Michael Connelly

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.

Nine Dragons audiobook is read by narrator Len Cariou. It is available in CD and in downloadable formats.

Listen to an excerpt:

Question: “Eight bullets, eight dragons. And then there would be him. Bosch would be the ninth dragon, as unstoppable as a bullet.” Where does the title Nine Dragons come from?
Michael Connelly: Hong Kong has many sections. One of the biggest is called Kowloon, which means “Nine Dragons.” It comes from a legend. During one of the old dynasties the emperor was chased by the Mongols into the area that is now Hong Kong. He saw the eight mountain peaks that surrounded the area and protected him and wanted to call the place Eight Dragons. But one of his guards reminded him that the emperor was a dragon too. So they called it Kowloon, meaning nine dragons. I was told this story by a researcher who was showing me around Hong Kong the first time I visited. I loved the story and immediately started thinking of using Nine Dragons as a title. This dictated that a lot of the Hong Kong portion of the story take place in Kowloon, including the most significant moment of the whole novel.

Q: What inspired you to write Nine Dragons and to set a third of the book in Hong Kong?
MC: Nine Dragons is a book long in the making. It is a pivotal story in Harry Bosch’s journey — and his most personal one. While I think it is a book with more action than usual for me, it is also a deeply driven character story for which the inspiration was set about seven years ago when I was writing the novel Lost Light (2003). I think with a series you have to be very careful with what you do with your character. Harry Bosch is built to be of and about L.A. So I have to be careful about taking him out of this environment. Usually when I do, it is never for a whole book. I have him follow a case to Mexico and back. Or to Las Vegas or Florida. Nine Dragons starts in Los Angeles, goes to Hong Kong, and then comes back to Los Angeles. Sending him to Hong Kong came out of me wanting to do that again but to really put him in a fish-out-of-water situation. So I planted the seed five or six books ago when I had Harry’s young daughter move there with his ex-wife. When I did that, I knew that I would eventually write a story that would take Harry there and give me the opportunity to explore the character in completely different terrain. So the book has been sort of waiting to be written. In writing, you rely on your instincts in terms of what to do and when to do it. Somehow, I felt it was time to write this story now.

Q: Did you actually spend time in Hong Kong researching the book?
MC: About five years ago I stopped in Hong Kong on my way home from a book tour in Australia. I immediately found what I was looking for: an intriguing new place with a sense that anything could happen. So I’ve made two trips to Hong Kong to research Nine Dragons. One was a general knowledge trip. I then refined what I was looking for, had a general sense of the areas the story would take me through, and I went back to more specifically research the story, to more or less follow the trail Harry follows in the book. As it turns out, only about a third of the book is set in Hong Kong, and that segment takes place in one day. There is a lot of movement and action. Like Hong Kong itself, it never slows down.

Q: Why did you wait so long to explore Harry Bosch’s relationship with his daughter Madeline?
MC: In Lost Light, Harry got the surprise of his life. He found out he was a father and met his daughter, Madeline, for the first time. Over the years and stories that followed their meeting, Harry’s relationship with his daughter never moved to the forefront because I wasn’t ready to explore it yet. I wanted her to grow up some and be a character who could communicate with Harry (and the reader) as a young adult before I wrote the story that explored the relationship and what is Harry’s ultimate vulnerability.

Q: Are you saying in this book that being a father is Harry’s greatest vulnerability?
MC: Nine Dragons is about Harry and his daughter. It’s about his hopes for her, his guilt over his poor performance as a father, and most of all it is about his vulnerability as a father. Putting this young person in Harry’s life was done with a lot of thought. Up until Bosch became a father, I had been creating a character who viewed himself as being on a mission. He was someone who was skilled enough and tough enough to go into the abyss and seek out human evil. To carry out this mission, he knew he had to be relentless and bulletproof. By bulletproof, I mean he had to be invulnerable. Nobody could get to him. It was the only way to be relentless. And this idea or belief bled into all aspects of his life. He lived alone, had no friends, and didn’t even know his neighbors. He built a solitary life so that no one could get to him. All that suddenly changed in one moment (one page) when he locked eyes with his daughter in Lost Light. Harry suddenly knew he could be gotten to.

