly's articles for those two newspapers were gathered in a special collectible volume published by Steven C. Vascik Publications. Now, Little, Brown and Company, the publisher of Connelly's novels, is releasing that collection, Crime Beat: A Decade of Covering Cops and Killers in a new hardcover edition. The obvious question is whether something as ephemeral as ten- or twenty-year-old newspaper articles can still elicit interest on the part of a reader far removed from the scene of the crimes that Connelly covered as a reporter. The answer is yes: The pieces in Connelly's collection hold up remarkably well, and still hold fascination and interest for a general reader. Partly this is to the credit of Connelly's skills as a writer. As a reporter, Connelly also benefited from covering two particularly compelling and bloody regions (several of the pieces in the collection will ring dim bells for readers outside California and Florida because the crimes or criminals about which Connelly writes achieved national coverage). In several instances, multiple reports filed by Connelly over a period of months and years — through the processes of discovery, detection and, in some cases, incarceration and conviction — are gathered to provide a full and rounded depiction of a particular crime or criminal. Where appropriate, footnotes are also provided to update the status of a court case, crime or criminal. Connelly fans will also enjoy reading the pieces to see how the exceptionally gifted reporter would eventually use some of the materials and atmosphere and, in a few cases, the crimes he covered in his novels. His reporting voice is also sufficiently close to the third-person voice Connelly adopts in the majority of his Bosch novels to ease the transition for those fans of his fiction who sample this very fine collection of news dispatches. In addition to Connelly's crime journalism, the collection also includes an introduction by Connelly, and an afterword by Michael Carlson.
— Craig McDonald, This Week Newspapers
The same qualities that make for an outstanding crime reporter -- attention to detail, understanding people, empathy, etc. -- also make for a great crime novelist, as evidenced in Crime Beat: A
Decade of Covering Cops and Killers, a gripping collection of newspaper articles written by bestselling author Michael Connelly (The Lincoln Lawyer, The Closers, et al.), when he worked as a journalist in South Florida and Los Angeles before becoming a full-time writer. The collection of almost two dozen exposés from the late 1980s and early 1990s ranges from stories focusing on cops (former LAPD Chief Daryl Gates in "Death Squad") to those spotlighting infamous killers (serial murderer/rapist Christopher Bernard Wilder in "Killer on the Run"). "Trunk Music," which explores the unsolved gangland-style murder of a businessman found bound and shot to death in the trunk of his Rolls-Royce, was the inspiration behind Connelly's 1997 novel of the same name. The phrase "truth is stranger than fiction" couldn't be more apt when it comes to the incredibly diverse subject matter of Crime Beat -- from demented serial killers to savvy con artists to overzealous police. Fans of Connelly's novels featuring former LAPD homicide detective Harry Bosch will gain invaluable insights not only into Connelly's complex and engaging protagonist but also into the equally complex and engaging author himself. Additionally, aficionados of true crime will absolutely devour this powerful nonfiction collection -- yellow crime scene police tape not included.
— Paul Goat Allen, BarnesandNoble.com Editorial Review
Before thriller writer Michael Connelly wrote about fictional crimes, he spent a decade covering real ones as a journalist in Fort Lauderdale and Los Angeles (where he'd base his Harry Bosch novels). Bosch fans keen
to find the real-life inspirations for their dogged detective hero in this collection of Connelly's reportage should look no further than the superb opening piece, which tracks a week in the life of the Fort
Lauderdale homicide squad and closely resembles the tone of his subsequent books. Elsewhere, Connelly's distinctive authorial voice is less evident, although his eye for detail remains a constant. He notes that one
less-than-bright drug-addicted burglar boasted a giveaway "Get High" tattoo on his bicep.
