The image of Michael Connelly that looks out from his dust-jacket photo suggests he’s quite a serious guy. There’s the smart casual pose, the somewhat penetrating stare and an expression that indicates that while he might well be capable of a hearty belly-laugh if the occasion really calls for it, he’s not going to waste it on you unless it’s earned. As someone I know noted recently, it’s a slightly intimidating, Connery-esque ‘I’m waiting to be impressed’ look.
I’ve had the pleasure of talking to the author face-to-face before and the first thing you realise is that, in the flesh, he’s funnier than you expect. As we walk along the streets of York, I note that his head must be spinning. Within twelve hours of leaving the Los Angeles set of the forthcoming ‘Bosch’ tv pilot, he was on a flight to Heathrow and has spent the last three days cross-crossing the UK. When he returns to the US he continues the book-tour before heading back to Florida to continue penning the next Bosch novel due next year.
“I’m not too bad, I got a lie-in yesterday. I was in Edinburgh. No, wait… I think it was Dublin,” he smiles, wearily. “And today I was just talking to a reporter who says their lead story is about a dog that looks like Hitler.” He shrugs.” And y'know...it actually does. I wonder if they’ll find a cat that looks like Mussolini? But….yeah, interesting times. (Pauses). I think I’ll sleep on the way home.”
The truth is that Connelly has a lot to smile about. His latest book, The Gods of Guilt (reviewed HERE) has just been released in the UK and will hit US shelves this week. In the last year or so he’s completed his hard-fought battle to win back the multimedia rights to the character of Harry Bosch and - as mentioned – helped oversee the pilot to a television adaptation of the character. There are also tentative plans for more cinematic visits to the world of his ‘Lincoln Lawyer’, Mickey Haller.
Do the various characters fight for space in his head, arguing which one should get the next shelf-space?
“It’s really kind of a weird, instinctive process. I can never remember any ‘It’s time to write about Mickey but I really want to write about Harry...’. It just comes to me about what I should write. Sometimes Harry will appear in a Mickey story or vice versa and at the beginning of the book I won’t know how big a part they’ll play. You see what happens. But it got to the point with Harry that the novels were about elements of his character, the process of whom I should write about usually came out of me instinctively thinking that I needed to take a break from Bosch to keep him fresh. Then I’d go to Haller and it would be more of a plot thing: what do I have that I could put Haller in? With The Gods of Guilt, he’s following a pattern that was similar for Bosch back in the 90s… in my opinion it took me four or five Bosch books to really get to a process where I was moving them along in a character-first basis. The Gods of Guilt has all the trappings of a courtroom drama, but it’s really about Mickey’s internal compass and the things going on there. In some ways it’s what happened to Bosch around the time of The Last Coyote – that was fifteen years ago," he explains. "I guess that’s a long way of saying it could NOW get into a competitive thing. Everyone would rather write about a character-driven story than just a finely-tuned plot. Now, they’re both on that kind of level, so there could be some difficult discussions within my own head. Then again, I do have an artificial deadline with Bosch as he’s out of his current police job in 2015, so I have until then to write books with him still having his badge – probably two more books. I think Bosch will win any competition for the next two releases.”
In The Gods of Guilt, Connelly gives Haller another tough case involving a dead prostitute and possible police corruption. Given that Haller is an effective lawyer but sometimes one with morally-dubious methods, I suggest to the author that there must be a real art to writing a book where the audience isn't always on the side of the 'hero'...
“Thanks for calling it an ‘art’. To me, it’s the ‘challenge’. Immediately after I decide to write a Mickey Haller book… I kinda sigh and think ‘I have to write a Mickey Haller book!’ because Bosch, from page one, has the audience with him because of what he does. He’s doing very noble things and trying to fight ‘evil’. I start with all the readers on my side. I can make him be a jerk and say the wrong thing and perhaps push people away from the 100% good-guy rating he starts with. Mickey, on the other hand, starts with the fact that no-one really likes a defence attorney. You have to move people towards that middle point. That’s the hard part with him. I suppose to write a Haller novel is a greater challenge,” he agrees.
Though his work has been adpated for the screen before - no less than Clint Eastwood took a shot at Blood Work, but alterations to the basic plot did not go down well... The Lincoln Lawyer with Matthew McConaughey was much more successful - it's clear that Connelly is now much happier with the plans to bring Bosch to the television screen. After a decade of lack-of-production purgatory and a long and expensive battle to get the rights back for Harry, we'll finally see the character in his own pilot courtesy of Amazon Studios. The company, one of the major players diversifying into the quickly growing area of distribution and content provider, was eager to work with the author and Connelly was closely involved in all aspects of the production.
With mixed experiences with Hollywood so far, was Michael more excited or anxious on the day the cameras started to roll on the pilot in Los Angeles?
“I knew before we shot any video that we had really good team on both sides of the camera. I love the cast - I went to every casting session. I was involved in all the choices to some extent. I was pretty confident, but then you go and see the first shot. The first shot was actually underwhelming because it was just an establishing shot of the courthouse. I had my family with me and it was a great day, but at the same time it was still a matter of thinking ‘I hope we don’t fumble this…’ Everything was lined up correctly and it’s taken twenty years to do it. I think it’s going to be good. Every day was kinda like that to start with. My apprehension eased away the more we got into it. The more we got to the important scenes and got them done… I saw Titus Welliver (who plays Harry) get the relentless look in his eyes – and that’s the key thing about Harry Bosch. I saw the scene where it all means something to him and he was great…”
Largely based on the story elements found in The City of Bones and The Concrete Blonde, Connelly admits that the central casting took a long time to agree upon and they were lucky to get Welliver for the role of Bosch as the actor was still busy filming for Michael Bay's forthcoming Transformers: Age of Extinction. Connelly says there was just something intense in Welliver's eyes that showed he 'got' the emotional core of Harry Bosch from the very start.
“We had a problem even talking to him because he was making Transformers 4 and half of that was being made in Hong Kong. He plays a SEAL team leader. It was the key decision and we weren’t going to make that choice until we were 100%. We were set up with financing, a scheduled shoot and on the very day that we were going to tell Amazon Studios that we’d have to push it back to next year, we had access to two actors coming in… and one of them was Titus. He’d just flown in from Hong Kong and we thought he’d be jetlagged, but we gave him three scenes from the script, the three most important scenes with three different women who are in the pilot – a romantic meeting, his boss and a colleague. He was just really good. That was about 11:00am. We had the meeting scheduled at 4:00 that day with Amazon about pushing it all back and we cancelled the meeting..." he smiles.
Amazon Studios will make the pilot available for free and then, depending on the public reaction, will green-light a full series. Given the popularity of Connelly, no stranger to the best-seller lists... and Bosch himself (often cited by other crime authors as a great character), it seems a done-deal.
"I have a big social media presence, so I shall marshal the troops. I’ll accept nothing but five-star reviews (laughs). I think we’ll be able to handle that. It’s part of my job. I’m not trying to be a happy cheerleader, I’m cheering something I really believe in. I’ll be using my social media before broadcast to show clips and things like that. I just want people to know I’m involved in this and not standing off to the side and just watching..." he notes.
With that he's off to Manchester then Heathrow. Beyond that, he will sleep perchance to walk the crime beat once more. There's no rest for the wicked, but maybe just a little for this God of Guilt...
The Gods of Guilt is published by Orion in the UK and is available now.
