Michael Connelly

By Michael Connelly, from the Limited Edition Release of The Poet.  WARNING: SPOILERS for The Poet.

After Robert Backus headed off into the darkness in the last pages of The Poet my full intention was for him to remain in the darkness, to never return, to always be out there like a killer ghost haunting my fictional world. I started writing the book in 1995. I had recently left my job as a journalist and was still struggling with the idea that as a crime novelist it would be expected that I write stories where good always vanquished evil, where the good guy caught the bad guy, where there were no loose ends — especially a jagged end like a killer left in the wind. I had spent a dozen years as a police beat reporter and I knew that reality was quite the opposite of that. People get away with murder everyday. I had written dozens and dozens of newspaper stories about murders that had gone unsolved. During the year I was writing The Poet I saw the murder case against O.J. Simpson start to self-destruct and the Los Angeles Police Department vilified for it. And so it was hard for me to turn from the reality of the world I knew and write one more murder mystery in which the sun rose at the end and all was right in the world. So I wrote The Poet with the idea that it would be a thrill ride with enough reader fulfillment at the end to overcome the dissatisfaction of having the killer ultimately get away. Before I wrote the first line — Death is my beat — I knew that the book would end with the killer slipping away into the darkness.

Now here I am eight years later, sitting in the same room at the Chateau Marmont where Jack McEvoy encountered Robert Backus, and I am trying to explain to you and myself why I have just written a sequel to The Poet. It is hard to explain, other than to simply say things have changed. That was then and this is now. Just out the window and across the balcony I no longer see the Marlboro Man’s steely eyes watching from the billboard. He has been replaced by a vanilla vodka bottle. I am different, too. And so is the world.

In the years since writing The Poet the world has grown more welcoming to me at the same time it’s become more uncertain to me. A couple years after writing The Poet I became a father and my life became wonderful and vulnerable in the same moment. As I watched my daughter grow it began to bother me that I had created a fictional world where a killer like Robert Backus could walk free. I started to long for order to be restored in that world. After all, the real world had become a place of increased fears and uncertain safety. I came to realize that the one place where I could control things was in the fictional universe that I had created. So six years after Robert Backus disappeared into the dark I made the decision to go back into that darkness to find him. And I decided to use Harry Bosch for the job. Harry is my best man. He is also a man who has become a father and knows my sense of wonder and joy and fear all at the same time. The story is called The Narrows and my hope is that it shows a bit of what I have learned since the time I decided to let a killer go free.

Yes, in reality people still get away with murder. I don’t know if that will ever change. But I have come to realize that the line between reality and the created world of a novel is thinnest when it comes to human feelings and desires. It is easy to take those across the line, traveling from fiction to reality. And so I have learned that it is important to take care in the fictional universe of your own creation. It is important to remember that the darkness into which you may banish a killer can travel. It can cross that line. I don’t want that to happen. In that respect I look at The Narrows as a story that is long overdue.

Michael Connelly
Chateau Marmont Hotel, Los Angeles
December 13, 2003

“Infernally ingenious …An irresistibly readable thriller.”
— New York Times

“Chilling…Connelly puts his foot on the gas and doesn’t let up.”
— Los Angeles Times

“An intriguing new protagonist…. Connelly doesn’t just talk about poets, he writes like one, with a spare, elegiac tone that is the perfect voice for the haunting tale he has to tell.”
— People Magazine

“On the fright level, “The Poet” ranks with Thomas Harris’ ‘The Silence of the Lambs’.”
— Fort Lauderdale News and Sun Sentinel

Death is my beat.  I make my living from it.  I forge my professional relationship on it.  I treat it with the passion and precision of an undertaker — somber and sympathetic about it when I’m with the bereaved, a skilled craftsman with it when I’m alone.  I’ve always thought the secret to dealing with death was to keep it at arm’s length.  That’s the rule.  Don’t let it breathe in your face.

