Michael Connelly

Question: It has been quite a few years since reporter Jack McEvoy was featured in The Poet. What made you decide to write about him again?
Michael Connelly: Being a former newspaper reporter, I’ve watched in recent years as the newspaper economy has crumbled and newspapers have tried to figure out ways to deal with advertising and readers shifting to the Internet. Along the way, many people I worked with have lost their jobs to buyouts or layoffs. I am also a big fan of the television show The Wire. In its last season, the show explored in a secondary plot what was happening to the newspaper business. Watching that show made me want to take a shot at a story that would be a thriller first and a torch song for the newspaper business second.

Q: In The Scarecrow, Jack is in his last days of working for the Los Angeles Times, the newspaper you used to work for as a reporter. Sadly, the Rocky Mountain News, Jack’s newspaper in The Poet, has shut down production forever. How did that affect the writing of this book?
MC: As with any sort of downward spiral, the closer you get to the end, the tighter the circles become. In the writing process and thereafter, I kept hearing of things that were happening and had to try to get them into the story. The Times is meant to represent the entire business — all newspapers. So I might hear of something happening at one paper and I would incorporate it into my story of the Times. But after the book was finished, the spiral continued. The day after I turned in the manuscript, the Times’s parent company filed for bankruptcy. This necessitated several changes in the manuscript. Three days after the book was supposedly locked and ready to be printed, the Rocky Mountain News closed. This meant we had to unlock the book and make changes. Since then, the Times has announced plans to close more foreign bureaus this summer. Sadly, it goes on and on. In many ways, I wish the book weren’t so timely, because what is making it timely is all of this bad news for newspapers.

Q: What is your biggest fear about the decline of newspapers and daily print journalism?
MC: I understand and even accept the shift to online news. What I worry about is the reliability of the news and the loss of vigilance. Anybody can start a web site, write a blog or hold themselves out as a journalist. But the newspaper is an institution (the Rocky Mountain News was 150 years old) with set standards and requirements of journalists. It is also the central point of community news. It usually sets the stage for what is important and what is news. A lot of that will be lost. There will be no central place for news. There will be dozens of web sites that people will probably pick according to their political persuasion. Ultimately, it will be the public that loses here. A friend of mine who lost her job in the business says that you can bet on government corruption becoming the growth industry because there will be no watchdogs like there are at newspapers. The thing I wonder is whether a bunch of news web sites and bloggers could ever bring down a corrupt president the way Nixon was felled by the Washington Post and other papers. At the moment, I doubt it.

Q: Did you make up the name the “Velvet Coffin” (“a place to work so pleasurable that you would easily slip in and stay till you died”) to describe the Los Angeles Times, or was it really called this back when you were a reporter there?
MC: That was its nickname when I went to work there in 1988. I remember people in the business telling me that I had made it to the velvet coffin. That it would be my last stop because it didn’t get any better than working for the L.A. Times. I remember if they sent you somewhere on a story, they flew you first class. In the early ’90s its circulation grew to over 1.2 million and it was the largest daily newspaper in the country. It’s got less than two-thirds of that circulation now, and it is still declining.

Q: In The Scarecrow, you bring FBI agent Rachel Walling and journalist Jack McEvoy back together for the first time since The Poet. In recent years we’ve seen Rachel working closely with LAPD detective Harry Bosch and falling in and out of a romantic relationship with him. Do you think Jack is a better match for Rachel than Harry is?
MC: I think the thing about my books is that nobody matches up well, and in the friction of these relationships is some of the drama I need for each story. For the moment, at least, Jack fits better with Rachel because he needs her more than Harry does. Harry has sort of built himself to need no one on any level. Jack is not that way, and I think that would make him more attractive to Rachel. The question is who and what does Rachel need. I am not sure yet because I need to explore this character more. I hope I get the chance.

Q: I think your killer, The Scarecrow, is by far the creepiest one you have ever written. What elements do you think you need to create a truly terrifying fictional killer?
MC: Prior to this, I’ve written from the killer’s point of view only two other times. One of those times was with The Poet. Since that was a Jack McEvoy/Rachel Walling story, I decided to do it again here. The truth is, the villains are easiest to create because there are no bounds. The creepier your imagination can go, the better. I think the thing to remember is that these sorts of people need to square their crimes with themselves. So they have built-in mechanisms that allow them to live with themselves and that give them plausible explanations for why they are the way they are. When they become true believers in the cancer that affects their character, they are really frightening.

Q: Care to explain how the Scarecrow, Wesley Carver, got his name?
MC: He operates a data storage center. This is a hermetically sealed environment where there are rows and rows of servers for storing digital information. Businesses anywhere in the world can instantly back up their vital records to centers like these. These are often called farms by people in the business because of the rows and rows of servers set up like crops, and because most often they are located outside urban areas — in traditional farming areas — for security reasons. As the man charged with keeping intruders off the crops, so to speak, Carver is like a scarecrow watching over the farm.

Q: Identity theft, cyberstalking, computer hacking, and the sharing of sexual perversities are just some of the ways the Internet is used by predators in The Scarecrow. It is not the first time you have used the Internet to showcase crime. Why does it make for such a good playground for evil?
MC: I think I write about the Internet so often because it is such a force of positive change in my lifetime. But with the good comes the bad. For every invention that positively changes the world, there will be those who turn it toward the dark side. That is the grist of fiction as well as social reflection. I find it fascinating, if not scary as hell, that the Internet is the great meeting place in our time for all things. This is including the bad. People with similar perversities and aberrant tastes find one another on the Internet every day. It breeds acceptance. To me, the scariest lines in the whole book are what Rachel says about this to Jack: “Meeting people with shared beliefs helps justify those beliefs. It emboldens. Sometimes it’s a call to action.”

