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• Mr. Connelly's official site
• Mr. Connelly on "Meet the Writers"
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Tavis: Michael Connelly is an award-winning writer and best-selling author of the popular Harry Bosch series of mystery novels. The first novel in this series was awarded the prestigious Edgar Award for mystery writing. Before becoming a novelist, though, he was a police reporter for the 'L.A. Times' and a crime journalist down in Florida. His latest book is called 'The Closers,' which marks the return to one of his favorite subjects, the L.A.P.D. Michael Connelly, nice to have you on the program.

Michael Connelly: Thank you for having me.

Tavis: I know for your fans, they know this story, but for those who are not familiar with the story of how you decided to become a crime writer, take me back to your teenage years. You know what I'm talking about here.

Connelly: Well, yeah, I was a witness to a crime--

Tavis: As a teenager. How old were you?

Connelly: I was 16.

Tavis: 16. Go ahead.

Connelly: I had just gotten my driver's license, I had gotten a job as a dishwasher, and I was driving home one night pretty late at night, and I saw a man running, and he was fully clothed, so it was kind of suspicious. He wasn't a jogger, and I saw him stick something into a hedge. And just being curious, I waited--I was at a stop light, I waited for the light change, and I went over there and I pulled out something, what he had put into the hedge, and it was a gun and--which kind of freaked me out, so I just put the gun back in there, got back in my car, and drove home. And I told my father what had happened, and he and I drove back. And by the time we got back to the hedge, there were cops all over the place and I told them what I saw and I led them to the gun, and they said what had happened was a carjacking gone bad just a few blocks away where someone was shot. And I was able to, you know, lead them to the gun. I told them in the direction where the guy had run, and they--they went to a bar, a motorcycle bar and took--I described the guy as being bearded and long hair, which is about everybody in a motorcycle bar. So they went in there--

Tavis: They cleared the bar out.

Connelly: Yeah, they cleared the bar, took me to the police station, I spent almost all night there looking at all these guys trying to pick the guy who put the gun in the hedge, but I never saw him. And it became a frustrating thing for the detectives. They thought I was afraid to identify a guy, and they got very upset with me. They were sure he was one of these motorcycle guys, and it was just this kind of, like, battle through the night before they finally let me go.

Tavis: There are a couple of questions I want to ask you out of that. The first that comes to mind is why, after that case--the case never got solved, I presume?

Connelly: Right.

Tavis: OK. Why decide then out of that to become a mystery writer and not, say, a police detective?

Connelly: That's a good question. I don't actually know the answer. I think I--what happened was after that incident, I left with bad feelings even though I know they did not have the right guy. I felt because the cops obviously felt that I had let them down, that bothered me, and it--what that story was not me wanting to become a mystery writer, but it made me start reading about police and novels and non-fiction books and in the newspaper. And that kind of led me towards eventually coming to a writer named Raymond Chandler. And I when I read his work, all thoughts of maybe becoming a detective left, and I just loved the prose. I loved his writing so much that I decided, you know, I'd like to try to do that someday, and that's when I decided to become a writer.

Tavis: The other thing that comes to mind with regard to that story is what you make these many years later, having studied police cases and been a crime reporter and, of course, now a best-selling mystery writer, what do you make of the fact that even as a 16-year-old, you were subjected to the police, shall we say, pressuring you gently or otherwise to identify someone and to perhaps have put someone away who might really not have been guilty of what you saw? What do you make of that pressure that police put on you that night?

Connelly: I came from a world where I had not had much police interaction, and it wasn't gentle. You're being nice saying it was gentle. They wanted me to identify one of these guys and I wouldn't do it. And so, it did give me this--early on--this idea that police are not always right, and that's--you know, and I write about a detective, I write about how hard it is to do it right. When you do it right, I think it's a very noble profession. But as we know in Los Angeles, there's been many cops over the years who don't do it right, and so I know it's out there. It's not--like I don't count myself as being one of the people who is preconceived to believe what the cops say.

Tavis: Tell me, speaking of cops, what cops have to say. What happens when you run into persons who are members of the L.A.P.D., the chief of police, or others in the rank and file who read and certainly are aware of your work what you have to say about the L.A.P.D. because it's not always nice?

Connelly: You're right. I think I treat the bureaucracy as a bureaucracy with a lot of flaws, but operating in that bureaucracy is this guy Harry Bosch. He's a guy who is just trying to do a good job and is a good man. And I think most of the cops who read my books gravitate towards Harry Bosch, and they hopefully see something about themselves. And so--actually, I count the chief of police as a fan of my work even though I wouldn't say my work is very complimentary of his department, but I think he sees something in Harry Bosch that he wants to see in all his officers and himself.

Tavis: Tell me more about how you created this character; because for those who follow your work, obviously, they know this guy, they know his work. Tell me how you came to create this character Harry Bosch.