But my rule didn’t protect me.  When the two detectives came for me and told me about Sean, a cold numbness quickly enveloped me.  It was like I was on the other side of the aquarium window.  I moved as if underwater — back and forth, back and forth — and looked out at the rest of the world through the glass.  From the backseat of their car I could see my eyes in the rearview mirror, flashing each time we passed beneath a streetlight.  I recognized the thousand-yard stare I had seen in the eyes of fresh widows I had interviewed over the years.

I knew only one of the two detectives, Harold Wexler.  I had met him a few months earlier when I stopped into the Pints Of for a drink with Sean.  They worked in CAPS together on the Denver PD.  I remembered Sean called him Wex.  Cops always use nicknames for each other.  Wexler’s is Wex, Sean’s, Mac.  It’s some kind of tribal bonding thing.  Some of the names aren’t complimentary but the cops don’t complain.  I know one down in Colorado Springs named Scoto whom most other cops call Scroto.  Some even go all the way and call him Scrotum, but my guess is that you have to be a close friend to get away with that.

Wexler was built like a small bull, powerful but squat.  A voice slowly cured over the years by cigarette smoke and whiskey.  A hatchet face that always seemed red the times I saw him.  I remember he drank Jim Beam over ice.  I’m always interested in what cops drink.  It tells a lot about them.  When they’re taking it straight like that,  I always think that maybe they’ve seen too many things too many times that most people never see even once.  Sean was drinking Lite beer that night, but he was young.  Even though he was the supe of the CAPs unit, he was at least ten years younger than Wexler.  Maybe in ten years he would have been taking his medicine cold and straight like Wexler.  But now I’ll never know.

I spent most of the drive out from Denver thinking about that night at the Pints Of.  Not that anything important had happened.  It was just drinks with my brother at the cop bar.  And it was the last good time between us, before Theresa Lofton came up.  That memory put me back in the aquarium.

But during the moments that reality was able to punch through the glass and into my heart, I was seized by a feeling of failure and grief.  It was the first real tearing of the soul I had experienced in my thirty-four years.  That included the death of my sister.  I was too young then to properly grieve for Sarah or even to understand the pain of a life unfulfilled.  I grieved now because I had not even known Sean was close to the edge.  He was Lite beer while all the other cops I knew were whiskey on the rocks.

Of course, I also recognized how self-pitying this kind of grief was.  The truth was that for a long time we hadn’t listened much to each other.  We had taken different paths.  And each time I acknowledged this truth the cycle of my grief would begin again.

My brother once told me the theory of the limit.  He said every homicide cop had a limit but the limit was unknown until it was reached.  He was talking about dead bodies.  Sean believed that there were just so many that a cop could look at.  It was a different number for each person.  Some hit it early.  Some put in twenty in homicide and never got close.  But there was a number.  And when it came up, that was it.  You transferred to records, you turned in your badge, you did something.  Because you just couldn’t look at another one.  And if you did, if you exceeded your limit, well, then you were in trouble.  You might end up sucking down a bullet.  That’s what Sean said.

The Last Coyote Lost Chapter: 1961

Published here for the first time is a chapter from The Last Coyote that never made it into the final published book. It is a glimpse into Harry Bosch’s past. It was originally written as the prologue to the book. It takes place at the youth hall where an 11-year-old Harry was placed after he was removed from his mother’s custody because she was deemed an unfit mother.

Michael was asked why he, initially at least, wanted to start the book with this scene at the youth hall? Here is his answer:

“It doesn’t specifically say it, but this scene was the last time he ever saw his mother. Obviously, that would be a significant moment in his life. So initially I just wanted to create that scene and to show two things; that his mother was working hard to get him back and that despite the sad situation he and she were in, he loved her no matter what. I thought that showing this would help the reader understand why her unsolved murder would haunt Harry until he finally blew the dust off it and investigated it. However, pieces of this scene were mentioned or thought about by Harry in later sections of the book and it was thought that removing the prologue got the reader into the present day story more quickly and smoothly while the sentiment was expressed later on.”