“This magnificent effort is a reminder of why Connelly is one of today’s top crime authors.”
— Publishers Weekly, * Starred Review

Connelly has done it again.”.
— Jeff Ayers, Library Journal, * Starred Review

”Even confirmed Harry Bosch fans will have to admit that this Harry-less novel is one of Connelly’s very best.”
— Bill Ott, Booklist, * Starred Review

“Connelly, who’s nothing if not professional, keeps the twists coming…”
— Kirkus Reviews

“Michael Connelly is not only a treasure for crime fiction fans, he’s a treasure for anyone who loves to read. And at the time I write this, he is working on another book for October! This is a can’t miss book.”
— Jon Jordan, Crimespree Magazine

“I was captivated from start to finish. There is no debate that Michael Connelly is a masterful author that continues to create vivid characters that struggle with their own personal battles. I highly recommend that you pick up a copy of The Scarecrow on May 26, 2009.”
— Bookologists.com, Rating 10 out of 10

“Interesting protagonist, good plot and a lot of suspense.”
— David Montgomery, Crime Fiction Dossier

“All that we’ve come to expect in Michael’s work is here in abundance— crystal clear prose, brilliant plotting, good detection, and fast pacing.”
— George Easter, Deadly Pleasures Magazine

“Definitely read The Scarecrow for the thrills, but reread it for the warning the book delivers.”
— Betty Webb, Mystery Scene Magazine

“if crime is your bag look no further than Connelly’s The Scarecrow … a former police reporter, Connelly knows his stuff.”
— Giles Foden, Conde Nast Traveler

“The Scarecrow shows that there’s very little in the genre that’s beyond his talents.”
— Michael Carlson, Crime Time

“Michael Connelly…has the nerve and timing of a whole SWAT team…”
— Marilyn Stasio, New York Times

“The Scarecrow is typical of Connelly’s writing in that he makes timely, pertinent points about American society within a rousingly good crime yarn.”
— Nancy Gilson, The Columbus Dispatch

“Connelly is best known for his Harry Bosch series, but this thriller is right up there.”
— The Sacramento Bee

“Michael Connelly is that rare writer who can operate on different levels: both as the fluid storyteller spinning engrossing yarns and as the wry commentator on our world and its institutions. Among those institutions is the big city newspaper, whose unique ambiance any journalist, new or old, will recognize delightfully.”
— Robert Wade, San Diego Union Tribune

“Connelly depicts the decline of a newsroom with honesty and compassion, and the fact that the Scarecrow is a hacker running a digital data farm is sadly symbolic, given that digital media is killing the print press.”
—  Carole E. Barrowman, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

“Like all of Connelly’s work, the story moves quickly. There’s a deep pleasure in reading about the methodical work of a craftsman, be he a journalist such as McEvoy or a cop such as Bosch. No matter what they’re doing or where they are — Los Angeles or Chicago or somewhere else — people who take pride in their work have a touch of nobility about them.”
— Julia Keller, Chicago Tribune

“The Scarecrow is swift and engrossing…”
— Charles Taylor, Boston Phoenix

“The Scarecrow certainly reads like a movie — but it’s one that unfolds not just in your mind’s eye but primarily in your mind. A–”
— Thom Geier, Entertainment Weekly

“The Scarecrow, a return to form for Mr. Connelly and his sharpest book since The Lincoln Lawyer,…”
— Janet Maslin, New York Times

“Jack McEvoy is a fascinating character, the classic world-weary cynic with a cast-iron conscience, and it is to be hoped it won’t be another decade before he surfaces again.”
— Declan Burke, Irish Times

“It is rip-roaring crime fiction that hits the ground running and doesn’t let up until the finale. Connelly is one of the most consistent of today’s crime fiction writers. The Scarecrow ranks among Connelly’s best work.”
— Oline H. Cogdill, Sun Sentinel

“The Scarecrow is Connelly in top form. And reading it will make it impossible for you to ever again think that when you do something online, no one’s watching.”
— Colette Bancroft, St. Petersburgh Times

“Connelly’s thriller is an addictive read that, once it grabs you in those first few pages, won’t let go of you.”
— Chuck Leddy, Boston Globe

“Connelly amps up the suspense with one of his best novels to date.”
— JC Patterson, Madison County Herald

“Connelly has already proved, with his “Lincoln Lawyer” courtroom thrillers, that there is life after his hugely successful Harry Bosch LAPD cop series. With The Scarecrow he finds yet another kind of crime fiction in which to excel.”
— The Times (London)

“The greatest living American crime writer… Once again, Connelly is utterly gripping.”
— Henry Sutton, The Mirror (London)

“As with most Connelly novels, this is an energetic page-turner. His fans — of which I am one — will count this as among his best books, as was The Poet, his best-selling title.”
— Dwight Silverman, Houston Chronicle

“A longtime reporter, Connelly brings real-life depth and texture to his work…”
— Mary Ann Gwinn, Seattle Times

“With its ingenious story line and the twisted brilliance of the creeps involved, “The Scarecrow” holds its own with its predecessor, which was a breakthrough novel for Connelly.”
— Maureen Corrigan, Washington Post

“Any way you read it, The Scarecrow is crime fiction at its best.”
— Connie Ogle, Miami Herald

“The Scarecrow is worthwhile because it’s a good, page-turning story. But it also contains lots of smart asides, such as this one: “A crime reporter always wants a good murder to write about. The reporter’s good luck is somebody else’s bad luck.””
— John J. Miller, National Review

“So read this thriller for the thrills, the computerized crime spree. Or read it for the sad reality of what’s happening to almost all newspapers. Or read it to take in the work of a writer who can tell a gripping story through characters who live and breathe. “The Scarecrow” is fine reading. You won’t miss Harry Bosch.”
— Harry Levins, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“The novels and short stories we conveniently pigeonhole as “genre fiction” often are the tripwires of our literature’s social consciousness.It’s unsurprising, therefore, that the first fictional work to take the newspaper industry’s agonizing decline as its backdrop is a mystery, nor that its author, Michael Connelly, is a onetime crime reporter who spent the last years of his print career at the Los Angeles Times. He’s one of the masters of contemporary crime fiction with a Stakhanovite work ethic that must have delighted his city room editors as much as it now does his legions of fans. “The Scarecrow” is his 20th novel and 21st book since 1993. It’s also his best work since “The Poet” 13 years ago and revives that bestselling novel’s main character, newspaper police reporter Jack McEvoy.”
— Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times

