Connelly's Lt. Bosch Moonlights -- in Other Writers' Books

By TOM NOLAN
April 4, 2006; Page D8

Crime-fiction novelist Michael Connelly's many readers look forward to a new book involving his popular series-protagonist LAPD Lt. Hieronymous "Harry" Bosch every year or so. (The author alternates Harry Bosch titles with novels featuring other protagonists. The most recent Bosch book was 2005's "The Closers"; the next Bosch title, "Echo Park," is scheduled for publication in October.

But in February, alert Bosch-watchers were rewarded with a bonus glimpse of the fictional Southern California cop -- not in a Connelly work, but in another writer's novel.

On page nine of "Strange Bedfellows," Paula L. Woods's just-published fourth book about fictional LAPD homicide detective Charlotte Justice, the female cop-narrator catches a glimpse of "a curly-headed, mustachioed guy" in conversation with her boss in front of police headquarters and thinks: Surely her lieutenant "couldn't be trying to get Harry Bosch transferred back to Robbery-Homicide, not after that case he screwed up. Or maybe...Bosch can fill the spot...you'll be vacating if you don't get your act together."

"Charlotte is at a point in her own paranoia about her job," Ms. Woods explained recently, "that she's afraid that she could be replaced. And when that book takes place [in 1993], I knew that Harry had been bounced out of RHD; that was his back-story. So I thought, 'Wouldn't it be interesting if he happened to be there, and she saw him?'...Michael's character I think is so iconic...there was no way that people would say, 'Who's Harry Bosch?'...It's a way of paying homage to the writer."

This fleeting appearance of Mr. Connelly's hero is the latest in a small but growing series of Bosch-sightings in other writers' books. The conscientious, moody L.A. police detective (who debuted in the 1992 novel "The Black Echo") has been interacting briefly with fictional colleagues, it seems, since 2001, when Joe Gores, a Northern California writer, worked a reference to Harry Bosch into "Cons, Scams, and Grifts," one of his "DKA File" novels.

"I stuck him in," Mr. Gores recalled, "not really as a character. I just had my [Bay Area] guys say, 'Well we were talking with Harry Bosch down at the Hollywood station; there's a murder down there, and he's gonna look into it for us.'"

Mr. Gores got permission beforehand from Mr. Connelly for this cameo reference. "As far as I know," says Michael Connelly, now living in Florida, "that was the first time" another author made such use of his series lead. "Other times, I've just kind of heard about it....If it's happening, it's obviously a nice compliment. So, as far as I can tell, it's fine with me."

The most elaborate Bosch cameo yet was one in which Mr. Connelly himself participated. In 2003, when he and fellow detective-novelist Robert Crais each had books scheduled for publication at about the same time, the writers arranged for a Bosch appearance to be matched by a sighting of Elvis -- not Elvis Presley, but Mr. Crais's L.A. private-detective character Elvis Cole.

"The artful reader would recognize 'em," Mr. Connelly said, "because we think we have almost a hundred percent overlap in our audiences....So in my book 'Lost Light,' at one point Harry Bosch comes to a red light, and across the red light is a private detective he knows that's his neighbor, in the yellow Corvette; and they just kind of give each other the smooth-sailing signal.

"Then in Bob's book 'The Last Detective,' he had Elvis Cole taken to the Hollywood police station...and there he talks to another detective, unrelated to the case, who he knew was a Vietnam veteran; and he just gives a few descriptions that kind of made it clear, without naming him, that that was Harry Bosch."

Such overlappings of Bosch into other people's fiction seems an extension of a creative device Mr. Connelly himself employs on a grander scale. In the books of Michael Connelly (16, so far), major and minor characters from this or that series or stand-alone title wander in and out of one another's sagas all the time. The female-criminal lead of 1999's "Void Moon," for instance, has since been glimpsed in a couple of Harry Bosch novels. The journalist-sleuth of "The Poet" (1997) later played a part in one of Bosch's cases. And very sharp-eyed readers of the 2005 book "The Lincoln Lawyer" will spot that novel's eponymous attorney as the son of a man ID'ed long ago as the father of Harry Bosch.