1961

All the picnic tables were already taken by mothers and sons when they got outside so the boy led his visitor to the grass along the fence. The fence served as both the right field limit of the softball field and the barrier to the outside world. Few of the boys ever hit to the fence. And it seemed as though fewer ever got beyond it to the outside world.

They didn’t speak until they got there and then both stood looking out through the fence. The San Gabriel Mountains were distant in the smog. It smelled like rain to the boy but it had been weeks since there had been any and he had had false premonitions of rain before. The Public Social Services lady who had followed them stood about twenty feet away. Watching everybody, but not watching anybody.

The visitor broke the silence.

“Is it any better for you now?”

“It’s okay” the boy replied. “Don’t worry.”

“I have to worry about you, you’re my baby.”

“I’m not a baby.”

“I know. You know what I mean.”

They didn’t speak for a while after that but that was okay. He just liked being with her and there was an easy comfort whether they spoke or not. She never missed a visit. He knew that was so she could show the Court, but he thought that she’d come every time even if it only mattered to them and the Court had nothing to do with it.

The Court was something he didn’t really understand yet. He’d actually never been there, but he had heard awful stories in the Hall from some of the other boys. What he found most baffling was that he didn’t think he had done anything wrong. Why had the Court put him here? Why couldn’t he leave?

He turned and leaned his back against the fence. A couple of the kids were trying to get a game going on the diamond. He knew they wouldn’t ask him. The PSS lady saw the game starting and walked to the side of the field, a safe enough distance from home plate so that she wouldn’t get hit with anything. The boy guessed that she knew they would intentionally try to hit one at her or maybe send an errant throw her way during the warm up between innings.

The woman with the boy also saw the game starting.

“You know, next season the Dodgers will be in the new stadium in downtown. Chavez Ravine. Won’t that be fun? We’ll go see Koufax.  Opening day. I promise. Would you like that?”

He nodded and tried to smile.

“Did you read the books?”

“One of them. I’m not finished with the other one yet.”

“I’ll have to take them back when you’re done. They’re from the library.”

“I know.”

That was why he had hidden them between his pillow and the slip case. He protected the books like they were gold. He thought that if they were stolen and she got blamed for not taking them back to the library, the Court would find out. This was a major fear he had, but he never wanted to tell her not to bring the books. He knew it meant a lot to her and so he read them. And he liked them. Of the two brothers, he thought he liked Joe Hardy the best. But he usually guessed the endings to the mysteries before either of them.

He noticed she was wearing the belt he had given her for her birthday. He knew she liked it because she wore it every time. He’d had help picking it out. And paying for it. That reminded him.

“How is Aunt Meredith?”

“She’s great. She was going to come .. .”

She didn’t finish but that was all right. He could guess the rest.  Meredith had a job.

“I talked to the attorney,” she said. “He said the appeal hasn’t been put on the court’s calendar yet but we’re almost there, baby. When it gets — I’m sorry, I’ll try to stop calling you that. Anyway, when it gets close to being on calendar I’m going to get a job at the coffee shop on Ivar. I already talked to Mr. Sinkowski about it. Me having a regular job will help. The attorney said that if I — Hey, what happened to your new Keds?”

The boy shrank back against the fence and wished the grass was tall enough so that he could hide his feet. He looked down at them as if they were somebody else’s, not his. He had hoped she wouldn’t notice. That was why he had wanted to get one of the picnic tables. She wouldn’t have noticed the missing Keds then.

“Nothing happened to them,” he tried. “I’m just wearing these today.”

“There’s holes in those. Don’t the new ones fit right?”

“They fit fine. I just …”

He looked away, toward the mountains. He hated lying to her. But he hated to hurt her or make her feel bad. He suddenly felt like crying but knew it would then make her cry. She stepped closer and turned his face with her hands. She leaned down a few inches to put her forehead against his. She always did this when she wanted him to tell her something that hurt to tell. She spoke very low and sweetly the way mothers do.