“Connelly is nothing short of amazing in THE SCARECROW, building the story somewhat slowly in the beginning before introducing explosive revelations, twists and turns, which increase in frequency and intensity.”
— Joe Hartlaub, BookReporter.com

“I found myself turning pages as quickly as I could, drawn in by a very tightly written plot, peopled with fully drawn characters.”
— Terry Matthews, Sulphur Springs-Telegram, an enthusiastic five stars

“Still, McEvoy, a complicated, unpredictable protagonist, carries the story. His alter ego, Michael Connelly, just adds the intricate plotting and perfect-pitch dialogue that keeps The Scarecrow scary. Together, they hook the reader early and never let up, delivering a fast read that meets Connelly’s high standards.”
— David W. Marston, Philadelphia Inquirer

“The Scarecrow is an especially timely read in this day of newspaper downsizing and identity theft.”
— David Money, Daytona Beach News-Journal

“Plot: Engrossing. Characters: Engaging. Pacing: Roller coaster. Three out of three, which makes “The Scarecrow” a perfect summer vacation read.”
— Lisa McLendon, Wichita Eagle

“Switching viewpoints between the killer and McEvoy in a high-stakes dance of smarts and ruthlessness, Connelly keeps the suspense at a high pitch, ratcheting up the pace with law-enforcement mistakes, rule breaking, ego clashes, nick-of-time saves and crackling electricity between McEvoy and Walling. But what adds real depth to this fast-paced read is the portrayal of the newsroom in all its old dinosaur warts, traditions, and gritty venerability. Connelly plumbs his journalistic background for more than atmosphere, however, exploring the meeting of internet and paper, and the ways they enhance one another. The ease and speed of internet research, for instance, combined with the structure and discipline of traditional journalism creates a powerful investigative machine, paradoxically undermined by its own economic mechanism. Stalking a killer, Connelly gives us a glimpse of a future without newspapers and it’s a scary sight. This is one of his best.”
— Lynn Harnett, Portsmouth Herald

“Less a whodunit than a whydunit, “The Scarecrow” offers a convincing ode to the strengths of newspaper journalism and the dangers of the medium that is strangling it.”
—  James Pressley, Bloomberg.com

“After reading this fast-paced adventure, you’ll want to pick up a morning paper and hide behind it as you ponder how much of your personal information is available online.”
— New Orleans Times-Picayune

“The Scarecrow is a dire warning about the dangers of electronic snooping and a reminder of what we will lose if newspapers continue to fail. And it is a page-turning thriller — cleverly plotted, fast-paced and crisply written. As Connelly puts it, he set out to write “a thriller first and a torch song for the newspaper business second.” The book works superbly on both levels, surpassing The Poet as his finest.
— Bruce DeSilva, Associated Press

“Definitely at the top of his game, Connelly wows his audience. His clever mind of sheer genius is revealed in unexpected plot twists that thrill, shock, and surprise.”
— J.Curran, TheMysterySite.com

The Scarecrow is in:
Notable Crime Books of 2009, New York Times
Amazon’s Top 100 Editors’ Picks of 2009
Amazon’s  Top 100 Customer Favorites of 2009
Amazon’s Customers’ Top 10 Books: Mystery & Thrillers
Publishers Weekly Top 100 Books of 2009
Bookmarks Magazine’s Best Books of 2009 in the “Crime” category
Library Journal’s Best Books of 2009
St. Louis Post-Dispatch Best of 2009
St. Louis Post-Dispatch 10 Best Thrillers of 2009
Best Mystery Novels of 2009, Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel
iTunes Top Sellers of 2009 (refers to the audiobook)
Audible’s Best of 2009 (refers to the audiobook)
Best Crime Books of 2009, JanuaryMagazine.com

CARVER

CARVER PACED IN the control room, watching over the front forty. The towers spread out in front of him in perfect neat rows. They hummed quietly and efficiently and even with all he knew Carver had to marvel at what science had wrought. So much in so little space. Not a stream but a swift and torrid river of data flowing by him everyday.

Growing in front of him in tall steel stalks. All he need do was reach in to look and to choose. It was like panning for gold.

But it was easier.

He checked the overhead temperature gauges. All was perfect in the server room. He lowered his eyes to the screens on the workstations in front of him. His three engineers worked in concert on the current project. An attempted breach thwarted by Carver’s skill and readiness. Now the reckoning.

The would-be intruder could not penetrate the walls of the farmhouse, but he had left his fingerprints all over it. Carver smiled as he watched his men retrieve the bread crumbs, tracing the IP address through the traffic nodes, a high speed chase back to the source. Soon Carver would know who his opponent was, what firm he was with, what he had been looking for and the advantage he hoped to gain. And Carver would take a retaliatory action that would leave the hapless contender crumpled and destroyed. Carver showed no mercy. Ever.

The mantrap alert buzzed from overhead.

“Screens,” Carver said.

The three young men at the workstations typed commands in union that hid their work from the visitors. The control room door opened and McGinnis stepped in with a man in a suit Carver had never seen before.

“This is our control room and through the windows there you see what we call the front forty,” McGinnis said. “All of our colocation services are centered here. This is primarily where your firm’s material would be held. We have forty towers in here holding close to a thousand dedicated servers. And, of course, there’s room for more. We’ll never run out of room.”

The man in the suit nodded thoughtfully.

“I’m not worried about room. Our concern is security.”

“Yes, this is why we stepped in here. I wanted you to meet Wesley Carver. Wesley wears a number of hats around here. He is our chief technology officer as well as our top threat engineer and the designer of the data center. He can tell you all you need to know about colocation security.”

Another dog and pony show. Carver shook the suit’s hand. He was introduced as David Wyeth of the St. Louis law firm, Mercer and Gissal. It sounded like crisp white shirts and tweed. Carver noticed that he had a barbecue stain on his tie. Whenever they came into town McGinnis took them to eat at Rosie’s Barbecue.

Carver gave Wyeth the show by rote, covering everything and saying everything the silk-stocking lawyer wanted to hear. Wyeth was on a barbecue and due diligence mission. He would go back to St. Louis and report on how impressed he had been. He would tell them that this was the way to go if the firm wanted to keep up with changing technologies and times.