— Clark Collis, Entertainment Weekly, B+
Ever wonder how crime writers get their ideas? Best-selling author Michael Connelly divulges some of his secrets in the nonfiction Crime Beat. In 1987, Connelly was a crime-beat reporter for the South
Florida Sun-Sentinel spending a week shadowing the homicide squad. The sergeant in charge was George Hurd, a Vietnam veteran who told the reporter after they had been to one grisly murder scene that it seemed as if "much of his life had been spent rolling over bodies." When Connelly later moved to the Los Angeles Times,
he covered a murder on Woodrow Wilson Drive in the Hollywood Hills, a place where someone could view the "city he helped protect" from his back deck. Whatever the assignment, Connelly tucked away details
that he would later use when writing The Black Echo, his first novel featuring Los Angeles homicide detective Harry Bosch, a tunnel rat in Vietnam with a Hollywood Hills house overlooking the city. In Crime
Beat, Connelly reprints some of his most memorable newspaper stories and tells how all his reporting experiences "went into the creative blender and were eventually poured out as something new in my
fiction." He tells how on his first day in Los Angeles that day's newspaper featured a bank heist in which the thieves had used the city' stormwater tunnel system to get beneath the bank, giving Connelly the
plot for Bosch to probe in The Black Echo. Connelly got the idea for another Bosch novel, Trunk Music, from a story he covered involving the discovery of a man's body in the trunk of a Rolls-Royce. If
only Connelly had written more about the creative process. Crime Beat is devoted primarily to reprints of Connelly's best newspaper stories. The trouble with reading successive newspaper stories about a crime is that, taken collectively, they produce a sense of deja vu as each story must contain the same basic facts. Fortunately, whether writing about a Los Angeles woman's bid to clear her name in the slaying of her husband or tracking a serial killer's cross-country killing spree, Connelly's writing nearly two decades ago was as vivid, enthralling and detailed as any of his novels. He was a master of writing that all-important opening paragraph (referred to in newsrooms as a lede). "Billy Schroeder is 24 years old. But he looks, at best, like 24 going on 40. Put him up next to his boyish mug shot of just a few years ago and the boy is long gone," is the lede of Connelly's June 7, 1987, story for the South
Florida Sun-Sentinel about a burglar with a lengthy police record. And setting up testimony in a civil-rights case involving police brutality in Los Angeles, Connelly captured the moment with: "As Mayor Tom Bradley sat in the witness chair, a thin smile played on his face. He was facing an uneasy situation that he and the city may have to get used to." One thing Crime
Beat makes clear: Connelly both past and present has always delivered a great read. So for those who have spent dozens of pleasurable hours lost in Connelly's distinctive, best-selling novels, this is a chance to say thanks for the years he spent honing his craft as a police beat reporter in Daytona Beach, Fort Lauderdale and Los Angeles.
— Ann Hellmuth, Orlando Sentinel
It all comes down to the eyeglasses. In the introduction to "Crime Beat," a collection of the crime reporting he did for papers in South Florida and Los Angeles, the mystery novelist Michael Connelly pins
down the moment that, he says, taught him a crucial lesson in observing people. In the course of a week spent with homicide detectives, Connelly noticed one of them, usually at a crime scene, taking off his glasses
and hooking the earpiece in his mouth. "These were solemn moments," he writes. "He was observing the victim as a detective but there seemed to be something else going on as well. A sort of communion,
or secret promise. It was not something he would talk to me about when I asked."
Shortly after that, Connelly notices a deep groove in the earpiece. "I knew," he writes, "that when he hooked his glasses in his mouth, his teeth clenched so tightly on them that they cut into the hard plastic of the earpiece. It said something about the man, about the job, about the world." Connelly concludes, "It said all that needed to be said about his dedication, motivation and relationship to his job." Well, yes and no. Here is the detail as it appeared in Connelly's South Florida Sun-Sentinel article "The Call" on Oct. 25, 1987: "George Hurt is sitting at his desk, shaking his head. He has the reading glasses he usually wears while doing paperwork off and the tip of one of the earpieces clenched in his teeth. The plastic tip is grooved from being clenched there often. It is that kind of job." Minus the context Connelly provides in his introduction, particularly his apt and telling choice of the word "communion," with all the spiritual symbolism it implies, to describe a homicide detective's feelings of obligation to murder victims, we could be reading a detail of an overworked cop who hates to do paperwork, or has taken to chewing his glasses to kick a nicotine habit. In fairness to Connelly, newspaper reporters don't often get the chance to branch out as storytellers. So he may have had to make do with simply noting the grooved earpiece. Or he may have thought it was overselling the point to elaborate. Whatever happened, the longer pieces in "Crime Beat," and the sections containing several articles on the developments in one particular case, make it easy to see why Connelly wanted to move on to the full-scale storytelling of his novels featuring the Los