13. Michael Connelly: Death Is My Beat
Michael Connelly’s paternal grandfather built houses in the suburbs around Philadelphia. As a young man, Michael’s father, also named Michael, dreamed of being a painter, and enrolled at the Philadelphia Institute of Art but dropped out in the early 1950s and joined his father as a builder so he could marry. His son Michael was born in 1956, the second of six children, and by the age of nine or ten was helping his father on construction projects. In the mid-1960s, a downturn in the region’s economy wiped out the business. The novelist still remembers a man posting a foreclosure notice on the front door of the family home.
For a time, his father went into the car-rental business. In April 1968, passing through Washington, D.C., he was caught in the riots that followed the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Connelly abandoned his car and took refuge in a diner. He was in his mid-thirties and had recently broken a smoking habit that began when he was 12. Shaken, he bought a pack of cigarettes and returned to smoking. He died of smoking-related cancer at age 60, shortly before his son’s first novel was published. Later, as a successful novelist, Connelly drove around one of his father’s subdivisions, Coldbrook Farms, and took pride in his father’s craftsmanship and the pleasant world he’d helped create. “For years,” he says, “I have felt I am sort of living out my father’s unfulfilled artistic dream.”
Later in 1968, the family moved to Fort Lauderdale. The next summer, when Michael’s mother went to her job, she would drop him and two younger brothers at Holiday Park to amuse themselves as best they could. It was hot and one day they noticed a sign outside the library across the street: Now Air Conditioned. The boys took refuge inside but the librarians wouldn’t let them just sit; they had to read. “This is where I first started reading mysteries,” Connelly recalls. “From the Hardy Boys, which I had never read, to Mickey Spillane. I remember hiding a paperback of Spillane inside a more appropriate book for a 13-year-old and being caught by a librarian who took it from me and said, ‘Maybe next summer.’ I’ve often wished I could go back and thank those librarians for making me read and read crime novels in particular.”
When Connelly was sixteen he was working as a dishwasher at a beach hotel. Driving home one night he saw a bearded man running down the street. As Connelly watched, the man stripped off his shirt, wrapped something inside it, stuffed the package in a hedge, and then, wearing a tee-shirt, entered a biker bar called the Parrot. Connelly pulled the shirt out of the hedge and found a gun. He called his father who called the police. The police came to their house and told Connelly that a man had been shot in a robbery. He was the only witness. Detectives questioned the teenager for four hours, then took him to a line-up to look at several men they’d pulled from the bar. Connelly was sure that none of them was the man he’d seen. The angry detectives thought he was too scared to tell the truth. The incident intensified his interest in crime. He began reading crime stories in the newspapers and all the crime novels he could. But he wasn’t yet thinking he could write about crime.
Connelly’s father had gone to work for a big developer and the boy worked summers on its construction projects. When he entered the University of Florida, he was a Building Construction Sciences major but he hated classes like Introduction to Concrete. “I carried a failing average and sought almost nightly respite in the bars, bookstores and movie theaters of Gainesville.” One night he wandered into a showing at the Student Union of Robert Altman’s quirky version of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. Connelly had not read Chandler but he loved the movie. He watched it again the next night and within a week had read all of Chandler’s novels. By then Connelly knew what his dream was – to be a crime novelist like Chandler.
“When I told my father of this dramatic shift,” he recalls, “he was completely supportive. He had seen his career as a painter slip away and he didn’t want to discourage his son. I came upon the plan of enrolling in journalism school, learning the craft of writing as a reporter and using the job to get into the world I wanted to write about in fiction. The world of police and crime.”
After graduating in 1980, he worked for papers in Daytona Beach and Fort Lauderdale. One day he returned to the station house where he’d been questioned as a 16-year-old and talked to the same gruff detective, who still blamed him for not identifying the gunman. In 1986, the 30-year-old Connelly and two other reporters wrote a long piece on the survivors of an airline crash. The story was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize and helped him land a job as a police reporter for the Los Angeles Times. He had never been to Los Angeles before he sought the job. To him, it was Raymond Chandler’s town.
Crime Beat, a collection of Connelly’s journalism published in 2006, makes clear that even his early reporting was distinctively novelistic. The first piece in the book, about the discovery of a body in Fort Lauderdale, is filled with details that later turned up in his novels. As a police reporter in Los Angeles, he endlessly filed away details about the street cops, the detectives, the Parker Center brass, and the FBI agents who swooped in on high-profile cases. In the riots that followed the acquittal of the white policemen in the Rodney King case, he found himself confronting a black mob. A young black man in a LOVE tee-shirt helped him escape. That experience, combined with his father’s escape from another mob in 1968, would surface in one of his novels.
While still in Florida, Connelly had written two novels that he thought weren’t good enough to show anyone. By his mid-30s he was a star reporter but his dream of writing fiction seemed to be slipping away. Then one day he saw a listing for a double-feature of Altman’s Long Goodbye and Chinatown, Roman Polanski’s elegant neo-noir from 1974. He went to see them and soon after that he started writing The Black Echo (1992), his first published novel.