“What happened to your shoes, darling?”

He hesitated only long enough to swallow.

“One of the older kids in the dorm took them.”

“How old?”

“I think he’s thirteen.”

“Thirteen? Why would he take them? They wouldn’t fit him.”

He didn’t answer.

“Hieronymus, tell me.”

Her use of his formal name was always the trick that destroyed all his resistance. She was the only one who ever called him that and so it had taken on a special meaning when she used it.

“He took them because he could.”

She straightened up and the boy could see her anger. It was a mother’s protective anger. She looked around for the PSS lady.

“Come’on, we’re going to talk to Mrs. Matthews and get your shoes back.”

She grabbed his hand and started toward the PSS lady. He pulled back, stopping her.

“No. That would only make it worse.”

“Why?”

“Because. Look, I don’t need the shoes. I can’t go anywhere anyway. It doesn’t matter what shoes I have.”

He realized that with those words he had done what he most of all wanted not to do. He had brought the pain they both shared out into the open. He could see it work its way into her eyes. And he knew that before long she would start to cry.

All the mothers cried when they came here on visiting day. And so did the sons. And none of the boys ever made fun of each other afterward. Even the older ones. Now if a boy cried when hurt on the ballfield or in the dorm when the bigger boys took his shoes away, then that was fair cause for childhood taunting and his demotion to crybaby status. But the unspoken rule was that a boy could cry with his mother on visiting day and not have to pay a price in boyhood pride. That was the way it was.

She pulled him close and hugged him, his head against her cheek. He raised his arms and put them around her. After a while he could feel her tears in his short hair. Then she whispered in his ear.

“I’m going to get you out of here.  I promise, baby.  I don’t care what I have to do, but I’m going to get you back with me.”

“I’m not worried,” he said in a strangled voice.  It was all he could manage to get out.

“Recalls no one so much as Raymond Chandler…ambitious, skillful, moving, intricate, and clever.”
— Los Angeles Times

“Raised the hard-boiled detective novel to a new level…add[ing] substance and depth to modern crime fiction.”
— Boston Globe 

“He not only unravels Bosch’s psyche with a fascinating precision but also produces a classic whodunnit.  “The Last Coyote” is good to the last line.”
— The Orlando Sentinel

“Edgar-winner Connelly smoothly mixes Harry’s detecting forays with his therapy sessions to dramatize how, sometimes, the biggest mystery is the self.”
— Publisher’s Weekly

Bosch cleared all the old mail and carpentry books off the dining room table and placed the binder and his own notebook on top of it.  He went to the stereo and loaded a compact disc, “Clifford Brown with Strings.”  He went to the kitchen and got an ashtray, then he sat down in front of the blue murder book and looked at it for a long time without moving.  The last time he’d had the file, he had barely looked at it as he skimmed through its many pages.  He hadn’t been ready then and had returned it to the archives.

This time, he wanted to be sure he was ready before he opened it, so he sat there for a long time just studying the cracked plastic cover as if it held some clue to his preparedness.  A memory crowded into his mind.  A boy of eleven in a swimming pool clinging to the steel ladder at the side, out of breath and crying, the tears disguised by the water that dripped out of his wet hair.  The boy felt scared.  Alone.  He felt as if the pool were an ocean that he must cross.
Brownie was working through  “Willow Weep for Me,” his trumpet as gentle as a portrait painter’s brush.  Bosch reached for the rubber band he had put around the binder five years earlier and it broke at his touch.  He hesitated only another moment before opening the binder and blowing off the dust.