Angeles Police Department detective Harry Bosch, and of stand-alones like "The Poet" and "Blood Work." "Crime Beat" is an uneasy hybrid. The writing is both expansive and constricted. When Connelly attempts to move beyond meat and potatoes reporting, you get the impression of a reporter trying to squeeze reality into the confines of hard-boiled fiction. Take the following passage, about a suspected mobster: "Little Nicky was driving his white Rolls-Royce on Commercial Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale, heading for some dinner, when he saw the blue light in the rearview mirror." Or this one, from a Los Angeles Times article: "The hard set of his eyes betrayed nothing. No fear. No concern. The camera clicked, and the mug shot was taken. For Comtois, it was simply part of life." Or this, about Fort Lauderdale cops: "George Hurt has gone home early. His sinuses are acting up and the last few days have been slow. He figures he can take the break. He is sitting on the couch and has the afternoon paper in his hands when he gets The Call." The initial caps in those last two words are the written equivalent of a sudden blast in the midst of a Miklos Rozsa score, a bit of noir melodrama, and it sticks out. And the prose in "Crime Beat" is full of those moments, the tough-guy writing that's part Hemingway stoic and part wiseacre snappy. "Crime Beat" isn't all like that. When Connelly tamps down his slumming scribe impulses, his reporting is good, clean, straightforward. What's best here are the dispatches in which he follows a case over a couple of months. Taken together, the installments give you the whole story. Because each separate entry feels as if it was written on deadline, adhering to the reporter's necessity to get down the essentials briefly and accurately, there's no room for mannerisms. Connelly is particularly good in a section titled "Death Squad," about a case involving a Los Angeles Police Department squad that surreptitiously followed people suspected of criminal activity and allowed crimes to take place. The reasoning was that the cops would then have a better chance of convicting them once they were arrested. In the case Connelly writes about, it allowed the cops to act as executioners right after the crime. This is exactly the sort of subject that calls for hardheadedness, and Connelly supplies it, not in his prose but in his determination not to take the word of authority simply because it comes from authority. The articles that make up "Death Squad" suggest there is a place for the hard-boiled influence in reporting. Not by aping the prose of Chandler and his progeny, but by following the motto of a less glamorous icon, Jack Webb's Joe Friday: Just the facts.
— Charles Taylor, New York Times
Before Connelly became a best selling author, he worked covering the crime beat with the South Florida Sun Sentinel and the Los Angles Times. His interest in detective work began at sixteen when coming
home one night from his dishwashing job he witnessed a running man stop to stash a gun into a hedge. Following his father's advice, Connelly reported what he saw to the police who subsequently didn't believe him
later when he said the man was not part of a line-up, but no matter. From then on he was hooked, reading all the true crime stories he could find before deciding to become a writer, eventually being allowed a week
of unfettered access to an L.A. homicide squad where he witnessed all facets of crime investigation. This is a collection of reprints from the aforementioned newspapers, an array of crime stories as told by the
victims, their families, the media and the detectives involved with the cases. Connelly manages to convey the shock, horror and despair of the people involved while avoiding the sensationalism so prevalent in
journalism today. Many of the stories he reported on became the backbone for later novels. Perhaps one of the most engrossing stories presented details the activities of serial killer Christopher Wilder who topped
the 1984 most wanted list. Posing as a fashion photographer complete with stolen business cards, phony ID's and a camera Wilder proceeded to lure young women to a grizzly end. When they found out what their son had
been doing, Wilder's family members were stunned, broken up and went into seclusion while the mother of one of Wilder's missing victims keeps her daughter's room untouched and cries when she thinks about the
canceled wedding plans. Connelly covers it all with an adroit touch that keeps sticks to the grim facts while avoiding melodrama. Fans of crime fiction will appreciate this look at the often stranger then fiction
reality of the homicide beat as well as gain an insight to the roots of inspiration for some of the top selling books of the genre. Some of the stories leave the reader wondering what happened to our criminal
justice system while others make one ponder just what the perpetrators were thinking when they advertised discreet services for sale. With close attention to the humanizing details, these are stories that will stay
with you.
— Sandy Amazeen, MonstersandCritics.com
"Crime Beat" by best-selling novelist Michael Connelly, is subtitled "A Decade of Covering Cops and Killers." It's a fascinating collection of his articles that appeared in newspapers in the late
1980s and early 1990s about crimes in California and Florida. Connelly, author of many excellent, gripping crime novels starring detective Harry Bosch, notes in his introduction that "all experiences went into
the creative blender and were eventually poured out as something new in my fiction."