In his introduction to Crime Beat, Connelly tells of going to a crime scene and seeking information from a detective he knew that he’d never seen show emotion. Connelly was studying him to get details for his fictional detective, Harry Bosch. The detective came out of the house and told Connelly a mother had shot her three young children and then herself. “He then had to walk away from me and I think I saw him wipe a tear out of his eye. I understood in that moment some of the difficulty, danger and nobility of the job. And I knew I had something more to give to Harry Bosch.”
We first meet Bosch on the second page of The Black Echo. The scene begins: “Harry Bosch could hear the helicopter up there, somewhere, above the darkness, circling up in the light…he felt the terror build and he moved faster, crawling on scraped and bloody knees…” This is a nightmare, based on Harry’s memories of Vietnam; the horror of that war is central to Connelly’s portrait of his angry, troubled detective. In the next paragraph the phone rings and awakens Harry. It is 8:53 on a Sunday morning. Harry has been asleep in a chair, fully dressed. The TV is on. Paperback novels, crumpled cigarette packs and beer bottles are scattered around. Harry suffers from insomnia and often drinks himself to sleep in the chair. The call summons him to a murder scene. A body has been found in a drain pipe near the Mulholland Dam, not far from Harry’s home. Harry is angry. Why wasn’t he called sooner? He fears that the first cops on the scene will muck up the evidence. Harry looks in the mirror and sees red-rimmed, forty-year-old eyes, gray in his curly hair. The detective stood a few inches short of six feet and was built lean, Connelly tells us, and his brown-black eyes seldom revealed his emotion.
Harry lives in the Hollywood Hills in small, one-bedroom house that is built out over the edge of a steep hill. The house embodies the precariousness of Harry’s life. He made his down payment on the house with money from a film studio that made a movie about one of his cases, and he could afford it because the only things he spent money on were food, drink and jazz. Harry’s love of jazz is reflected throughout the series, as he spends solitary nights listening to the likes of John Coltrane, Stan Getz and Frank Morgan. Once, listening to Art Pepper’s rendition of “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To,” he reflects on how Pepper attacked the song: “It was the only way he knew how to play and that relentlessness was what I liked best about him. It was the thing that I hoped I shared with him.”
When Connelly first visited the L.A. Times, an editor showed him a story about some criminals who entered the city’s storm water tunnel system and tunneled up into a bank vault. That provided the plot of The Black Echo. At the crime scene that Sunday morning, Harry recognizes the dead man, Billy Meadows. They were “tunnel rats” together in Vietnam, young men with the job of exploring the Vietcong tunnel systems. The book’s title comes from those tunnels: “Each one was a black echo. Nothing but death in there.” The first chapter carries Harry through that long Sunday, and before it ends he suspects that Meadows has taken part in a recent robbery that involved tunneling into a bank. Harry forms an uneasy alliance with the FBI, which is also investigating the bank robbery.
He meets FBI agent Eleanor Wish, who will become important in his life. Harry admires her beauty but notes coldly that: “She looked hardshell and maybe a little weary for so early in the day, the way lady cops and hookers get.” Soon he is sleeping with Eleanor Wish, but the FBI is otherwise hostile and even Eleanor has her own agenda. (Her name may be a warning: “Be careful what you wish for.”) In Harry’s world, authority is always the enemy, and that includes the FBI. In the LAPD, the enemy is top-level officials who are incompetent, gutless, and hypocritical, and in particularly the agents of the Internal Affairs Division who are forever trying to drive Harry from the force.
Harry clings precariously to his job, mainly because he has cracked big cases and made friends in the media. Harry persists as a cop because his mother’s murder when he was a child, along with the harsh treatment he received in foster homes, left him with a deep need to make the world right. The full name his mother gave him is Hieronymus Bosch, that of the Flemish painter who portrayed a hell on earth, populated by fiends and monsters. Harry is a lone pilgrim trying to bring order to the hell of Los Angeles.
The Black Echo is a long novel, filled with police lore. Among its strengths are the complexity and sophistication of its plot. Harry realizes that a second bank robbery is coming, again via a tunnel, and he sets out to thwart it. But the larger question is who is behind these elaborate crimes. It is no surprise that the masterminds are people in authority.
