MICHAEL CONNELLY'S TRUNK MUSIC: MY SPECTATOR REVIEW 20 YEARS ON

Tonight I will be interviewing Michael Connelly at Waterstones in Piccadilly, to celebrate publication of his 30th novel, The Late Show, which features a new main character, LAPD night shift detective Renee Ballard. As I prepared for the interview I realised that I wrote my first review of Connelly 20 years ago. The novel was Trunk Music (his fifth Harry Bosch novel, and his sixth overall) and the review was published in the Spectator. It was, I think, his first major review in this country. Not long after that, I met Michael when he was reading in Melbourne, Florida, and I've been lucky enough to stay in touch, and to be asked to write an afterword to his collection of journalism, Crime Beat. So I thought I'd reprint that first review, from the Spectator, 8 March 1997. I also discovered that Connelly was mis-spelled throughout, and I've finally corrected that. One line from the close of the review was used as a blurb on any number of Michael's later books, which more than made up for the typo!

THE BEST FROM AMERICA

TRUNK MUSIC

by Michael Connelly

Orion,£16.99, pp.375

The Los Angeles inhabited by LAPD detective Hieronymous “Harry” Bosch resembles the paintings of his Flemish namesake. Horrors lie underneath the surface of a garden of earthly delights. The classical gives way to the modern; Trunk Music, Michael Connelly’s fifth Bosch novel, is also the first post-OJ police novel; the ghosts of Judge Itoh and Johnnie Cochrane are never far from the thoughts of cops like Bosch, nor from Bosch’s real Nemeses: lawyers, politicians, and police administrators.

When the body of soft-core porn video-maker Tony Aliso is found in the trunk of his car with two .22 shells in his skull, on a hill overlooking a concert in the Hollywood Bowl, it appears to be a classic mob hit (“trunk music”). The trail leads Bosch quickly to Las Vegas, and to an apparent solution. It also leads him back to a woman who betrayed him, in the very first Bosch novel, The Black Echo. The situation may seem old hat but Connelly makes it work by constantly confounding your expectations as he finds new angles to pursue. His stories have more twists and turns than Mullholland Drive, but they never divert you from where they should be going. Because the murder is only part of the story, the rest is Harry Bosch, his character, and his conflicts with authority, the forces of control whose toes he inevitably steps on. “Who polices the police who police the police?” is a favourite Bosch line.

Character is action, said Fitzgerald, and the way Connelly gets to the core of the situation through Bosch suggests the genre’s best writers. If Bosch resembles Hammett’s Continental Op, a lone wolf who’s honest in a corrupt world, the woman who betrayed him is his Brigit O’Shaugnessy. Trunk Music also recalls Chandler’s relishing of the sleazy Hollywood milieu and his use of Las Vegas as a contemporary Bay City, where respectable people go to be bad, and bad people go to help them. The hothouse corruption of Aliso’s wife and the deserted settings in the Hollywood hills smack of Chandler at his best.

There is no new ground broken in Connelly’s prose style, but he writes with sensitivity to nuance, the kind of undercurrent often missed in conversation. He is particularly good in the interplay of verbal and psychological warfare. This was shown best in The Last Coyote (1995) , where Bosch fences with the police psychologist who must decide if he is fit to return to duty after he has assaulted his chief, the wonderfully named Harvey “98” Pounds (as in the American equivalent of 7 stone weakling). 

Bosch uses his suspension to investigate the murder of his mother, a prostitute, who gave him his name because she had no father’s name to use. There is more than a hint of James Ellroy in the pursuit of this case, which leads to revelations of Chinatown-like corruption. Although he lacks the innovative prose fire of Ellroy, Connelly has the skill to create a powerful new story out of familiar materials to create a new story with its own power.

After The Last Coyote, Connelly changed gears with The Poet (1996), a serial killer novel which is interesting, but hampered by the use of a reporter as its protagonist. The journalist, oddly, lacks the psychic empathy to the killer that the cop may have, the kind of feeling for criminals that Bosch has. The Poet, of course, became a best-seller in America. Trunk Music marks Bosch’s return, and lives up to the high standard of The Last Coyote. This is the strongest crime series being written in America right now, and Trunk Music gets an unqualified recommendation.

BOSCH: THE COMPLETE FIRST SERIES

It's not often one's highest hopes are rewarded. Watching the Bosch TV series through to the end on Amazon hasn't changed my opinion of it (see my interview with Michael Connelly and Titus Welliver and essay on the first four episodes here) but it has widened my perspective. I rejoined the series with episode five, Mama's Boy, which again was directed by Ernest Dickerson in the most stunning fashion for the small screen. Dickerson has always been good in darker, shadowy locations, and the way he blends that darker sense with the bright light of Los Angeles is a perfect visual metaphor for what Connelly's books and the series itself try to do.

