Michael Connelly was born in Philadelphia in1956 and decided to become a writer having been influenced by his reading of Raymond Chandler books while at the University of Florida.
Upon leaving university he became a journalist, specialising in crime reports. In 1986 he and two other reporters spent several months interviewing survivors of a major plane crash and the magazine story that followed was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. This success resulted in Connelly landing a job as crime reporter on one of the largest papers in the country, the Los Angeles Times.
His very first novel in 1992 was The Black Echo, which won the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for the Best First Novel. It was in this book that the reader was introduced to Detective Harry Bosch, a loner who during his time as a marine in the Vietnam War was a tunnel rat, fighting the Vietcong in the underground tunnels. This experience in Vietnam helped to define his character, the outsider who never gave up tracking the criminals, no matter what. In the first novel the body of a fellow tunnel rat was found in a drainage tunnel. Bosch was not convinced that this was an overdose case and relentlessly pursues the case until he finds the culprit.
Connelly is a master of police procedure and the Harry Bosch series is a fine example of this genre. There is a clarity to Connelly’s writing, which never over-complicates the story line and leads the reader through the thought processes of Bosch, whose attention to detail is his strength in catching the criminal.
The library has a number of Michael Connelly books including The Black Echo and some Raymond Chandler books if you want to read author who influenced Connelly.
Available from the library:
The Black Echo 1992
The Last Coyote 1995
Trunk Music 1997
City of Bones 2002
Nine Dragons 2009
The Drop 2011
The Fifth Witness 2011
The Gods of Guilt 2013
The Burning Room 2014
Midnight File 2014
The Wrong Side of Goodbye 2016
Dark Sacred Night 2019
Fair Warning 2021