And McGinnis would get another contract.

All the while he spoke, Carver was thinking about the intruder they had been chasing. Out there somewhere, not expecting the comeuppance that was speeding toward him. Carver and his young disciples would loot his personal bank accounts, take his identity and hide photos of men having sex with eight-year-old boys on his work computer. Then he would crash it with a replicating virus. When the intruder couldn’t fix it he would call in an expert. The photos would be found and the police would be called.

The intruder would no longer be a threat.

“Wesley?” McGinnis said.

Carver came out of the reverie. The suit had asked a question – Carver had already forgotten his name.

“Excuse me?”

“Mr. Wyeth asked if the colocation center had ever been breached.”

McGinnis was smiling, already knowing the answer.

“No, sir, we’ve never been breached. To be honest, there have been a few attempts. But they have failed, resulting in disastrous consequences for those who tried.”

The suit nodded somberly.

“We represent the cream of the crop of St. Louis,” he said. “The integrity of our files and our client list is paramount to all we do. That’s why I came here personally.”

That and the strip club McGinnis took you to, Carver thought but didn’t say. He smiled instead but there was no warmth in it. He was glad McGinnis had reminded him of the suit’s name.

“Don’t worry, Mr. Wyeth,” he said. “Your crops will be safe on this farm.”

Wyeth smiled back.

“That’s what I wanted to hear,” he said.

JACK

EVERY EYE IN the newsroom followed me as I left Kramer’s office and walked back to my pod. The long looks made it a long walk. The pink slips always came out on Fridays and they all knew I had just gotten the word. Except they didn’t call them pink slips anymore. Now it was an RIF form – as in, reduction in force.

They all felt the slightest tingle of relief that it hadn’t been them and the slightest tingle of anxiety because they still knew that no one was safe. Any one of them could be called in next.

I met no one’s stare as I passed beneath the Metro sign and headed back in to podland. I moved into my cubicle and slipped into my seat, dropping from sight like a soldier diving into a foxhole.

Immediately my phone buzzed. On the read out I saw that it was my friend Larry Bernard calling. He was only two cubicles away but knew if he had come to me in person it would have been a clear signal for others in the newsroom to crowd around me and ask the obvious. Reporters work best in packs like that.

I put on my headset and picked up the call.

“Hey, Jack,” he said.

“Hey, Larry,” I said.

“So?”

“So what?”

“What did Kramer want?”

He pronounced the assistant managing editor’s name as Crammer, which was the nickname bestowed on Richard Kramer years earlier when he was an assignment editor more concerned with the quantity rather than the quality of news he got his reporters to produce for the paper. Other variations of his full or partial name evolved over time as well.

“You know what he wanted. He gave me notice. I’m out of here.”

“Holy shit, you got pinked!”

“That’s right. But remember, we call it involuntary separation now.”

“Do you have to clear out right now? I’ll help you.”

“No, I’ve got two weeks. May twenty-second and I’m history.”

“Two weeks? Why two weeks?”

Most RIF victims had to clear out immediately. This edict was instated after one of the first recipients of a layoff notice was allowed to stay through the pay period. Each of his last days people saw him in the office carrying a tennis ball. Bouncing it, tossing it, squeezing it. They didn’t realize that each day it was a different ball. And each day he flushed a ball down the toilet in the men’s room. About a week after he was gone the pipes backed up with devastating consequences.

“They gave me two weeks if I agreed to train my replacement.”

Larry was silent for a moment as he considered the humiliation of having to train one’s own replacement. But to me two weeks’ pay was two weeks’ pay I wouldn’t get if I didn’t take the deal. And besides that, the two weeks would give me time to say proper goodbyes to those in the newsroom and on the beat who deserved them. I considered the alternative of being walked out the door by security with a cardboard box of personal belongings even more humiliating. I was sure they would watch me to make sure I wasn’t carrying tennis balls to work, but they didn’t have to worry. That wasn’t my style.

“So that’s it? That’s all he said? Two weeks and you’re out?”

“He shook my hand and said I was a handsome guy, that I should try TV.”

“Oh, man. We gotta get drunk tonight.”

“I am, that’s for sure.”

“Man, this ain’t right.”

“The world ain’t right, Larry.”

“Who’s your replacement? At least that’s somebody who knows they’re safe.”

“Angela Cook.”

“Figures. The cops are going to love her.”

Larry was a friend but I didn’t want to be talking about all of this with him right now. I needed to be thinking about my options. I straightened up in my seat and looked over the top of the four-foot walls of the cubicle. I saw no one still looking at me. I glanced toward the row of glass-walled editors’ offices. Kramer’s was a corner office and he was standing behind the glass looking out at the newsroom. When his eyes came to mine he quickly kept them moving.

“What are you going to do?” Larry asked.

“I haven’t thought about it but I’m about to right now. Where do you want to go, Big Wang’s or the Short Stop?”

“Short Stop. I was at Wang’s last night.”

“See you there then.”

I was about to hang up when Larry blurted out a last question.

“One more thing. Did he say what number you were?”

Of course. He wanted to know what his own chances were of surviving this latest round of corporate bloodletting.

“When I went in he started talking about how I almost made it and how hard it was to make the last choices. He said I was ninety-nine.”

Two months earlier the newspaper announced that 100 employees would be eliminated from the editorial staff in order to cut costs and make our corporate gods happy. I let Larry think about who might be number 100 for a moment while I glanced at Kramer’s office again. He was still there behind the glass.

“So my coaching tip is to keep your head down, Larry. The ax man’s standing at the glass looking for number one hundred right now.”

I hit the disconnect button but kept the headset on. This would hopefully discourage anybody in the newsroom from approaching me. I had no doubt that Larry Bernard would start telling other reporters that I had been involuntarily separated and they would come to commiserate. I had to concentrate on finishing a short on the arrest of a suspect in a murder for hire plot uncovered by the Los Angeles Police Department’s Robbery-Homicide Division. Then I could disappear from the newsroom and head to the bar to toast the end of my career in daily journalism. Because that’s what it was going to be. There was no newspaper out there in the market for an over-40 cop shop reporter. Not when they had an endless supply of cheap labor – baby reporters like Angela Cook minted fresh every year at USC and Medill and Columbia, and willing to work for next to nothing. Like the newspaper industry itself, my time was over.