Connelly: Well, I--Harry Bosch comes from everywhere, you know? Your head is like a blender and you throw all these things in, you turn it on, you mix it up, and hopefully something original comes out, so I've been influenced by many real detectives, I've been influenced--as I said, Raymond Chandler and many fictional detectives. I love movies and television shows, so he really comes from all over, but he has this--this sensibility that comes down to a bottom line that Harry believes that in this society, everybody should count or no one's gonna count, and that's kind of what guides him as a policeman and as a man.

Tavis: Tell me more. We don't want to tell too much because we don't want people to not go out and get the book, but tell me--tell me a little bit about the premise of 'The Closers.'

Connelly: Well, it's really about Harry Bosch finding his home. He gets--he has left the department for a couple books. He comes back and is assigned to the--

Tavis: He was retired for, like, a few years, and now you've brought him back out of retirement.

Connelly: Yeah. I found that was boring, and so did he, so I bring him back to the L.A.P.D.'s open unsolved case--open unsolved squad, and they look at all the old cases. And from the standpoint of being a writer, it gives me avenues into studying a lot about what has happened in the history of Los Angeles over many years. And so, in this case he's investigating a murder of a child of mixed race in 1988, and it's just like a few years before the whole city blew up with Rodney King and so forth. And so, I'm kind of studying what was going on in that city--in the city at that time. And, you know, so--as usual of Harry, he kind of gets into this case and he's finding out--some of the leads come back into the department. And so he's gotta kind of watch his back even within the department.

Tavis: There is a real-life department in L.A.P.D. and other departments as well where they--you know, if they have the resources, at least, they try to close these unsolved mysteries. These unsolved cases in L.A., I'm told, there are about 11,000 of those cases that L.A.P.D. has right now, cases that are unsolved, tell me whether Harry Bosch is gonna find this work more challenging, more rewarding, more difficult than the everyday stuff that we have known him doing temporarily.

Connelly: All those things. In the space I spend time with the real cold case squad of the L.A.P.D--and what I found was--I've known many detectives over the years, and what happens is when there's a murder--as you probably well know--the first 48 hours are so important, they have to try to solve things quickly, and as they do that the emotions are really raw and it's all very quick. There's no attachment, really, between detective and victim or the victim's family. When these guys go back and look at a case from like 1988 or 1972 or whatever, they're seeing what has happened--in a microcosm, what happens to our society when a murder goes unsolved. They see the ripple effects through families, through neighborhoods. And so when I discovered this is where I want to take Harry on my stories, I felt that I was bumping my game up a little bit because I can really kind of make a social study. Yes, the book's an entertainment, it's a puzzle who did it, but on another level, it's a social study of what happens in our society when we let 11,000 murders go unsolved.

Tavis: Let me explore more about that. I'm glad you went there because this is a book for entertainment purposes, but you have been, as I mentioned earlier, a crime reporter, so you've done the real-life stuff as well. Talk to me about whether police departments--and L.A.P.D. is a really interesting study, not just because everybody knows L.A.P.D. made famous through films and television, but in part because you and I both happen to know the L.A.P.D., given the size of this city, we have one of smallest forces in the country given the size of the city of L.A. As I said, I wonder whether or not a force like L.A.P.D. or any force, quite frankly, really does have the resources to deal with solving--or maybe is it even wise to spend time trying to solve cases that are 10, 15, 20, 30 years old with the crime that we still see out of control every day that's being debated as we speak in a mayor's race?

Connelly: Right. Well, I mean, I think it's a 2-sided question or a coin answer. On one hand, you don't want to take resources off the street, or you want people to solve the cases that are very contemporary or happening right now, and that's important, but I do think there is an obligation to, as they call 'em in the cold case squad, "the lost souls" of people that--we can't forget these people because what kind of city are we, what kind of society are we if we let this go, and--so, you know, it's not a big squad, it's 6 detectives and a supervisor, and when they created the unit, they budgeted it, I think, for 12 detectives. So it's kind of a sh...string operation, but, you know, if the advances in technology--D.N.A., fingerprinting, computers, and so forth--in some ways, it's like shooting ducks on a pond. You can go in there; you can feed this stuff from all these unsolved cases into these computers and come up with winners. You know, come up with as they call cold hits, connect killers, and, you know, and who knows? Taking a killer off the street who committed a crime 12 years ago, 15 years ago, you still may be saving somebody down the road.

Tavis: I'm out of time, but one can tell by your answers to these real-life questions I've asked you for the last few minutes that you do a lot of research in writing what we read as a novel.

Connelly: Yeah, I mean, I grind it or ground it in reality. I want you to think this could happen and, you know, as I said, there's good cops; there's bad cops. I like to write about the good cops, the guys who are trying to overcome all the obstacles and do the right thing, and to get that right, you gotta spend some time with them and get the essence of what they're doing.

Tavis: Well, your mission is accomplished because you're making all of us believe when we read these books by Michael Connelly. The latest is 'The Closers.' Michael Connelly, nice to have you on the program.

Connelly: Thanks for having me.

Tavis: My pleasure.