Connelly wrote The Black Echo before he tried to sell it. He was able to hire the agent he wanted, Philip Spitzer, James Lee Burke’s agent. Connelly recalls, “I was fortunate because Spitzer immediately took the long view and planned and positioned me for a long haul.” Of course, Spitzer could do that because Connelly had given him an exceptional novel. “He didn’t demand big money from prospective publishers. He demanded a plan. I accepted a deal with Little, Brown and they printed a first edition of 17,000 copies.” The book won an Edgar award for best first novel of the year. Connelly has had the same agent and editor ever since. The editor, Michael Pietsch, later signed George Pelecanos. In Connelly’s second novel, The Black Ice (1993), a police detective is found in a cheap motel with his head blown off, an apparent suicide. It should be Harry’s case but the higher-ups take him off it, arousing his suspicions. Harry is drawn to the dead cop’s wife and begins an affair with her. In time, the cop’s death proves to be far more sinister than suicide. By the end of these two novels, it was clear that Connelly was a serious, ambitious writer. His writing is always solid and occasionally lyrical, but it does not glitter like his hero Raymond Chandler’s. He says of Chandler:
“It was his prose and his marvelous way of evoking Los Angeles—a place I had never been—that drew me to his work. Also, his depiction of a man alone against the odds and the system. Maybe because I was at the right age but I found it intoxicating and inspiring. I read the books over and over and whereas before when I read mysteries I fantasized that I was the detective on the case, winning the day and vanquishing evil, with Chandler I fantasized that I was the writer behind that wonderful prose. Of course, Chandler is not perfect. His plots are confusing and don’t always add up. His views of women and race and homosexuality are of that time and ill-informed. But what holds up is the prose. What holds up is the city. Riff after riff on Los Angeles and the hopeful yet cynical view of it are wonderful and still hold up today. In chapter 13 of The Little Sister we are taken on a four-page ride around Los Angeles. Marlowe getting some air. The chapter has nothing to do with the plot. It is just Chandler describing the city. He could just as easily be describing contemporary Los Angeles. When you can pull that off that is art and that is why I was and am so inspired by his work. One of my writing rituals is to read chapter 13 before starting every Bosch book.”
The promise of Connelly’s early novels was more than fulfilled by his fourth and fifth, The Last Coyote and The Poet. As The Last Coyote begins, Harry’s life has fallen apart. The detective’s widow has walked out on him. He’s drinking too much. An earthquake has damaged his house and the building inspector says it must be demolished, although Harry is still furtively living there. Worst of all, he has been suspended from the LAPD for roughing up a superior officer and ordered to undergo psychiatric testing. In time the psychiatrist wins his respect and Harry admits to her that he is haunted by his mother’s murder in 1961 when he was eleven.
Harry’s mother, Marjorie Lowe, was at times was a call girl and at times worked the streets of Hollywood. Her body was found in an alley there. Someone had killed her with a blow to the head. No arrest was made. Harry was in a foster home but his mother was trying to regain custody. Harry knew she loved him, whatever her demons. With the psychiatrist’s help, Harry realizes the mystery of his mother’s death has defined his life and that he must learn the truth and avenge her. Harry’s investigation leads to his mother’s best friend, Meredith Roman. She tells him that not long before his mother’s death she had been dating a prominent political figure. Even thirty years later, Harry smells a cover-up. He learns, along the way, who his father was, and meets him on his deathbed. Harry also flies to Florida to talk to the retired cop who investigated his mother’s death. There he chances to meet a painter named Jasmine, called Jazz, who becomes the new woman in his life. Harry’s search for his mother’s killer is the most emotionally powerful of the early novels and its surprise ending is a shocker. The last coyote of the title is of course Harry himself. There is in fact a lone coyote he sometimes glimpses in the hills near his house, scruffy and solitary, trying to survive in an increasingly hostile environment, much like Harry.
Fans of the Bosch novels got a surprise when Connelly’s fifth novel arrived. Harry Bosch was nowhere to be found in The Poet, the first of Connelly’s “stand-alones.” And yet The Poet was possibly the best novel he had written. It begins with this paragraph:
“Death is my beat. I make my living from it. I forge my professional reputation 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 of dealing with death was to keep it at arm’s length. That’s the rule. Don’t let it breathe in your face.”
That’s the voice of Jack McEvoy, a thirty-four year old crime reporter for the Rocky Mountain News – and, of course, the voice of Connelly himself. At the outset, McEvoy learns that his twin brother, Sean, a homicide detective, is dead, an apparent suicide. Devastated, unable to accept that verdict, Jack launches his own investigation and discovers evidence the police have missed. His brother may have been killed by a serial killer who has murdered other detectives around the country. The murders are linked by lines of Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry that the killer left at each crime scene – thus the novel’s title. Jack cannot conduct a national investigation, but because he has information no one else has he is able to bargain his way into the task force the FBI launches to pursue the killer.
Jack’s alliance with the task force is an uneasy one. Some agents are openly hostile. However, like Harry in The Black Echo, Jack McEvoy soon forms a special alliance with a comely female agent: this time her name is Rachel Walling. It is unlikely that real-life female FBI agents make a habit of sleeping with reporters who cover their cases, but it’s a convention of crime fiction that the brave deserve the fair, and the improbability of the romance is mitigated by the fact that Connelly writes well about sex.
The Poet ends with a double whammy. The identity of the serial killer is a total surprise and is followed by another twist: Connelly lets the homicidal “poet” escape. Connelly had recently quit the Times to write fiction full-time and he was struck by how many cases went unsolved. “It dawned on me then how many people got away with murder. So when I wrote The Poet I was bothered by the contradiction of art not imitating life. All the crime novels seemed to end with the bad guy getting caught. In L.A., that only happened about 70 percent of the time. This, and what was happening in the O.J. Simpson case, added up to me deciding to let the Poet slip away.” Several years later, Connelly had a change of heart and sent Harry Bosch to find him.