My phone buzzed in my ear and I was about to guess it would be my ex-wife, having already heard the news in the Washington bureau, but the caller ID said VELVET COFFIN. I had to admit I was shocked. I knew Larry could not have gotten the word out that fast. Against my better judgment I took the call. As expected, the caller was Don Goodwin, self-appointed watchdog and chronicler of the inner workings of the L.A. Times.

“I just heard,” he said.

“When?”

“Just now.”

“How? I just found out myself less than five minutes ago.”

“Come on, Jack, you know I can’t reveal. But I’ve got the place wired. You just walked out of Kramer’s office. You made the thirty list.”

The thirty list was a reference to those who had been lost over the years in the downsizing of the paper. Goodwin himself was on the list. He had worked at the Times and was on the fast track as an editor until a change of ownership brought a change in financial philosophy. When he objected to doing more with less he was cut down at the knees and ended up taking one of the first buyouts offered. That was back when they offered substantial payments to those who would voluntarily leave the company – before the media company that owned the Times filed for bankruptcy protection.

Goodwin took his payout and set up shop with a web site and a blog that covered everything that moved inside the Times. He called it www.thevelvetcoffin.com as a grim reminder of what the paper used to be; a place so pleasurable at which to work that you would easily slip in and stay till you died. With the constant changes of ownership and management, the layoffs, and the ever-dwindling staff and budget sizes, the place was now becoming more of a pine box. And Goodwin was there to chronicle every step and misstep of its fall.

His blog was updated almost daily and was avidly and secretly read by everybody in the newsroom. I wasn’t sure much of the world beyond the thick bombproof walls of the Times even cared. The Times was going the way of all journalism and that wasn’t news. Even the New York By God Times was feeling the pinch caused by the shift of society to the internet for news and advertising. The stuff Goodwin wrote about and was calling me about amounted to little more than rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

But in another two weeks it wouldn’t matter to me. I was moving on and already secretly thinking about the half-started, half-assed novel I had waiting in a drawer somewhere in my house. I was going to pull that baby out as soon as I got home. I knew I could milk my savings for at least six months and after that I could live off the equity in my house – what was left of it after the recent slide – if I needed to. I could also downsize my car and save on gas by getting one of those hybrid tin cans everybody in town was driving.

I was already beginning to see my shove out the door as an opportunity. Deep down, every journalist wants to be a novelist. It’s the difference between art and craft. Every writer wants to be considered an artist and I was now going to take my shot at it. The half-novel I had sitting in my desk – the plot of which I couldn’t even correctly remember – was my ticket.

“Are you out the door today?” Goodwin asked.

“No, I got a couple weeks if I agreed to train my replacement. I agreed.”

“How fucking noble of them. Don’t they allow anybody any dignity over there anymore?”

“Hey, it beats walking out with a cardboard box today. Two weeks’ pay is two weeks’ pay.”

“But do you think that’s fair? How long have you been there? Six, seven years and they give you two weeks?”

He was trying to draw an angry quote from me. I was a reporter. I knew how it worked. He wanted something juicy he could put into the blog. But I wasn’t biting. I told Goodwin I had no further comment for the Velvet Coffin, at least not until I was permanently out the door. He wasn’t satisfied with that answer and kept trying to pry a comment out of me until I heard the call-on-hold beep in my ear. I looked at the caller ID and saw XXXXX on the screen. This told me the call had come through the switchboard rather than from a caller who had my direct number. Lorene, the newsroom operator I could see on duty in the booth, would have been able to tell I was on my line so her decision to park a call on it rather than take the message could only mean the caller had convinced her that the call was important.

I cut Goodwin off.

“Look, Don, I’ve got no comment and I need to go. I’ve got another call.”

I pushed the button before he could take a third swing at getting me to discuss my employment situation.

“This is Jack McEvoy,” I said after switching over.

Silence.

“Hello, this is Jack McEvoy. How can I help you?”

Call me biased but I immediately identified the voice that replied as female, black and uneducated.

“McEvoy? When you goin’ to tell the truth, McEvoy?”

“Who is this?”

“You tellin’ lies, McEvoy, in your paper.”

I wished it was my paper.

“Ma’am, if you want to tell me who you are and what your complaint is about, I’ll listen. Otherwise, I’m – ”

“They now sayin’ Mizo is’n adult and what kinda shit is that? He did’n kill no whore.”

Immediately I knew it was one of those calls. Those calls on behalf of the “innocent.” The mother or girlfriend who had to tell me how wrong my story was. I got them all the time but not for too much longer. I resigned myself to handling this call as quickly and politely as possible.

“Who is Mizo?”

“Zo. My Zo. My son Alonzo. He ain’ guilty a nothin’ and he ain’t no adult.”

I knew that was what she was going to say. They are never guilty. No one calls you up to say you got it right or the police got it right and their son or their husband or their boyfriend is guilty of the charges. No one calls you from jail to tell you they did it. Everybody is innocent. The only thing I didn’t understand about the call was the name. I hadn’t written about anybody named Alonzo – I would have remembered.

“Ma’am, do you have the right person here? I don’t think I wrote about Alonzo.”

“Sure you did. I got your name right here. You said he stuffed her in the trunk and that’s some motherfuckin’ shit right there.”

Then it came together. The trunk murder from last week. It was a six-inch short because nobody on the desk was all that interested. Juvenile drug dealer strangles one of his customers and puts her body in the trunk of her own car. It was a black on white crime but still the desk didn’t care because the victim was a drug user. Both she and her killer were marginalized by the paper. You start cruising down to South L.A. to buy heroin or rock cocaine and what happens happens. You won’t get any sympathy from the gray lady on Spring Street. There isn’t much space in the paper for that. Six inches inside is all you’re worth and all you get.

I realized I didn’t know the name Alonzo because I had never been given it in the first place. The suspect was sixteen years old and the cops didn’t give out the names of arrested juveniles.