His journalistic style delivers sparse prose as he reports on cases involving murders, serial killers, unsolved crimes and much more. The cases are presented in order of interest, not necessarily chronologically or geographically; there's a bit of expected repetition as news stories are followed through to their gritty and sometimes grisly conclusion.
— Ray Walsh, Lansing State Journal
Most crime novelists with any staying power (that means sales) have spent more than a night shift or two in the grungy milieu of a homicide squadroom. Where else in real time can a writer witness the aftermath of
such dismal examples of human behavior such as shootings, strangulations, stabbings, bludgeoning, suicides, decap-- , well, you get the picture. So the writer buddies up to the hard-boiled veterans of violence who
must dig deep into the well of darkness and nurse their Styrofoam cups of cold mud and their annoying hard-boiled Joe Friday attitude. Nights belong to crooks, cops and crime writers and, come to think of it, it's
probably in your favor if you have as little to do with them as possible. One of the latter bunch is Michael Connelly, creator of the Harry Bosch series of novels that include The Narrows and The Closers,
along with more than a dozen other award-winning works of fiction. Connelly's new book, Crime Beat, is a nonfiction collection of the stories behind the stories. These 22 brief news pieces, written over a
period of a decade beginning in the late 1980s were produced when the author was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Much is made of Connelly's journalistic
credentials, not only by the writer himself in the preface but also redundantly in the eight-page afterword "The Novelist As Reporter," by Michael Carlson. "Michael Connelly is a reporter. A good one.
Not in the tabloid sense of someone who, like a pulp fiction writer, does whatever it takes to twist the elements of a story into a recognizable template that doesn't stretch his audience's emotions beyond the
certainties in which tabloids deal." OK, we get it already. Carlson's own credentials? "He has written about Michael Connelly for the Spectator, Daily Telegraph, Financial Times . . . " Connelly, who grew up reading Raymond Chandler and Joseph Wambaugh, uses his own over-the-top metaphor when he writes that the murders he covered all "went into the creative blender and were eventually poured out as something new in my fiction." Behind the yellow tape, the reporter noticed subtleties for his future books: the way a detective would chew on the earpiece of his glasses and how even the gruffest cop could be brought to tears when kids are murdered. Connelly would even field disturbing phone calls from the jailed serial killer Jonathan Lundh, a man the author describes as "smart, articulate and manipulative . . . I remember hanging up the phone each time and feeling lucky that we were separated not only by the phone line but by the concrete and steel of jail as well. No person I have ever spoken to in my life was creepier than Jonathan Lundh." The seeds of Connelly's later fiction style are scattered throughout Crime Beat.
"Billy Schroeder is 24 years old. But he looks, at his best, like 24 going on 40 . . . Sometimes the eyes, set in a ruddy face, are glassy and have a thousand-yard stare in a six-by-six room." The book
divides into three sections, on cops, killers and cases. The cops' chapters examine the practices of Florida's Metropolitan Organized Crime Intelligence Unit, or the Mob Squad, and the controversial Los Angeles
Police Department's Special Investigations Section (SIS), or what many critics called "assassins with badges." The SIS was eventually sued in 1992 by the families of three men who were killed by the police
unit in the act of fleeing a McDonald's they had just robbed. This occurred in the wake of the Rodney King beating and when the LAPD was under national scrutiny. The killers Connelly covered are the usual lowlifes:
wise guys, con men, greedy relatives, and charming sickos, Aside from rushing out to order the latest high-tech security system and embracing the Second Amendment, the over-all effect of reading page after page of
these brutal crimes is to cancel plans to buy a condo in Los Angeles or south Florida. Serial murderer Christopher Bernard Wilder began his chilling crime spree in the Sunshine State. "In Miami, FBI
agents Friday released a 1981 video recording of a well-groomed and quiet-spoken Wilder, sitting relaxed before a camera and discussing what he called his goals, his need to meet more women and his description of
who the right person for him would be." Novelistic techniques certainly would have improved Crime Beat. Reality, at least as recounted in formulaic newspaper style, does not make for compelling reading.
The reporting is dutiful but neither original or insightful. Sentences often begin with that annoying phrase, "According to ... " Equally uninspiring is reading the same boilerplate paragraph two or three
times in the same chapter as Connelly updates the status of cases over time. Then there is the question of publishing a book of news stories that are almost a quarter of a century old. Age works better on wine and
cheese. A book of musty murders has all the appeal of wandering the aisles of Menard's in search of an obsolete threaded screw and suddenly hearing the Beatles "The Long and Winding Road" over the
speakers. Moments like those can stop you cold as you ponder the Big Question about life: When do I get to the good parts? Crime Beat is like that.