None of Connelly’s previous novels had come as easily as The Poet. It took him less than three months to write. “I think this is because there was no middle-point of having to think about what a character like Harry Bosch would do in certain circumstances. I was essentially writing about myself as a journalist and so I knew immediately what Jack would do in any circumstance. The story just flowed out of me.”
The Poet became Connelly’s breakout novel. The hardback editions of his first four novels advanced from 17,000 to 30,000, but with The Poet the publisher printed 60,000 and sales increased accordingly. The paperback edition made the New York Times list – his first official bestseller. Connelly’s career, slow to start, but always solid, had taken off. His more recent books have sold 200,000 to 300,000 copies in hardback.
Harry Bosch returned in Trunk Music, which concerned a movie producer who is found in the trunk of his car and may have been killed by the Mafia. It was followed by a second stand-alone, Blood Work, which introduced Terry McCaleb, a FBI serial-killer investigator who receives a heart transplant and then pursues the killer of the woman who donated the heart. Harry was back in Angels Flight, in which a black lawyer is killed, possibly with LAPD involvement. At the end of the novel Harry is trapped in his car in a riot but manages to escape into a looted store where he seizes some cigarettes and rekindles the addiction he thought he had beaten.
In 2001, Connelly published one of the best Bosch novels, A Darkness More Than Night (the title comes from Chandler). Connelly was becoming increasingly innovative. He’d left Bosch to write two stand-alones that introduced Jack McEvoy and Terry McCaleb. (McEvoy was Connelly’s mother’s maiden name and McCaleb is his wife’s maiden name.) All three men – Bosch, McEvoy, and McCaleb – appear in Darkness. The previous Bosch novels, written in the third-person, show events from Harry’s point of view. Darkness alternates between Bosch’s and McCaleb’s points of view. The plot turns on McCaleb’s suspicion that Bosch may be a murderer. The criminal who has been killed – a man Harry openly despised – was the victim of a ritual murder. A wooden owl was left at the scene. It and other evidence linked the killing to the painter Hieronymus Bosch, which led McCaleb to suspect Harry. Connelly says of the novel:
“My plan was to make the story an exploration of Harry Bosch’s character and the cost of his going into the darkness. By darkness, I mean the underworld of crime and moral corruption where he toils as a cop. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote than when you look into the darkness of the abyss that the abyss looks into you. Probably no other line or thought more inspires or informs my work. Harry Bosch has spent most of his life looking into the abyss, into the darkness of the human soul. What has this cost him?”
The novel is finally a character study of the two very different men. McCaleb, after retirement from the FBI and his marriage and the birth of his daughter, is a contented man. (McCaleb pays his ten-year-old stepson for chores with $5 bills, as the young Connelly’s father paid him years earlier.) During the course of the novel, each man saves the other’s life but at the end they are no longer friends. Not simply because McCaleb suspected Harry of murder but because Harry is willing to go farther to put monsters away than McCaleb can approve. McCaleb goes back to his family and Harry goes back to the abyss.
City of Bones opens with a dog discovering human bones buried in the Hollywood Hills. They prove to be those of a child who has been brutally abused. Harry vows to find the killer. He talks to a doctor who has witnessed unspeakable child abuse. The doctor says he could not keep going without his religion and presses Harry about his faith. The detective says, “I have faith and I have a mission. Call it the blue religion.”
Harry is nearing fifty and shows signs of mellowing. He has his drinking and smoking under control and has achieved an uneasy peace with his superiors. When he meets a good woman, he tries to treat her right, only to see her die a senseless death. He remains tormented, hungry for redemption. For what? someone asks him. “For everything,” he replies. “Anything. We all want to be forgiven.” Although Harry fears he would be lost without his badge and his mission, after he exposes the child-killer, he quits the LAPD.
Lost Light was a departure in two ways. First, Harry is a private citizen again. Second, for the first time he is telling his story in the first person, presumably because Connelly wants to see if that can carry him even deeper into Harry’s troubled soul. Harry’s retirement is not going well. He’s staying up late, drinking too much, staring at the walls. He has a call from a retired cop who offers him new information on an unsolved case. Harry remembers the case well; the memory of the dead woman, her hands lifted as if in prayer, has haunted him. Revisiting the case gives him a mission but he has no badge to go with it. His investigation brings him into conflict with a top-secret FBI antiterrorism unit operating under post-9/11 rules. When Harry defies them, he is roughed up and tossed in a cell. Harry bitterly tells an FBI agent that it used to be a free country, and cites Nietzsche’s remark that in combating monsters we must not become monsters ourselves.
Eleanor Wish reappears. They were married for a time but she left him and has been living in Las Vegas and working as a professional gambler. He considers her his one great love and wants her back but she resists. Increasingly, Harry has been struggling to save his soul. At the end of Lost Light, he unexpectedly finds salvation within his grasp, when Eleanor introduces him to the daughter he didn’t know he had. Connelly had been building toward this scene for a long time and I found it immensely moving. Harry has earned a shot at happiness. The novel ends with him declaring: “In that moment I knew all the mysteries were solved. That I was home. That I was saved.” The question is whether Harry can be Harry and still cling to his newfound happiness.