I flipped through the stack of newspapers on the right side of my desk until I found the Metro section from two Tuesdays back. I opened it to page four and looked at the story. It wasn’t long enough to carry a byline. But the desk had put my name as a tagline at the bottom. Otherwise I wouldn’t have gotten the call. Lucky me.

“Alonzo is your son,” I said. “And he was arrested two Sundays ago for the murder of Denise Babbit, is that correct?”

“I told you that is motherfucking bullshit.”

“Yes, but that’s the story we’re talking about. Right?”

“That’s right and when are you going to write about the truth?”

“The truth being that your son is innocent.”

“That’s right. You got it wrong and now they say he’s going to be an adult and he only sixteen years old. How can they do that to a boy?”

“What is Alonzo’s last name?”

“Winslow.”

“Alonzo Winslow. And you are Mrs. Winslow?”

“No, I am not,” she said indignantly. “You goin’ put my name in the paper now with a mess a lies?”

“No, ma’am. I just want to know who I am talking to, that’s all.”

“Wanda Sessums. I don’t want my name in no paper. I want you to write the truth, is all. You ruin his reputation calling him a murderer like that.”

Reputation was a hot button word when it came to redressing wrongs committed by a newspaper, but I almost laughed as I scanned the story I had written.

“I said he was arrested for the murder, Mrs. Sessums. That is not a lie. That is accurate.”

“He arrested but he did’n do it. The boy wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

“Police said he had an arrest record going back to twelve years old for selling drugs. Is that a lie, too?”

“He on the corners, yeah, but that don’t mean he go an’ kill nobody. They pinnin’ a rap on him and you jes along for the ride with your eyes closed nice and tight.”

“The police said that he confessed to killing the woman and putting her body in the trunk.”

“That’s a damn lie! He did no such thing.”

I didn’t know if she was referring to the murder or the confession but it didn’t matter. I had to get off. I looked at my screen and saw I had six emails waiting. They had all come in since I had walked out of Kramer’s office. The digital vultures were circling. I wanted to end this call and pass it and everything else off to Angela Cook. Let her deal with all the crazy and misinformed and ignorant callers. Let her have it all.

“Okay, Mrs. Winslow, I’ll – ”

“It’s Sessums, I told you! You see how you gettin’ things wrong all’a time?”

She had me there. I paused for a moment before speaking.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Sessums. I’ve taken some notes here and I will look into this and if there is something I can write about then I will certainly call you. Meantime, best of luck to you and – ”

“No you won’t.”

“I won’t what?”

“You won’t call me.”

“I said I would call you if I – ”

“You didn’t even ask me for my number! You don’ care. You just a bullshit motherfucker like the rest a’ them and my boy goes to prison for somethin’ he dint do.”

She hung up on me. I sat motionless for a moment thinking about what she had said about me, then tossed the Metro section back on the stack. I looked down at the notebook in front of my keyboard. I hadn’t taken any notes and that supposedly ignorant woman had me pegged on that, too.

I leaned back in my chair and studied the contents of my cubicle. A desk, a computer, a phone and two shelves stacked with files, notebooks and newspapers. A red leather-bound dictionary so old and well used that the Webster’s had been worn off its spine. My mother had given it to me when I told her I wanted to be a writer.
It was all I had left after twenty years in journalism. All I would take with me at the end of the two weeks was that dictionary.

“Hi, Jack.”

I turned from my reverie to look up at the lovely face of Angela Cook. I didn’t know her but I knew her: A fresh hire from a top-flight school. She was as green as can be but she was probably being paid $500 a week less than me and that made her a greater value to the company. Never mind the stories that would be missed because she had no sources. Never mind how many times she would be set up and manipulated by the police brass who knew an opportunity when they saw it. Never mind the corruption that would go by unnoticed because she didn’t know what to look for.

She was probably a short-timer anyway. She’d get a few years’ experience, get some decent bylines, and move on to bigger things, law school or politics, maybe a job in TV. But Larry Bernard was right. She was a beauty with blonde hair over green eyes and full lips. The cops were going to love seeing her around headquarters. It would take no more than a week before they forgot about me.

“Hi, Angela.”

“Mr. Robertson said I should come over.”

Kendall Robertson was a deputy managing editor and Kramer’s right hand hack. They were moving quickly. I had gotten pinked no more than fifteen minutes earlier and already my replacement had come knocking.

“Tell you what,” I said. “It’s Friday afternoon, Angela, and I just got laid off. So let’s not start this now. Let’s get together on Monday morning, okay? We can meet for coffee and then I’ll take you around Parker Center to meet some people. Will that be okay?”

“Yeah, sure. And, um, sorry, you know?”

“Thank you, Angela, but it’s okay. I think it’ll end up being the best thing for me anyway. But if you’re still feeling sorry for me you could come over to the Short Stop tonight and buy me a drink.”

She smiled and got embarrassed because she and I both knew that wasn’t going to happen. Inside the newsroom and out, the new generation didn’t mix with the old. Especially not with me. I was history and she had no time or inclination to associate with the ranks of the fallen. Going to the Short Stop tonight would be like visiting a leper colony.

“Well, maybe some other time,” I said quickly. “I’ll see you Monday morning, okay?”

“Monday morning. And I’ll buy the coffee.”

She smiled and I realized that she was indeed the one who should take Kramer’s advice and try TV.

She turned to go.

“Oh, and Angela?”

“What?”

“Don’t call him Mr. Robertson. This is a newsroom, not a law firm. And most of those guys in charge? They don’t deserve to be called mister. Remember that and you’ll do okay here.”

She smiled again and left me alone. I pulled my chair in close to my computer and opened a new document. I had to crank out a murder story before I could get out of the newsroom and go drown my sorrows in red wine.

Use these questions to help start a conversation about the book. SPOILER WARNING! These questions cover the entire book. Don’t read them unless you have read the book.

Happy Is The Man Who Finds Refuge In Himself
That is the fortune in the matchbook that Detective Harry Bosch carried for 12 years. Why was that fortune significant to Harry personally? What does it say about the kind of man he is or was?