— Stephen J. Lyons, Chicago Sun-Times
Michael Connelly, whose early crime reporting is collected in "Crime Beat," didn't start out to be either a reporter or a novelist. His father and grandfather built houses, and when Connelly entered college
in Florida, his major was building construction sciences. He hated it. One night, he happened upon a showing of Robert Altman's quirky 1973 film version of Raymond Chandler's "The Long Goodbye." He loved
it, and he proceeded to read all of Chandler's novels and to change his major to journalism. From then on, he intended to use crime reporting to prepare himself to write novels in the Chandler mode, and he followed
his plan brilliantly. After starting out with newspapers in Florida, he wound up as a police reporter for the Los Angeles Times, where he began writing his great Harry Bosch series. Every generation produces
reporters whose talent is essentially novelistic and for whom journalism is a way station on the road to fiction. Hemingway was the classic example of the 20th century, but there are many others -- Tom Wolfe was
one, and so is Connelly. For instance, here's the lead of the first crime story reprinted in the book, from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in 1987: "It has been four days since anybody has heard from or seen Walter Moody, and people are thinking that something is wrong." It's not the typical who-what-when-where-why-and- how formula of police reporting. Connelly was always looking for mood, drama, eccentricity, the telling detail. One of the fascinations of this collection is spotting the police-beat details -- the fellow with teardrops tattooed below his eyes, the detective who chewed the earpiece of his glasses -- that later punctuate the Bosch novels. This is not a book for everyone. It's probably best seen as a courtesy paid to Connelly by his publisher after the huge success of last year's "The Lincoln Lawyer." But it will be of interest to close students of his fiction, to some journalists and to anyone interested in how the sow's ear of fact becomes the silk purse of fiction. "Nothing was lost," Connelly says in his introduction. "All experiences went into the creative blender and were eventually poured out as something new in my fiction." Connelly shows us the before-and-after. What he can't do is explain the magic that underlies the process. That's the mystery, the quicksilver called talent, the sorcery that makes readers suspend disbelief.
— Patrick Anderson, Washington Post
Michael Connelly is a terrific author of crime novels. He also was a terrific crime reporter, as demonstrated in his new book, "Crime Beat." The book is a compilation of several stories
Connelly covered while a reporter for the South Florida Sun Sentinel and the Los Angeles Times. The stories are engrossing, and Connelly's skills as a reporter mirror his skills as a novelist. His
characters are carefully drawn, his eye for detail is sharp, and the crimes he explores -- a fugitive child-killer, a group of bungling assassins, a profile of a burglar -- are fascinating. Fans of Connelly's Harry
Bosch novels shouldn't hesitate to pick up "Crime Beat." The stories are real, but in Connelly's hands, that just makes them more chilling.
— John Keenan, Omaha World-Herald
If you're a fan of the Quarrymen, John Lennon's 1950s skiffle group; Donna Karan's design school projects; or seconds from the Godiva chocolate factory, your book has arrived. "Crime Beat" is a collection of
Michael Connelly's articles for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and Los Angeles Times. Pithy and insightful, the tales are also dusty, dating from 1984 to 1992. Journalism being literature in a hurry, the prose is
often repetitious and cautious. Connelly's crime fiction being top-notch literature, leafing through his nonfiction clippings is an interesting but unsatisfying exercise. In other words, "Crime Beat" is
essential reading only for fans who must devour the entire Connelly canon. That's a huge group, perhaps large enough to push this book onto the bestseller lists. Connelly is one of our great crime novelists,
whose exquisitely tailored fiction combines Brooks Brothers sophistication with Reyn Spooner breeziness. Someday, literary DNA tests may prove that he's Raymond Chandler's bastard son. So it's no surprise that his
first nonfiction volume offers some pleasures. Unfortunately, these pleasures are first cousins to the shortcomings: The stories show a wonderful writer learning his craft, conducting reconnaissance missions into
territory that he would later conquer. A 1989 feature story about the unsolved murder of an ambitious sports promoter and reckless gambler, Vic Weiss, shares a title and a corpse-infested Rolls-Royce with Connelly's
1997 mystery "Trunk Music." A 1987 profile of Fort Lauderdale's homicide squad illustrates the future novelist's eye for detail and empathy for the men and women assigned to clean up society's ugliest and most
dangerous messes. "George Hurt is sitting at his desk, shaking his head," Connelly wrote about the sergeant who led the squad. "He has the reading glasses he usually wears while doing paperwork off and the tip of
one of the earpieces clenched in his teeth. The plastic tip is grooved from being clenched there often. It is that kind of job." Those ravaged spectacles, Connelly claims, prompted an epiphany. "My life as a writer
had to be about the pursuit of the telling detail," he wrote in "Crime Beat's" introduction. "If I was going to be successful, I had to find Sergeant Hurt's glasses over and over again in my stories."