The Narrows brought together characters and events from several earlier novels. We again encounter Rachel Walling, the FBI agent last seen in The Poet. In part because of her affair with Jack McEvoy, she has been exiled to South Dakota, but now she is summoned back to California because the serial killer called the Poet has resurfaced and she has personal knowledge of him. We shift to Harry’s first-person narrative – Terry McCaleb is dead and his widow wants Harry to examine his death. Perhaps McCaleb’s transplanted heart failed him but Harry soon suspects murder. We move between Harry’s investigation of McCaleb’s death and the FBI investigation of the Poet’s murders in Nevada. The two investigations inevitably merge. The FBI tries to force Harry off the case. Rachel is already an outsider within the FBI and the two of them team up to find the Poet. Their partnership includes the bedroom – Connelly’s protagonists are now three-for-three with sexy FBI agents.
Connelly says that his young daughter inspired him to write The Narrows: “As I watched my daughter grow it began to bother me that I had created a fictional world where a killer like [the Poet] could walk free…I made a decision to go back into that darkness to find him. And I decided to use Harry Bosch for the job.”
In The Closers, Connelly is back to a third-person narration and Harry is back to the LAPD. He joins a new unit that uses DNA to reexamine thousands of unsolved murder cases. Harry and his partner, Kiz Rider, a friend from years past, are given the case of a 16-year-old girl was abducted from her home and shot to death in 1988. It may now be possible to trace the killer through blood on the gun. The Closers is a return to basics. After several relatively fanciful novels in which Harry pursued the Poet, wooed an FBI agent, and was reunited with his gambler wife and their child, this is a pure police procedural. Eleanor has taken herself and their daughter to Hong Kong and there is no woman in his life. Harry is focused entirely on the case, once again an avenging angel.
As I read Connelly, this is the culmination of a process that has been underway since City of Bones. Just before it, in A Darkness More Than Night, Harry’s world grew about as dark as it could. Harry was suspected of murder and almost killed. With City of Bones, the Bosch novels began to change. Their style is leaner, more focused. There is less detail, less description, more dialogue. The focus is more on Harry and less on the world around him. Connelly says of the relationship between himself and his character:
“Initially there was very little of me in Harry Bosch. I deliberately took things that were the opposite of me and gave them to him. Our one commonality was left-handedness. But over the years and the books I have not been able to continue that distance. We share more and more. Fatherhood, world view, our disappointed hopefulness for L.A. After 11 books I think it would be impossible to keep a character at arm’s length. At some point you put your arm around him and invite him in.”
In the later novels, Harry’s smoking is gone; he still thinks about cigarettes but resists them. (Connelly never smoked.) Drinking is no longer an issue. To be sure, Harry remains a fatalist. “There was no closure and there was no peace,” he says in The Closers. “The truth did not set you free.” But Harry soldiers on. He has given himself to the blue religion. His retirement was a failure. He needed his gun and his badge to be himself. Near the end of the novel, in a kind of benediction, the police chief tells him, “You are on this earth for one thing, Detective Bosch…to carry out your mission.”
Harry has become easier to live with. The tormented wild man of the early novels has been replaced by the avenging angel, the man with a mission, a kind of saint. We see now that the series has an arc; the Bosch novels have become a classic story of rebirth and redemption. At the end of The Closers, Harry vows “to carry on the mission…always to speak for the dead.” His vow is a dramatic reminder of how far the crime novel has come. In the drawing-room mysteries of the early 20th century, no one really cared about the corpse on page one. It was a formality, the starting-point of the puzzle that would allow author and detective to demonstrate their brilliance. That’s no longer true in modern crime fiction and nowhere is it less true than in the Bosch novels, where Harry, now a priest of the blue religion, is sworn to speak for the dead.
Have the Bosch thrillers no flaws? Not many. People who don’t like the books probably find them too dark. Harry is not a barrel of laughs. The novels offer none of the comic relief that John Sandford injects into his Prey series. Connelly doesn’t do comic relief. There is a purity to the novels. A tragic view. Death is his beat.
All novelists ask us to suspend disbelief, but there is always the question of how far we are willing to go. Connelly’s plots, as with many thrillers, sometimes make demands on us. For example, in The Poet, we have to accept that the serial killer is the astonishing person he turns out to be. In The Narrows we have to accept that when the Poet burned evidence one scrap of paper survived to provide Harry with a crucial clue. But good writers earn our trust. We accept these and other developments because Connelly has created a world so real, so filled with credible details and believable people, that we want to believe.
In my review of City of Bones, I said that the Bosch novels were “the best American crime series now in progress.” Several novels later, I’ll go farther and say that if we consider the depth and seriousness that Connelly has brought to Harry’s characterization, the excellence of his plotting, the precision of his writing, his unsurpassed grasp of the police culture, and the moral gravity of his work, the Bosch novels are the finest crime series anyone has written. There is much fine competition. McBain, Pelecanos, Burke, Chandler, MacDonald, Rankin – all have done wonderful work. But I don’t think anyone else has written at such a high level for so long. For those of us who accept Harry, warts and all, there are few more affecting portraits of an angry, damaged, tormented idealist in American fiction. Connelly may have flunked Introduction to Concrete but he has built the world of Harry Bosch with the same skill and craftsmanship that his father and grandfather brought to the houses they put up. And, as he enters his fifties, he is getting better.