What's most interesting about the complete series is the way it winds up aligning with that vision in so many ways. It's light on the shootouts and car chases, and it is very heavy on the grind of police work, the slow process of unglamorous detection. Although Harry's relationships, with his daughter, his ex, and with his colleagues are inevitably the focus, the story lines, intertwined admirably (presumably by Eric Overmyer) from a number of Connelly's books, reflect issues that mirror Bosch the person and Bosch the detective, not least those of parenthood. The two major plot threads are connected, with the discovery of the body of a teenager murdered 20 years earlier ( City Of Bones) linking to the serial killer Reynard Waits (Echo Park). Bosch himself is introduced by a smaller storyline taken from The Concrete Blonde. It's a fascinating bit of adaptation, and what stands out is the way they have been combined to reinforce each other. Even Shawn Hatosy as Stokes and Jason Gedrick as Waits seem to reinforce each other.

The ensemble cast is not new to police drama (think especially of Hill Street Blues) and it is very much of a part of modern Scandinavian crime -- like Martin Beck, Bosch's essential isolation plays off the group he works with. But the persistent and upfront conflict with authority is an essential part of Bosch's work ethic. It is helped in this case by another parallel story, detailing the bartering between District Attorney Rick O'Shea (Stephen Culp), who wants to be mayor, and Deputy Chief Irvin Irving (Lance Reddick, in a role that seems an outgrowth of his part in The Wire) who wants to be chief and holds a copy of the video O'Shea thought he'd destroyed, which shows his own, rather than Bosch's culpability in Waits' escape from custody. It's a tremendous cast, with Jamie Hector as Bosch's partner Jerry Edgar and Mark Derwin as his nemesis Harvey Pounds standing out, and the seemingly requisite lesbian kiss signaled by Rose Rollins (fresh from The L Word) as Kiz Ryder. Annie Wersching does an excellent job of mercurial changes in her relationship with Bosch, while Sarah Clarke, as Eleanor Wish (it's not just villains whose names signify things) signals both why she was attracted to Bosch and why the relationship couldn't work. Pat Skipper, as the father of the murdered boy, has some devastating scenes, as does Veronica Cartwright as Waits' mother.

But the essence of good character acting is having good characters, and it is a tribute to the writing of the show that they have so much to work with. It's also writing that takes chances. The main story arc actually resolves itself in the ninth of the ten episodes, and I found it significant that Connelly himself co-scripted the final episode, which is where the series comes full circle back to its focus on Bosch while tying the other story lines together.

And of course Bosch is the centre. I started off admiring what Welliver brought to the part: a fierce internal drive which is the essence of Bosch. As the series went on, I realised he matched by pre-conception of Bosch less and less: he a bit too ectomorphic, too lean, sharp-angled, and hard. He dresses too well, wears too showy a watch, and a bracelet that seemed disconcerting. But then I realised that this is a bit of keeping with the times, and the anachronism is wound up in the turntable, and the jazz LPs that Bosch plays, and the way his daughter marvels at them (and doesn't even have CDs). Times have changed.

Then it occurred to me that my image of Bosch is very close to my image of Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op, an un-preposessing slightly soft around the edges detective, but that this does not have to be what Bosch should be, and what Welliver brought to the character was very much in keeping with where he was going in this show. Moreover, it occured to me that if you were casting for Hammett's Sam Spade (not that the world needs a remake of The Maltese Falcon) Titus Welliver would be the perfect choice for the Bogart part, and that Bogart might have made a decent Harry Bosch in his own time. Welliver as Bogart; I can't think of a much higher compliment. And Bosch: The Series has left me already anticipating the second season.

PAUL THOMAS' DEATH ON DEMAND

I have to confess; I pulled Paul Thomas' novel off the 'to read' shelf as soon as I returned from a too-short trip to New Zealand, and tore through it. It may be the most Chandlerian detective novel I've read in a long time. This is a compliment, but not in the way you might think.

What Death on Demand is not is descriptive of Aotearoa, neither the land nor the cities in which the action takes place. Neighbourhoods are barely sketched in, there's little of the background life, and even individual locations have none of the detail which Chandler uses to give clues about the nature of his characters and the character and the nature of Los Angeles. Nor is it written in the kind of wise-cracking first-person prose, full of evocative similies and wry commentary that translated so well into the mouths of actors like Bogart, or closer to Marlowe himself, Dick Powell or James Garner.

Tito Ihaka shares with Marlowe is a healthy disrespect for authority—though unlike Chandler's idealist, he is a realist who has stayed in his job in the police, because, as one character puts it, what else would he do? Plus, Tito is a Maori, and as such has a healthy outsider's scepticism about the pakeha who run New Zealand. Scepticism, in Marlowe's case, is idealism smashed on the shores of reality, but Ihaka was never an idealist. This seems to appeal to women; like Marlowe he sometimes has them throwing themselves at him, but where Marlowe, ever the schoolboyish knight of Chandler's imagination, usually keeps them at arm's length, always aware of the potential for ulterior motives, Ihaka again is more realistic.