"It's all part of the same canvas," is how Mr. Connelly describes the way his various books tie together. "The main character of all this is Harry Bosch, and his real name is Hieronymous Bosch; and the starting-point of all this was the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch," whose grotesque 15th-century visions find oblique parallels through Mr. Connelly's modern-day tales. In a Bosch picture, the author noted, there are "many different stories going on...but they're all part of the same painting....Things in one corner might not appear to be connected to something in the opposite corner; but when you step further back and see the painting as a whole, then it all fits together."

Adding yet another dimension to Harry Bosch's canvas are many real-life people -- police officers, judges, bookstore owners, art historians -- who make cameo appearances under their own names in Mr. Connelly's fiction.

"There's a couple things goin' on there," the author said of his use of actual folk in his made-up stories. "One is: It helps me write the books...because it's people I know....So I automatically know what they look like, and how they sound, and their postures, and all these things that help me visualize the scenes I'm writing about.

"A second aspect of it is that they're usually people that have been very helpful to me, and it's a way of saying thanks....I don't do it without telling them....In 'Lincoln Lawyer,' I used a judge and everyone in her courtroom, from her bailiff to her clerk to the stenographer; and so I sent the pages, I wanted them all to read it and sign off on it -- because I'm happy not to use their names if they don't want them used."

Mr. Connelly, before becoming a novelist, was for nearly a dozen years a crime reporter, first in Florida and then in Southern California. (A collection of his journalism, "Crime Beat: A Decade of Covering Cops and Killers," will be published this May.) In writing his fiction, he retains a journalist's urge to get the facts straight: "I try to be accurate about Los Angeles. Yes, I'm writing fictional stories; but I put them against a hard, factual surface. And that's not just getting the streets and the city right, but it's trying to get the politics of the police department right and so forth. So, yeah, it really comes out of my instinct as a journalist, I think."

But a novelist's instinct keeps him from using highly visible real-life figures in his fiction: "because if you get into well-known people -- it becomes something different." So when Harry Bosch and colleagues had cause in last year's "The Closers" to visit their department's chief (at one point, bringing him a cup of Starbucks coffee to induce quick access), Mr. Connelly borrowed real-life LAPD head Bill Bratton's Eastern accent ("De-paht-ment") but took pains to call his fictional character simply "the chief of police."

Nevertheless, while on a bookstore tour for the novel, Mr. Connelly got a surprise telephone call: "I'm not sure how he got my cellphone number, but -- it's Chief Bratton. And you know, I was careful not to use his name [in the book]; but he just went right by that, assuming that I was writing about him, and he said: 'You got everything right, except for one thing.' And I kind of braced myself; you know, was he upset about something?

"He said, 'I don't like Starbucks.'"

So the journalist-turned-novelist acquired another bit of true color he might someday add to his fictional L.A. canvas: "There's a little place up in Los Feliz, where he lives -- like, a Vietnamese doughnut shop. He goes there every morning to get coffee on the way in."

Mr. Nolan is the author of "Ross Macdonald: A Biography."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114410282299115781.html

Blooker Prizes: Best Books o' the Blogs and Web Sites

The Lulu Blooker Prizes, the first literary prize devoted to "blooks"--books based on blogs or Web sites--have been awarded in three categories, fiction, nonfiction and comics. There is also an overall winner. The awards are sponsored by Lulu, which makes POD books and an increasing number of blooks.

The overall winner and nonfiction winner is:

Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen by Julia Powell (Little, Brown, $23.95, 031610969X), who spent a year cooking all the recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Cory Doctorow, one of the judges, commented: "Julia & Julia does that amazing nonfiction trick of making you care about a subject through great storytelling, even if you don't care about the subject itself. Powell's heartfelt, funny, and occasionally obscene tell-all about her journey of self-discovery and cholesterol is by turns funny, shocking and delicious. Those who dismiss blogging as 'mere' confessional writing and complaining about one's day job fail to appreciate just how engrossing those genres can be when handled by a talented writer like Julie Powell. The story of how blogging--writing in public--changed Powell's life is inspirational and memorable."

Fiction winner:

Four and Twenty Blackbirds by Cherie Priest (Tor, $13.95, 0765313081). Judge Paul Jones said, "This blook captivated me with its gusto, its invocation of a dark South both in mountains and in swamp. Priest can tell a tale and she can write a sentence that competes with the best out there. Stephen King should be very afraid."