The binder contained the case file on the October 28, 1961, homicide of Marjorie Phillips Lowe.  His mother.
The pages of the binder were brownish yellow and stiff with age.  As he looked at them and read them, Bosch was initially surprised at how little things had changed in nearly thirty-five years.  Many of the investigative forms in the binder were still currently in use.  The Preliminary Report and the Investigating Officer’s Chronological Record were the same as those presently used, save for word changes made to accommodate court rulings and political correctness.  Description boxes marked NEGRO had sometime along the line been changed to BLACK and then AFRICAN-AMERICAN.  The list of motivations on the Preliminary Case Screening chart did not include DOMESTIC VIOLENCE or HATRED/PREJUDICE classifications as they did now.  Interview summary sheets did not include boxes to be checked after Miranda warnings had been given.

But aside from those kinds of changes, the reports were the same and Bosch decided that homicide investigation was largely the same now as back then.  Of course, there had been incredible technological advances in the past thirty-five years but he believed there were some things that were always the same and always would remain the same.  The legwork, the art of interviewing and listening, knowing when to trust an instinct or a hunch.  Those were things that didn’t change, that couldn’t.

The case had been assigned to two investigators on the Hollywood homicide table.  Claude Eno and Jake McKittrick.  The reports they filed were in chronological order in the binder.  On their preliminary reports the victim was referred to by name, indicating she had immediately been identified.  A narrative on these pages said the victim was found in an alley behind the north side of Hollywood Boulevard between Vista and Gower.  Her skirt and undergarments had been ripped open by her attacker.  It was presumed that she had been sexually assaulted and strangled.  Her body had been dropped into an open trash bin located next to the rear door of a Hollywood souvenir store called Startime Gifts & Gags.  The body was discovered at 7:35 A.M. by a foot patrol officer who walked a beat on the Boulevard and usually checked the back alleys at the beginning of each shift.  The victim’s purse was not found with her but she was quickly identified because she was known to the beat officer.  On the continuation sheet it was made clear why she was known to him.

Victim had a previous history of loitering arrests in the Hollywood. (See AR 55-002, 55-913, 56-111, 59-056, 60-815, and 60-1121) Vice Detective Gilchrist and Stano described victim as a prostitute who periodically worked in the Hollywood area and had been repeatedly warned off.  Victim lived at El Rio Efficiency Apts., located two blocks northerly of crime scene.  It was believed that the victim had been currently involved in call girl prostitution activities.  R/O 1906 was able to make identification of the victim because of familiarity of having seen victim in the area in previous years.

Bosch looked at the reporting officer’s serial number.  He knew that 1906 belonged to a patrolman then who was now one of the most powerful men in the department.  Assistant Chief Irvin S. Irving.  Once Irving had confided to Bosch that he had known Marjorie Lowe and had been the one who found her.

Bosch lit a cigarette and read on.  The reports were sloppily written, perfunctory, and filled with careless misspellings.  In reading them, it was clear to Bosch that Eno and McKittrick did not invest much time in the case.  A prostitute was dead.  It was a risk that came with her job.  They had other fish to fry.

He noticed on the Death Investigation Report a box for listing the next of kin.  It said:

Hieronymus Bosch (Harry), son, age 11, McClaren Youth Hall.  Notification made 10/28-1500 hrs.  Custody of Department of Public Social Services since 7/60 — UM.  (See victim’s arrest reports 60-815 and 60-1121) Father unknown.  Son remains in custody pending foster placement.

Looking at the report, Bosch could easily decipher all of the abbreviations and translate what was written.  UM stood for unfit mother.  The irony was not lost on him even after so many years.  The boy had been taken from a presumably unfit mother and placed in an equally unfit system of child protection.  What he remembered most was the noise of the place.  Always loud.  Like a prison.

Bosch remembered McKittrick had been the one who came to tell him.  It was during the swimming period.  The indoor pool was frothing with waves as a hundred boys swam and splashed and yelled.  After being pulled from the water, Harry wore a white towel that had been washed and bleached so many times that it felt like cardboard over his shoulders.  McKittrick told him the news and he returned to the pool, his screams silenced beneath the waves.