To harvest those details, the reporter spent weeks with detectives, absorbing their attitudes, language and station-house rivalries. Cops grew to trust him, and were unusually frank in discussing the triumphs they wear as badges and the failures they carry as scars. "It's unusual," Connelly quoted a Florida detective referring to a murder victim who remained unidentified, even after a man was convicted of the crime. "In a whodunit type of murder, you first try to identify the dead man and go from there. But we never got anywhere with the identification. All we have is a dead man who has nothing extraordinary about his appearance. He could fit the description of thousands of men." For a novelist, this is gold. If this nameless dead man sprawled at the feet of Connelly's fictional LAPD detective Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch, frustration would lead to clues, clues to suspects, suspects to a solution. By book's end, readers would know. While reporting on this real-life 1986 mystery, though, Connelly had no choice but to leave the readers as puzzled as the cops. "My guess is he was from out of state," the detective concluded. "He could have been reported missing in some other jurisdiction and we might never know it." Journalism's demands also mean that some of these stories are rich with cliches. Driven cops, free-spending but clueless mobsters, a killer who is soft-spoken and popular with the neighbors – they're all here. So are a few yarns in which Los Angeles' finest bend or violate a law or two. Connelly covered those cases from start to finish, and reading those stories back to back is a mixed blessing. They arrive at satisfactory resolutions, but also the realization that even the best reporter can choke his stories with graceless our-story-so-far summaries. The one-off feature stories are better. Better? Scratch that. Several are astonishing. "It would have been comical if it hadn't been so deadly, if lives hadn't been mercilessly ended or, at the very least, haunted by terror. They were called the gang that couldn't shoot straight, yet they were a gang that had so many shots, they were bound to hit their targets sometimes, and people were bound to die." What reader could resist that lead? What newspaper editor, hooked by the offhand brilliance and drive of "The Mail Order Murders," wouldn't hire this guy? But he's no longer in the market. He's moved on to more nuanced and precisely shaped tales. "Crime Beat" is a decent read but a great preview of coming attractions. Watching Connelly operating within daily journalism's confines, you can't wait to see him turned loose in the wide open spaces of fiction.
— Peter Rowe, San Diego Union-Tribune
Michael Connelly has emerged as both a popular and accomplished mystery novelist over the past several years. His primary character Harry Bosch has been the subject of many best sellers, and Connelly's
also won the Edgar award, the top prize in crime and mystery writing. But before he turned to fiction, Connelly was a top writer on the real crime beat in Los Angeles, covering detectives, victims, cases and
convicts. His newest book Crime Beat — A Decade of Covering Cops and Killers
(Little, Brown) shows readers how Connelly developed his knack for creating colorful characters and thought-provoking cases, once more proving that truth is always more intriguing and interesting than fiction. The book is divided into three sections. The opening portion spotlights detectives Connelly observed during investigations and on the job. Unlike the television types who quickly outwit and outmaneuver suspects, his stories revealed the difficulty and time expended in running down leads, questioning multiple figures and uncovering necessary evidence. These profiles include the thorny 1991 case of Mary Kellel-Sophiea, whose husband was found stabbed to death in his bed. Police initially felt that she was guilty, but then prosecutors dropped the case against her and Kellel-Sophiea in turn accused the police of conspiring to frame her. Connelly follows the story right through the trial, with his account equally balanced between Kellel-Sophiea's claims, the testimony of the detectives and the statements of others interviewed in the case. Ultimately, the police were cleared of conspiracy charges. The second part focuses on unusual, sometimes frightening criminals Connelly covered from beginning to end. These range from a serial killer who preyed on models and led detectives on a cross-country chase to a man who eluded capture, changed his identity and was only caught after an elaborate hoax collapsed in the strangest fashion. There's even one story about a group of killers who took out ads in publications to boast about their prowess and success rate. The last section covers specific cases, among them one involving the 1985 slaying of a successful businesswoman, a descendant of a pioneer family. Another covered a quadruple slaying at an upscale home that was doubling as a drug hangout, while another profiled Billy "The Burglar" Schroeder, a 24-year-old who broke into 350 homes in a year and stole more than $2 million of property. Despite all Schroeder's exploits, when he was caught, he had blown every dollar on crack. Through his time studying behavior and analyzing events in this world, Connelly acquired the knowledge that he uses in his current novels on Harry Bosch or his stories about the flamboyant serial killer known as the Poet. Still, while those are consistently entertaining and enjoyable, the people, places and events in
Crime Beat prove even more compelling.