14. Dennis Lehane: No Turning Back
Dennis Lehane was born in 1965 in Boston’s Dorchester community, then a melting pot of blue-collar Irish, Polish, and Italian families. His parents were Irish immigrants. His father worked for more than thirty years at Sears & Roebuck, just a block from Fenway Park, and his mother worked in the cafeterias of public schools. From the start Lehane was a reader. “My mother took me to a library when I was six because the nuns had told her I liked reading,” he told me. “I fell in love right then and there.” He told an interviewer from January magazine: “I wrote since I was 8. When I was 20, I realized I was just lousy at everything else; I had dropped out of two colleges. That’s when I said, well, this is the only thing I’m good at so I might as well take it seriously, and I went off to major in it. Writing was just not considered a viable option where I came from so it took me time to get there. Once I did there was – honest to God – no turning back.”
Lehane made his way to Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in creative writing, and then to Florida International University in Miami, where he studied under the novelist James W. Hall and received his MFA. He is the first novelist we’ve looked at who emerged from the thriving world of grad-school writing courses -- who went to college to learn to write. His success recalls the Nashville guitarist who, asked if he could read music, replied, “Yeah, but it don’t hurt mah pickin’ none.” Lehane is a serious student of literature, who knows all about Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, and postmodernism – but it don’t hurt his writin’ none. The man was born to write.
In his student days, Lehane focused on short stories, then: “I was 24 and I was broke and I had all this time on my hands. So I sat down and wrote a detective novel and – what do you know? – it sold.” That’s the condensed version; A Drink Before the War didn’t sell fast. Lehane submitted it to an agent, Ann Rittenberg, who was impressed and also surprised to learn that he was so young. There were editors who wanted changes that Lehane refused to make and editors who proposed a paperback original, which Lehane also rejected. In time Rittenberg submitted the manuscript to an editor at Harcourt, Claire Wachtel, who went around a more senior editor to buy it for an $8000 advance.
The novel, if begun as a lark, didn’t stay one -- Lehane says it went through a dozen drafts before publication. The work paid off: the novel won a Shamus Award and sold a solid 10,000 copies. When Wachtel left Harcourt for Morrow, Lehane followed her, and she speaks warmly of his loyalty: “He’s had all kinds of money waved at him. He just says, ‘How many boats do I need?’”
Lehane wasn’t thinking about publication when he wrote the novel. “I just wanted to have a little fun – I’d always loved to read mysteries. I just wrote it.” And yet, having studied with people who were serious about literary fiction, he knew the implications when his thriller was readied for publication. He told a CNN interviewer: “Coming from the world I was in, writing very esoteric short fiction, I knew exactly what boundary I was stepping over. I was leaving one camp and stepping into another.”
A Drink Before the War, published in 1994, opens with thirty-something PI Patrick Kenzie arriving at Boston’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel to meet some politicians. Instead of wearing his usual jeans and diver’s shirts, he tells us: “I picked up a dark blue, double-breasted Armani from my closet – one of several I received from a client in lieu of cash – found the appropriate shoes, tie, and shirt, and before you could say ‘GQ,’ I was looking good enough to eat.”
If that reminds you of Philip Marlowe as he arrives to meet the Sternwoods at the start of The Big Sleep – “I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it” – you have a good memory. A Drink Before the War reads like a hip, edgy, Generation X updating of Chandler into the post-Vietnam, post-Thomas Harris world of unlimited violence. Kenzie shares Marlowe’s wise-ass attitude toward the rich and powerful, and throughout this novel Lehane tosses off Chandlerisms: “…a brain-dead sociopath who was only slightly bigger than Rhode Island…a purse you could hide Peru in…lonelier than an AA meeting on St. Patrick’s Day.”
Lehane expressed surprise when I mentioned these echoes of Chandler. He says he read Chandler when he was “about 11” and hasn’t reread him. As he recalls it, “I learned the tricks of the vivid (and vividly outrageous) simile and metaphor from Robert Parker. I often cringe to read A Drink Before the War because it’s so ridiculously faux-Parker. But then Parker learned it from Chandler, so I guess I was influenced by Chandler without being aware of it.”
The novel’s plot brings together elements that Lehane knew growing up in Dorchester, among them gangs, racism, and political corruption, as well as the spirit of the neighborhood itself. The politicians want Kenzie and his partner, Angela Gennaro, to find a black cleaning woman, Jenna Angeline, who they say has stolen important papers. Kenzie insults the politicians, who are racist, sexist, stupid, and corrupt, but he gets the job anyway. He tracks down Jenna, a decent woman whose ex-husband, Socia, is a vicious drug kingpin who heads a teenage gang. Their teenage son, Roland, who hates his father, leads an equally lethal gang. There are many shootouts and showdowns. The two detectives are assisted by Bubba Rogowski, a hulking sociopath and arms dealer who is their friend and protector. In the end, Kenzie shoots and kills Socia and reaches a truce with Roland, who is like Kenzie a victim of childhood abuse.