But what made me think of Chandler was the depth of the story, the way it works back in time, through layers of society, through people who are not the people they seem, and through intense corruption, personal and institutional, at every layer. Thomas' picture of New Zealand society is drawn through the aspirations and limitations of the characters, through the goals of success they've been set within their society, and the brilliant way every personal conversation can have many layers. This works best when Ihaka is involved, and as I write this, it strikes me that he bears more relation to Hammett's Continental Op than to Chandler's Marlowe, but Ihaka is, in effect, a sounding-board for all sections of the society he protects.

Not least in the police department itself. I'm partial to tales of the infighting within the police, the way the bureaucracy often works against crime-solving, especially as one moves up the social strata. In that sense New Zealand is a small town, and you very much get the sense that to some cops, 'it's Chinatown', that, as in the best hard-boiled fictions, many crimes cannot be solved, or if solved, cannot be punished.

Ihaka is brought back to Auckland from exile in Greytown (both places I know) because a well-connected man Ihaka was convinced had staged his wife's accidental death wants to speak to him. Ihaka's refusal to leave the man alone was what had hime shipped to the Wairapa in the first place, that and knocking out his police nemesis in a men's room and pissing, literally, all over him. Now he's back, and he's looking for an anonymous hitman who did commit that murder, and others besides. The story is as compicated as the best of Chandler, with as many twists; I thought of The Little Sister, Farewell My Lovely, and The Lady In The Lake at various times, and that is high praise indeed. As I said, it's told in the third person, with the narration jumping times and characters, but the prose works best when Ihaka's on stage, and he's drawn well enough to get the reader identifying with him, and making it almost like the first-person when you see through Marlowe's eyes. The first three Ihaka novels appeared in the mid-1990s; is so good I'd lobby for Bitter Lemon to bring them all back into print in this country.

Death On Demand

Death On Demand by Paul Thomas

Bitter Lemon Press, £8.99, ISBN 9781908524171

NOTE: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

BLUE LONESOME: BILL PRONZINI REVISITED

BLUE LONESOME
by Bill Pronzini
Canongate 2001, £9.99

(note: Bill Pronzini was honoured with the MWA 2008 Grand Master Award, but his publication in Britain remains woefully lacking. I wrote this piece in 2001 for the Spectator, but despite Canongate packaging the book to attract 'serious' attention, the review appears here for the first time, perhaps because one does not like foreigners criticising one's publishing institutions does not one?)

Bill Pronzini has written more than 50 novels, and another dozen or so collections of non-fiction or short stories, but this is his first book published in Britain. Most of his output has been crime fiction or westerns, and he could be considered one of the last of the old-fashioned pulp writers.
Given that, it’s not surprising that in America, Pronzini is best known for his “Nameless Detective” series of novels, whose protagonist, a pulp magazine-collecting private eye, owes much to Dashiell Hammett’s similarly nameless ‘Continental Op’ and like him, is based in San Francisco. The ‘Nameless’ novels deserve reprinting in Britain, but BLUE LONESOME is a far better starting point, a multi-faceted work which highlights Pronzini’s strongest points as a crime writer.

The novel moves through three stages. The first is a hommage to the classic 1950s pulp novel of urban alienation, and is bleak enough to live up to Canongate’s thoughtful use of Edward Hopper’s “Sunlight In A Cafeteria” on the cover. Jim Messenger is a San Francisco accountant stuck in a dead-end job and living a dead-end life, who becomes fascinated with a woman he spies eating at his local cafeteria, a woman who appears to be even lonelier than he is. When the woman is found dead, having slit her wrists in the bathtub, Messenger decides to find out who she was, and what drove her to such a desperate act.

Following a clue to her real identity, he winds up in the Nevada desert, and the second stage of the story begins, as the stranger in town starts turning over rocks the locals would rather leave unturned. Pronzini’s working familiar territory, reminiscent of movies like “Bad Day At Black Rock”, but as Messenger’s own resources are tested, the surface friendliness of the small town reveals its own type of loneliness, more dangerous than the cold city from which Messenger fled. He also realises individuals make their own isolation, and it requires a certain courage to break out from it.

The book’s final stage is classic whodunit. Pronzini may have a hard-boiled facade, but underneath he loves literary puzzles, in which clues are left for the reader, crimes are solved by deduction, and the world is put right. Messenger lives up to his name, as far as Beluah, Nevada is concerned, and the suicide of a lonely woman in the city turns out to be a rebirth for him.
In other hands, this might have been a wild neo-noir cauldron of steamy sex and violence. Or it could have just as easily gone down the kind of pretentious existential road we fear is coming whenever we see Hopper’s paintings on book covers. Pronzini has a more basic agenda. If his prose doesn’t stun, neither does it get in the way of a carefully constructed, satisfying story, as spare and honest as Hopper. Much more than a cosy mystery, and justification for finally ending Pronzini’s British publishing isolation.