“Maybe it’s you, Ignacio.”
Harry suspected his partner Iggy was stuck as a cop. That his fear from being shot had impacted his ability to be a good cop. What do you think? Knowing what happened to Harry and his loved ones in this novel, how do you predict Harry will handle his fears in the future? Will he be able to be the same cop as before or will he be stuck, like Iggy?

“What was it, Vietnam? You served in Vietnam, right?”
Detective David Chu seemed to think Harry carried some prejudice against Asians. Do you think that was true? Or was Harry’s attitude bad because he didn’t like having to rely on any one else for help? Did you see other examples of prejudice in the story? Have you ever thought of Harry Bosch as prejudiced in previous books?

“She did this once before.”
Harry’s daughter, Maddie, seemed to have had many issues with her mother, Eleanor Wish. She had disappeared once before in an attempt to teach her mom a lesson. Do you think this was typical teenage behavior or something deeper? Were her actions motivated by wanting to live in Los Angeles or was it something deeper regarding her parents? Do you think the arrival of Sun Yee into her mother’s life cause some of her behavior?

“Harry, what did you do?”
Were you surprised that Eleanor blamed Harry for what happened to their daughter? She was formally in law enforcement and would have understood the situation with his case.

“We all make mistakes.”
There is a lot of death in this book. And some new beginnings, too. Can you make any predictions about the future of Detective Harry Bosch? How will he change? Within the LAPD? With his loved ones? With himself?

9 Words, 9 Winners, 9 Dragons

We held a contest and gave away 9 personally inscribed and signed copies of Nine Dragons to the 9 people who wrote the best 9-word sentence about Harry Bosch.  Here are the winners, in no specific order:

“Hieronymus Bosch depicted monsters, while his namesake pursues them.”
—Dan Latter

“Bosch, the last coyote, never forgets the lost light.”
—Steven Braun

“Harry Bosch ate Chuck Norris for breakfast without milk.”
—J.C.

“Harry Bosch thinks to himself, ‘What a Wonderful World.’”
—Liz and Dave Smith

“Harry Bosch, ever in the narrows, searching for truth.”
—Eddie Spencer

“Like a dark angel, Harry speaks for the dead.”
—Carol Carlson

“Harry Bosch has no time for stupid Internet contests.”
—Martin Marier

“More darkness than light, Harry Bosch dreams in jazz.”
—Nancy Holladay

“Bosch is the cop I want investigating my murder.”
—Glenn Kraemer

We held a second “9 Words, 9 Winners, 9 Dragons” contest, this time specifically about the book. This time around, we asked for the best 9-word review of the book. And here are the 9 winners.

“Harry’s Bullet will forever remain etched with Eleanor’s name”
— Codi Vernon

“Nine Dragons: Like Bosch, the story never stops moving!”
— Angela and Eric Juline

“The darkness found her, Bosch realized he wasn’t invulnerable. “
— Melissa Reed

“In Nine Dragons, Bosch suffers loss while finding renewal.”
— Phil Melton

“Love lost, daughter found, redemption claimed in Nine Dragons.”
— Gwen Alexander

“Death brings Harry Bosch new life in Nine Dragons.”
— Rod Kopycinski

“In 9 Dragons, a new chapter begins for Harry.”
— Michelle Yamanaka

“Bosch leaves the city of angels to battle dragons.”
— Dale Matsuoka

“Nine Dragons, two worlds, one devastating lie – Connelly’s best.”
—  Catherine Howard

The Lost Coyote: Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch Novels
By Dennis Lehane

We thought we’d share this piece by award winning and bestselling author Dennis Lehane. Dennis was asked by the Italian newspaper, Il Corriere della Sera, to write an article about Harry Bosch. Please enjoy.

In a fair amount of literary criticism, the favorite son of American crime fiction is Raymond Chandler, while the father role falls to Dashiell Hammett, the acknowledged progenitor of hard-boiled fiction. Hammett, Chandler himself said, “took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley.” Prior to that, the classic English mysteries had presented murder as a rather tidy affair, an intellectual parlor game to be played by people who somehow managed never to be dirtied by it. But Hammett, who eschewed the elegiac for the grimy, put the filth and blood back into murder. And this has always presented a problem for critics who don’t want to be caught admiring someone who forgets to wash for dinner.

So, if Hammett was the bedrock of American noir, Chandler was its flowering. He gave the genre its first mature philosophical musings; he fashioned a code of ethics, embodied by Philip Marlowe, that has been emulated ever since; he fixed the idea of a detective tied to only two things—his principles and his town—so firmly in the DNA of the genre that it’s impossible to imagine most of the great fictional detectives without twinning them to the cities from which they sprang.

Because he cast such a huge shadow, it’s often Chandler whom critics reach for when needing a comparison point (either negatively or positively) to those who came after him. It can be alarming how often and how lazily his name is bandied about, as if all that’s required to make a writer Chandleresque is the desire to write crazily vivid similes and metaphors. As if Chandler became a kind of critical shorthand—if you write novels in which bad things happen and a principled detective is hired to find out why those bad things happened and you write said story with a certain music in your prose, then you must be Chandleresque. This shorthand strikes me as woefully inaccurate because it fails to grasp the relationship between the writer and the city where the tales are set. You can’t be truly Chandleresque unless you write about Los Angeles. And only then if you do so with the same moral complexity and near-apocalyptic vision. If Chandler has any direct literary descendent, then, any fit wearer of his illustrious crown, any undeniable heir, it can only be Michael Connelly.

Where Chandler found the personification of his hero ideal in Philip Marlowe, the hard-drinking, chain-smoking, deeply principled and often philosophical private investigator, Michael Connelly has given us Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch, the relentless, tortured, highly principled but deeply pessimistic police detective who entered the literary stage in The Black Echo and has journeyed through fourteen more novels since. Detective Bosch shares his name, of course, with the Dutch Renaissance painter who slathered his canvases with ghastly visions of Hell, and one can certainly draw parallels between the hideous, fallen world of the paintings and the cauldron of sin and injustice that Harry Bosch confronts in modern day Los Angeles.