It’s a serviceable plot but less important than the characterizations, descriptions, and sociology that Lehane hangs on it. First and foremost there is the Kenzie-Gennaro relationship. This is our first glimpse of Angie:
“She had her feet propped up on the desk, a pair of black suede Peter Pan boots covering them, the cuffs of her charcoal jeans tucked into the boots. I followed her long legs up to a loose white cotton T-shirt. The rest of her was hidden behind the newspaper except for a partial view of rich, thick hair, the color of windswept tar, that fell to her olive arms…eyes the color of melting caramel. Eyes you’d dive into without a look back.”
That paragraph makes clear that Lehane is a writer, that Angie is to die for, and that Kenzie is in love with her. We learn that Angie is married to Phil, and the three of them were childhood friends, along with Bubba. Now Phil beats Angie. In the scene above, when Angie takes off her dark glasses, Kenzie sees her latest black eye. He wants to beat his old friend to a pulp – Bubba would gladly kill him – but the last time Kenzie did that Phil just beat Angie worse when he recovered. Why does this lovely, otherwise fiercely independent woman let her drunken husband use her for a punching bag? The not entirely satisfactory answer is that she loves him. Kenzie doesn’t hide his continuing interest in Angie, and Lehane gets a lot of “will-they-or-won’t-they?” mileage as the relationship evolves from book to book.
We learn not only that Kenzie’s fireman father beat him, but that Kenzie has an ugly scar on his stomach where his father, in a rage, branded him with a hot iron. Kenzie hated his father and watched without regret when he died of cancer. Yet at times Kenzie fears that he has inherited some of his father’s dark side – as, for example, when he shoots Socia in cold blood. By then, he knows that Socia sexually abused his own son, and in a sense Kenzie is killing his own father.
A Drink Before the War is a promising first novel, but Lehane’s second, Darkness, Take My Hand, vastly surpasses it. For one thing, its plot provides more suspense – a serial killer is at large and we don’t know his identity until the final pages -- and its writing is looser, more fluid. The plot is too complex to do more than hint at. Horrid murders in the present lead back to other horrid murders in the past. There is a vast amount of violence – to kick things off, a young woman is crucified. There are eight or ten certifiable psychopaths banging about. The identity of the killer is a mystery until the end, but it becomes clear that he knows Kenzie and is out to get him.
The level of violence is positively Shakespearean – we’re talking Titus Andronicus here. People are burned and beaten to death. A pair of eyeballs is left in Kenzie’s kitchen cabinet, along with a taunting note. A harmless young man is killed and his limbs sliced off. A killer puts a shotgun to a woman’s head with one hand and threatens to bash out her child’s brains with the other. A scene in which Kenzie goes to visit a master criminal in prison suggests homage to Will Graham and Clarice Starling visiting Hannibal Lecter. If Thomas Harris upped the ante for stylish slaughter, Lehane gladly called him. Lehane agrees he was influenced by the Lecter novels but less with regard to the violence, he says, than in terms of “the psychological damage that was done to those who hunt monsters. Will Graham, in particular, who’s a wonderfully flawed hero.”
Lehane’s third novel, Sacred, offers, by his standards, comic relief. Kenzie and Gennaro become involved with a rich and lethal old man and his beautiful and equally lethal daughter. Several people die but humorous scenes are tossed into the mix. “I’m Irish,” Lehane says. “Humor is part of who I am. But it’s a pretty dark humor.” Dark indeed. In Desiree, the daughter, Lehane apparently set out to create the most gorgeous and dangerous woman in all crime noir – the ultimate femme fatale -- and he may have succeeded. Kenzie and Gennaro by now are lovers – Lehane has rid us of Phil -- but we fear their happiness can’t last. The climax of Sacred follows the convention of crime fiction that the heroes, near the end, will get themselves in a seemingly hopeless fix. As always, Lehane goes for broke. Kenzie is bound hand and foot. Gennaro is buried up to her neck in the ground. The father and daughter are competing to kill them. Not to worry – our heroes prevail. So does the author, tongue securely in cheek.
Lehane has fun in Sacred but in Gone, Baby, Gone he is again terrifying. He has always been obsessed with child abuse and here he devotes an entire novel to it. Kenzie and Gennaro set out to find a missing child and enter a nightmare of pedophilia. The evil of the abusers in this novel, and the suffering of the innocents, are all but unreadable. Near the end, Kenzie finds the room where a pedophile keeps his victims. The room is a vision of hell, filled with bare mattresses, handcuffs, riding crops, whips and dildos.
Kenzie shoots the pedophile, then finds the victim:
“I looked in the bathtub.
“I’m not sure how long I stood there, head bent, mouth open. I felt a hot wetness on my cheeks, streams of it, and it was only after that double eternity of staring into the tub at the small, naked body curled up by the drain that I realized I was weeping.”
