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In a little over a decade, Michael Connelly has established himself as one of the best mystery writers working in America today.
With novels like THE BLACK ECHO and THE CONCRETE BLONDE, he brought readers onto the mean streets of modern Los Angeles through cases involving police detective Harry (short for Hieronymus) Bosch. His fifth novel and first non-Bosch book, THE POET, made Connelly a bestselling author. He has written a total of 16 mysteries and crime novels.
CRIME BEAT is Connelly's first book of nonfiction and a compilation of his writings as a newspaper crime reporter in both Florida and Los Angeles from 1984 to 1992. These 22 articles display the raw material that in Connelly's skilled hands would later help produce Harry Bosch and the serial killer known as the Poet. They also reveal the attention to detail and clean, concise writing that is a hallmark of both great journalism and Connelly's novels.
And in many ways, these works of nonfiction are even darker and more terrifying than his novels. In the introduction of CRIME BEAT, Connelly writes, "The irony of crime beat journalism --- maybe all journalism --- is that the best stories are really the worse stories. The stories of calamity and tragedy are the stories that journalists live for. It gets the adrenaline churning in their blood and can burn them out young, but nevertheless it is a hard fact of the business. Their best day is your worse day."
And there are a lot of bad days in CRIME BEAT. A hit man kills his target with a machine gun in front of the victim's 16-year-old son. A husband hires somebody to beat his wife to death in her bed as she recovers from a mastectomy. A nurse sees a man lying in the street, stops her car to help him, and the man jumps up and shoots her dead. A serial killer poses as a professional photographer to lure young women to their deaths.
The violence chronicled here is grim, unrelenting and executed for all the usual reasons: greed, sex, rage, power and madness. And worst of all, it is real.
Readers turn to mysteries for entertainment; reading the darkest story is like listening to a ghost story around the campfire. We want to be scared but know that by the time the last embers die, we will be safe in our sleeping bags as we drift off to sleep and dawn is on the way. And with that dawn and on the last page, justice will prevail.
Reporters and cops know that this is rarely the case in real life. Happy endings happen only in movies. The killer sometimes is caught and sometimes disappears, like the 21-year-old son who meticulously planed and executed the murder of his father in Los Angeles in 1987 and was never found. Or sometimes, the case is never solved, like the murder of the 51-year-old businessman, Vic Weiss, who was found stuffed in the trunk of his red and white Rolls Royce in LA in 1988. That news story later became the basis for Connelly's novel, TRUNK MUSIC.
What makes CRIME BEAT so hard-boiled is the simple, understated way Connelly writes about these horrors. For example, he says:
"Michael Connable, 31, was walking with two friends down Sixth Street towards the Riverside Pub. It was midnight dark, and a second group of three men were approaching from the opposite way. As the two groups passed, one of the men from Group Two opened fire. The men from Group One began running. Fifty yards later Connable fell dead a few feet from the door to the Riverside Pub, his blood slowly seeping down an incline on the parking lot towards a storm drain."
In the world Connelly writes about, violence strikes without warning and the results last forever. A woman seeks to escape her con man husband when she finds that he is married to another woman and has lived a double life. She gets the husband to surrender his gun to police. What she doesn't find out until the moment before he kills her is that the police gave the gun back to him.
"She would have never gone there if she knew he had the gun back," he (the victim's attorney) said. "She made a mistake and paid for it."
Connelly is not only a great novelist; CRIME BEAT proves that he is also a great reporter. Another great reporter turned great novelist, Pete Hamill, once told me that the tough thing about working the crime beat for a newspaper is that you can't approach it like a cop or funeral home director seeing yet another body during another day of work. You have to make death seem fresh each and every time you write a story because even if it is your 1,000th murder scene, the reader is reading it for the first time.
Connelly accomplishes this in CRIME BEAT. He doesn't editorialize. His stories are filled with the detachment and telling details of the reporter. But beneath the surface, you can feel the empathy he has for the victims and get a sense of the complexity that would later emerge in his fictional characters, like Harry Bosch. Good and evil is not always as simple as black and white.
It is the work of the novelist to explore those complexities and the gray areas that exist inside the human heart. Michael Connelly will be doing this for years to come, much to the delight of mystery fans. Read CRIME BEAT and see a young writer laying the foundation for his lifework.
--- Reviewed by Tom Callahan
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