When Chandler sent his knight errant down Los Angeles’ mean streets alone, “neither tarnished nor afraid,” its mean streets were not, with all due respect to the master, nearly as mean as they are now. Harry Bosch, if rarely afraid, is certainly tarnished. He is the personification, in fact, of Nietzsche’s admonition that those who fight monsters risk becoming monsters themselves. If there is a unifying tension that threads its way through all of the Bosch books, it is that—Bosch is always perilously close to succumbing to violence he not only fights but which inhabits him.

From that first book, The Black Echo, it’s clear that Harry Bosch is a damaged soul. You worry about his physical health from dangers both within (he smokes so many cigarettes you can’t help but assume a heart attack or at least an angioplasty awaits him at novel’s end) and without (a group of ex-military killers and drug smugglers; a possible femme fatale). But more so, you worry about his psychological well-being. This first case will be the one that triggers memories of his service in Vietnam, and Connelly does a masterful job of evoking the claustrophobia and isolationism of a former “tunnel rat.” At the end, we leave Bosch staring at a print of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, that epitome of broken dreams and alienation. Bosch, not surprisingly, identifies with the “darkness. The stark loneliness. The man sitting alone, his face turned to the shadows. I am that man, Harry Bosch would think each time he looked.”

These are the musings of a psychic orphan with attenuated emotional development. But it’s merely warm-up for what will be revealed about Bosch’s psyche in books to come. Because in the annals of American crime fiction series protagonists, it’s hard to imagine one who had a more traumatic history than Harry Bosch.

We soon learn that Harry Bosch entered McClaren Hall, an orphanage, at the age of eleven. He didn’t know his father and was removed from the home he shared with his mother, a prostitute, deemed UM (“unfit mother”) by the State of California. His mother, Marjorie Lowe, would later be murdered and the solving of that case would be the subject of Connelly’s fourth novel, The Last Coyote.

Far more than the investigatory work in that book (maybe the finest investigative narrative in the entire series) what lodges strongest in the memory is the eponymous coyote. Part doppelganger, part ghost, it quickly attains a mythic heft in both the novel and the series as a whole. Just as Bosch continually travels into his own past to uncover his mother’s murderer, so the coyote travels into the historical mist of Los Angeles itself, back before skyscrapers and pollutants and rampant overpopulation, back before the City of Angels became a perverted dream factory that served up far more nightmares than wish fulfillment, back when it was wild and smog-free and largely untouched, when the coyote—far from being the last—would have been part of a pack that outnumbered the human interlopers. This is one of the beating hearts of the city that can’t be fully destroyed—its undeniable and fragile beauty, its wealth of nature so precariously perched on shifting plates in the earth which cause the earthquake that destroys Bosch’s house. It is to this site of nature’s reclamation of itself that the coyote returns again and again. The animal also lives in Bosch’s dreams to such a degree that one could argue that the coyote may not be real at all but is, instead, a vision that Bosch conjures to retain his sanity amidst his love-hate relationship with the city that killed his mother and threatens, on a daily basis, to quit nibbling on his soul and finally get down to the business of eating it whole.

It is in The Last Coyote and in A Darkness More Than Night that Harry Bosch is, for me, most fully realized. I’ve heard Bosch described as representing a reasonably simple code of ethics best exemplified by his mantra, “Everybody counts or nobody counts,” but Connelly invests far more of his authorial energies, whether consciously or not, in the idea that Bosch is not only the last coyote, he’s the lost coyote, his soul consistently imperiled by his forays into the dark heart of a “Hollywood [that] glimmered in the cut, a mirror reflection of the stars of all galaxies everywhere . . . a city with more things wrong than right. A place where the earth could open up beneath you and suck you into the blackness. A city of lost light. His city. It was all of that and, still, always still, a place to begin again. His city. The city of the second chance.”

His city. Bosch’s. And Connelly’s. A city of schismatic paradoxes, where the tumult of nature’s fury is matched only by the turmoil of man’s corruption. Where the physical beauty of velvet oceans and hills garlanded in dots of urban light do battle for our attention with the squalid barrios and the heat-soaked alleys. Where good grips a wet ledge by its fingernails while evil gets a massage at a five-star hotel. If we are to survive the evil, shouldn’t we give the other half of the paradox its rightful name? For if Los Angeles is, in some part of itself, the City of Angels, is it not fair to argue that its mirror half is the City of Devils? And what name would we give a city of devils, after all? If the angels leave us, as Bosch’s mother did, and ascend into the afterlife, what is the name for what they leave behind if not Hell? Los Angeles, ironically named, is the “mirror reflection” of all other places, all other possible realms.

And an angel cannot guide us through here. Only someone fallen. Someone lost. When Terry McCaleb says to Bosch in A Darkness More Than Night, “. . . you have completely fallen. You are lost,” Bosch accepts the assessment by echoing the parable of the prodigal son, “Yeah, well, maybe I’m lost and maybe I’ve been found. I’ll have to think about it. Meantime, why don’t you just go home now. . . .Pretend the world is not what you know it to be.”

That’s Bosch speaking, not Connelly, because Connelly, the writer, is smart enough to see through Bosch and see that the world he inhabits is neither the world as he wants it to be nor the world he “knows it to be.” It’s so much more than that, just as Bosch is so much more than the lonely man in the Nighthawks painting. That man is frozen, stationary. He’s given up.

Harry Bosch, on the other hand, has never given up. Over the course of fifteen novels, he has warred with serial killers, drug smugglers, the mafia, corrupt (and in some cases killer) cops, riotous street gangs, an entrenched LAPD bureaucracy, and the tentacles of the power structure that run the city and, by extension, the world. In just about every case, he has been physically and psychologically damaged. His grip on his soul and his sanity remains precarious. And because of that, I’ve always found it easier to invest in him than in Marlowe. Marlowe was, true to his creator’s vision and personal aesthetic, “a complete man.” Bosch, however, is deeply incomplete, continually haunted by his past, by his baser instincts, by his need for justice (or is it vengeance?) and by his fervent desire, even as he believes the world is as rotten as he “knows it to be,” to create some minor vision of Heaven to illuminate a city, and a world, that has lost its light.

This article originally appeared in the Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera on April 30, 2009. Courtesy of Il Corriere della Sera, RCS Quotidiani Spa.