Lehane uses violence to express moral outrage. He usually shows that the abusers were themselves once victims. As a young man, he worked for a time counseling abused children. Asked if that was the source of his concern, he said, “The short answer is that, yes, my obsession began because I worked with abused kids. But I think it probably began earlier and I just wasn't aware of it. So many of the kids I grew up with came from broken homes or abusive homes. And I left the corner every night and went back to a sane, sound home where there was a lot of love. So, like Sean Devine [in Mystic River], I probably suffer from survivor's guilt. Luck, nothing more, separates me from my friends who never made it out of that place, because I won the parent-lottery and they didn't.”
The fifth Kenzie-Gennaro novel, Prayers for Rain, introduces a sadistic villain who out of sheer malice drives strangers to suicide. The series had been increasingly popular. The first book sold around 10,000 in hardback; the fifth had a first printing of 60,000, was a Literary Guild section, and sold another 300,000 copies in paperback. Lehane had a growing audience. Bill Clinton was a fan. Yet his novels were self-limiting – their violence was such that they were unlikely to reach a huge audience. Taken on their own terms, the Kenzie-Gennaro novels are dazzling. And yet they were increasingly over the top, even out of control, not in the writing but in the subject matter.
How much physical and psychic punishment could Patrick and Angie take, or Lehane dish out, or readers tolerate? How many monsters is too many? How many atrocities? Lehane had enjoyed a remarkable run. By his early 30s he was being compared to Raymond Chandler. And yet, if you admired his remarkable gifts, as stylist and storyteller, you had to think he was capable of better.
Lehane was thinking just that: “I had tired of the high body count and visceral-kicks-for-visceral-kicks-sake that I think reached either an apotheosis or nadir, depending on your perspective, in Prayers for Rain, a book that it's no secret I've never been too proud of. Maybe it was just an organic side effect of getting older but I began to question the whole idea of ‘good’ violence. It just didn't jibe with my experience of the world.”
More than most people who write thrillers, Lehane is a student of literature. He tells his creative-writing class at Harvard: “I’m going to talk about depth of language, about depth of character, I’m going to talk about epiphanic moments and Aristotelian logic…if you don’t bring some sort of music to your prose, if that isn’t something you can put on the table, then please go do something else because it’s the only thing that separates literature from any other art form. Hollywood can beat us in the car chases and the explosions and the high drama. All we have is language and depth of character, the ability to take you through a life.”
He has cited Graham Greene as his greatest influence, and says he considers himself less a crime novelist than an urban novelist “trying to follow in the tradition not so much of Chandler or Hammett but of Hubert Selby, Richard Price, Pete Dexter, William Kennedy.” He has particular admiration for Price’s Clockers and Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss. Music is important to him, too. He says the narrative voice in Mystic River was influenced by Bruce Springsteen, and that he listened to the Clash, the Rolling Stones, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, among others, while writing the novel.
He told an interviewer from bookreporter.com that: “I’m attracted to classical tragedy as a form. I can do comedy and I deeply admire satire but my strength, as far as I can tell, lies in tragedy.” He told another interviewer, “I’m attracted to what I think of as ‘fiction of mortal event,’ that is, fiction in which bad stuff happens and the price is high. That led me to crime fiction. I write about violence; it’s what I obsess over. I can’t imagine writing a book in which crime didn’t happen.”
The question was whether he could draw on both the street-smarts of his boyhood and the literary sophistication he gained in college to write a novel about crime that moved beyond melodrama into the realm of tragedy. He began to think about a tragedy in a blue-collar Boston neighborhood – “an epic story about small-scale lives.” The germ of his plot had been with him for years. For his master’s thesis, he wrote a story called Mystic River about a cop named Sean, and there were hints of the novel-to-be scattered throughout the Kenzie-Gennaro novels. He made frequent references to the river itself – its name, to Lehane, is evocative, mysterious, magical. In Darkness, Take My Hand, one character ran a grocery store before he became a Mafia boss; in Mystic River, ex-con Jimmy Marcus runs a grocery and at the end decides to return to crime. Also in Darkness, two psychopaths try to lure the young Patrick and Phil into their van, suggesting the abduction that starts Mystic River. In one Kenzie-Gennaro novel, there is even a brief, enigmatic reference to a man being shot to death beside the Mystic, as two men are in the novel. In short, Mystic River had haunted Lehane for years and at the start of the new century he was ready to confront it.
For anyone who loves fine writing, to move from the Kenzie-Gennaro novels to Mystic River is like leaving the funhouse and entering a world so real that it hurts. For all their lyricism, humor, and romance, the Kenzie-Gennaro books are ultimately about violence. In interviews, Lehane has stressed the writer’s duty to entertain: “That’s our primary job — keep ‘em awake at the campfire. It’s gotta be fun, gotta be exciting, gotta have some kick.” The problem with the Kenzie-Gennaro books is that they’re too entertaining. Lehane gives us too many kicks, slaughters too many innocents. I think there coexists within Lehane an Irish poet and an Irish devil. The devil made him write five novels about marauding psychopaths, but in Mystic River the poet took command. