Last One In

Michael Connelly’s books were first recommended to me in 1996, when The Poet was published, but I didn’t read him for years because a) in 1996 I was a bookseller, and the recommendations all came from customers, and I’d decided by that point that customers were always wrong about everything; b) I couldn’t even keep up with recommendations from my co-workers, and they knew what they were talking about when they recommended a book; c) no co-worker ever recommended Michael Connelly to me; d) The Poet was about a serial killer, and I didn’t care if I never read another serial killer novel; e) the rest of his books were about some cop, and I tended to agree with Hitchcock’s dismissal of policemen as “dull”; and f) there was something off-putting about several customer’s insistence that this guy was the only mystery writer worth reading at the moment -- an understandable sentiment, in a way, what with Patricia Cornwell and Tom Clancy dominating the bestseller lists, but still: Pronouncements like that grabbed me when I was sixteen, and The Clash was The Only Band That Matters, but I was older now, and more than a little embarrassed to hear middle-aged men (the customer was always a middle-aged man) carrying on so.

It only took me, um, fourteen years to overcome this poor first impression, but I finally read one of the Harry Bosch series, Angels Flight. It’s a terrific book.

I started Angels Flight just after finishing The Watchman, by Robert Crais. It was a great relief to open the Connelly book and see paragraphs longer than one sentence.

(I haven’t read much Robert Crais, either; I read The Two-Minute Rule a couple years ago and found it to be just about everything I could ask for from what I think of as a commercial thriller. I don’t know what happened between that book and The Watchman, but Crais seems to have fallen under the spell of Business Management English, never using a plain-old verb when he can stretch for (or invent) one that sounds more Action-y --- a practice that perhaps reaches its nadir with this sentence, during an interrogation scene: “Cole worked to relax the young man.” Um, what’s wrong with “tried”?)

Connelly’s prose has a one-foot-in-front-of-the-other quality that’s pleasing, comforting, and eventually thrilling, and that only rarely coughs up a sentence like this one: “It was locked and he knocked.” The reader is sometimes tempted to skip ahead; the reader won’t, because the writer won’t. That’s called suspense.

Or the reader might: It’s a reader’s right to barnstorm. When the writer barnstorms, it just seems lazy. Excite me -- or work to excite me, if you must. Don’t get excited on my behalf.

I've owned the first dozen or so of Michael Connelly's books for six or seven years now, and I think it might be a little while before I read anything by anyone else. My apologies to my customers of 1996.

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