Q: Nine Dragons opens with Bosch investigating the murder of the owner of Fortune Liquors, a small L.A. package store he’s known for years. He still carries in his pocket a matchbook he picked up there on a case years ago. Its motto inside — Happy is the man who finds refuge in himself — has been a guiding light through some of his darkest days. How did you come up with this “fortune” and is it significant thematically to the novel?
MC: What’s weird is that I can’t remember where that came from. I think it was an actual fortune I received in a Chinese fortune cookie and it sort of spoke to me and so I used it in Angels Flight, which is the book in which Harry first visits Fortune Liquors. So that’s going back more than a decade and I can’t remember the origin. But what I do remember is that I thought it sounded almost like an anthem for a loner like Harry. As somebody who feels he’s on a solitary mission in life, this bromide or whatever you want to call it would speak to him and keep him on the path. I think he finds refuge in himself by believing in the cause and remaining relentlessly in pursuit of it. By believing that everybody should count or nobody should count. By believing that no one need know about his mission as long as he believes in it himself. I think that it is not only thematic to this book but to all of the Bosch books.

Q: Do you think readers in Hong Kong will enjoy riding with Harry Bosch through their city?
MC: I don’t know. I think they might see a part of their city they haven’t seen before. The nature of a crime novel is to explore all areas of a city, good and bad. In this story Harry is on a mission that literally takes him from the highest vistas of the city to some its darkest corners. I think Hong Kong is a vibrant and beautiful place that is full of intrigue. I hope I’ve gotten that into the book.

Q: The day that Harry Bosch visits Hong Kong the city is in the middle of something called the Festival of Hungry Ghosts. People are burning sacrifices to ancestors all over the city. Is this fiction or does this festival exist?
MC: Yes, it exists. One of the times I was in Hong Kong researching the ghost festival was going on and it was one of the things that linked this amazingly modern city with old ways and beliefs. I thought it was fascinating and something I could use in the book to sort of tilt Bosch’s world, to be a constant reminder that he was not in any sort of comfort zone.

Q: What’s next for Harry Bosch, and do you have plans for more Mickey Haller and Jack McEvoy books? Any other projects on the horizon?
MC: I think it’s safe to assume all of these characters will be back.

Nine Dragons TV Commercial

Michael Connelly in Hong Kong
Watch a 10 minute film about Michael Connelly researching Nine Dragons and making the same journey through Hong Kong that Harry Bosch makes in the book.

Wan Chai
Watch and listen as Michael Connelly reads an excerpt from Nine Dragons. The footage was shot at the real Hong Kong location mentioned in the excerpt.

The Peak
Watch and listen as Michael Connelly reads an excerpt from Nine Dragons. The footage was shot at the real Hong Kong location mentioned in the excerpt.

Michael Connelly’s Nine Dragons
On location in Hong Kong, Michael Connelly discusses his novel, Nine Dragons.

Why I Wrote Nine Dragons

Nine Dragons is a book long in the making. It is a pivotal story in Harry Bosch’s journey. While I think it is a book with more action than usual for me, it is also a deeply driven character story for which the inspiration was set about seven years ago, when I was writing the novel Lost Light.

In that story, Harry gets the surprise of his life. He finds out he is a father and he meets his daughter, Madeline, for the first time. Putting this young person in Harry’s life was done with a lot of thought. Up until that point in the Bosch series, I had been creating a character who viewed himself as being on a mission. He was someone who was skilled enough and tough enough to go into the abyss and seek out human evil. To carry out this mission, he knew he had to be relentless and bulletproof. By bulletproof, I mean he had to be invulnerable. Nobody could get to him. It was the only way to be relentless. And this idea or belief bled into all aspects of his life. He lived alone, had no friends, didn’t even know his neighbors. He built a solitary life so that no one could get to him.

All that suddenly changed in one moment (one page) when he locked eyes with his daughter in Lost Light. Harry suddenly knew he could be gotten to.

Over the years and stories that followed, Harry’s relationship with his daughter never moved to the forefront because I wasn’t ready to explore it. I also wanted her to grow up some and be a character who could communicate with Harry (and the reader) as a young adult before I wrote the story that explored Harry’s vulnerability. I had Madeline and her mother, Eleanor Wish, move to Hong Kong. I wanted them in an exotic place so that when I was ready to write the father/daughter story Harry would be a fish out of water.

I first visited Hong Kong and started my research after writing Lost Light. I went back again last year. In writing, you rely on your instincts in terms of what to do and when to do it. Somehow, I felt it was time to write the story. And so Nine Dragons is that story. It starts in Los Angeles, goes to Hong Kong, and then comes back to Los Angeles. It’s about Harry and his daughter. It’s about his hopes for her, his guilt over his poor performance as a father, and most of all it is about his vulnerability as a father. This is the story when Harry is gotten to.

— Michael Connelly