— Ron Wynn, Nashville City Paper
When Michael Connelly was 16 years old, he spent an evening in a police station being questioned as a witness to a robbery. The experience led him to the realization that he wanted to write about cops. More
specifically, he wanted to write about detectives. And that's exactly what he's done. Before becoming a wildly popular crime novelist, Connelly actually earned his literary sea legs as a crime reporter for papers in
Southern Florida and California. He covered his beat and forged relationships with police detectives and later drew on these experiences and relationships for inspiration in his fiction franchise. CRIME BEAT begins
with an introduction by the author, detailing his transformation from a teenage observer to award-winning reporter. He recalls while paying the bills with reporting, he was beginning to dabble with fiction during
his off time. The remainder of the book is a compilation of some of the articles Connelly wrote as a journalist. True crime fans expecting blood, guts and gore should look elsewhere. Remember, these pieces were
written for family-friendly periodicals. Don't assume that the articles aren't compelling, though. One of the best involves the murder of a Japanese man by his son, who was never seriously considered a suspect due
to the rarity of patricide in the Japanese culture. The son enlisted the help of a buddy and after stabbing dear old Dad to death, the pair buried the corpse in the desert. The buddy stayed quiet until two months
later when he learned that the son dug up the body and cut a finger off of it so that a gold ring he wanted could be recovered. The buddy was granted immunity for spinning off the young Japanese be-ringed murderer.
Clearly, the crimes were items of local interest only and never made national headlines (not to my recollection, anyway). But Connelly seemed to understand that the victims of the crimes he wrote about deserved his
best. Many of the stories read more like short stories than the typical "just the facts, ma'am" crime reports. The articles are proof positive that news reports can be readable while still adhering to the basic
tenets taught in any Journalism 101 class. Instead of a straight compilation, I would have loved to have had more insight into the behind-the-scenes aspects of newspaper journalism. Were competing journalists
back-stabbers? Were his editors hard-nosed pricks? Did he ever tap any copywriter tail? My only other criticism is that reading a series of back-to-back articles about the same incident grew redundant at times. But
other than that, Connelly proves he knows his stuff.
— Ken Davis, Bookgasm.com
"Connelly is not only a great novelist; CRIME
BEAT proves that he is also a great reporter...It is the work of the novelist to explore those complexities and the gray areas that exist inside the human heart.
Michael Connelly will be doing this for years to come, much to the delight of mystery fans. Read CRIME BEAT and see a young writer laying the foundation for his lifework."
— BookReporter.com
"There is no doubt Michael Connelly can write a good mystery but as this collection of newspaper clippings proves, he is or was also very good at covering a real mystery."
— TheMysterySite.com
"If you are a Michael Connelly fan, this is a must read book. These are true stories but you will almost feel like you are reading a fiction mystery book. It's not very often the reader gets to go
along for an exciting ride with the homicide detectives. Michael shows us once again that he can write any kind of book and make it thrilling for the reader. Be sure to add this one to your reading list!"
— Bestsellersworld.com
"Connelly gives...insight into what drove him to be a fiction writer."
— EdgeBoston
"If you are interested in the solving of unusual cases, this is the book for you. Or possibly you're interested in writing mysteries yourself - you can't go wrong with Crime Beat as one of your textbooks."
— Bookloons
"It is an interesting approach and gives the reader an insight not only into the subject—crime and murder and police procedures—but also into the developing author's
craft."
— The Mystery Morgue
"A stylish collection— and one that should
not be missed by the fans of Michael Connelly. Truly a great, great read."
— NewMysteryReader.com
|