The comics winner:

Totally Boned: A Joe and Monkey Collection by Zach Miller (Lulu Press, $14.95, 1411671902). Doctorow observed: "Laugh-milk-through-your-nose funny comics aimed at an audience that could only be commercially viable through the Internet. Geeks are distributed in a thin Gaussian layer across the world, and while it might not make sense to put one copy of this in every bookstore in America, putting it online where all geeks can find it makes it into a smash success."

Celebrities List Favorite Books for 2006

By GLENN ADAMS
The Associated Press
Friday, March 31, 2006; 4:27 PM

GARDINER, Maine -- Gregg Allman acknowledges that he doesn't read as much as he should. But when a friend gave him a copy of "The Five People You Meet in Heaven," the rocker couldn't put it down.

"I've had it three days and am almost finished, at which time I plan to read it again," the singer and songwriter from The Allman Brothers Band told a retired Maine librarian who asked him what his favorite book is.

Allman joins actors, authors, politicians, a Supreme Court justice and a Harvard astrophysicist who responded to Glenna Nowell's queries for her annual "Who Reads What?" list in time for National Library Week, April 2-8.

Their responses ranged from the nice _ Rosalynn Carter's favorite is the Bible _ to the naughty: dirty joke books favored by writer Piers Anthony.

Nowell, a silver-haired retired librarian, started writing to celebrities in 1988 for her annual list. She searches the Internet for her eclectic collections of names, based on suggestions from friends and people who e-mail her.

A sizable share of responses come from writers, who are voracious readers by nature. A few contact Nowell out of the blue. Nowell tries to mix up her lists, getting people of all political parties and from varied backgrounds. She even seeks names that are scattered about the alphabet.

With an impish smile, she said she chose Allman because she wanted someone with a last name starting with A.

This year, she got responses from two Hollywood veterans: Jane Russell and Eva Marie Saint.

Russell, who played opposite Marilyn Monroe in the 1953 movie "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," looks to the heavens these days for her literary inspiration, citing "Hearing God" by Lory Basham Jones. While Saint, who won an Academy Award for her 1954 film debut in "On the Waterfront," lists "The Year of Magical Thinking" by Joan Didion and "Elia Kazan: A Biography" by Richard Schickel, about the director of "On the Waterfront."

Many of the titles deal with more mainstream material. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg expressed her joy in reading a biography of a giant of the high court's past, "John Marshall: Definer of a Nation," by Jean Edward Smith. But she also recommends retired justice Sandra Day O'Connor and H. Alan Day's "The Lazy B," the story of a girl who grew up to become a Supreme Court justice.

Writer Sue Grafton was amused by the "dry and sly British observations" in Julian Fellowes' "Snobs." Writer Nadine Gordimer wrote that "In Search of Lost Time" by Marcel Proust, which she first read at age 15, "has been a revelation of human relationships and literary genius, all my life."

Medieval murder mystery writer Michael Jecks replied with a variety of favorites but found too little space to mention all of them.

"Yes, sadly there are so many good books that picking one or two is almost criminally shortsighted," the English writer wrote. Some of Jecks' favorites: "The Hobbit" by J.R.R Tolkien; "Pickwick Papers" by Charles Dickens and "The Day of the Jackal" by Frederick Forsyth.

Harvard University astrophysicist Margaret Geller, who sees the world from a truly universal perspective, is down to Earth in her choices for literature. Geller lists "The End of Poverty," Jeffrey Sachs' book about the possibilities for a poverty-free future, and "A Bed of Red Flowers: In Search of My Afghanistan" by Nelofer Pazira as her favorites.

Politicians often turn out to be eager readers, as evidenced by this year's list. New York Gov. George Pataki, who likes to end his day by reading biographies, historical volumes or best sellers, said he was engrossed in Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln." Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack recommends "The World Is Flat" by Thomas Friedman.

Over the years, two consistent favorites have been the Bible and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." Mark Twain's classic is one of three favorites listed this year by biographer Kitty Kelley, who also lists "Gentleman's Agreement" by Laura Hobson and "Strange Fruit" by Lillian Smith.

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On the Net:

Gardiner Public Library: http://www.gpl.lib.me.us/



Celebrities List Favorite Books for 2006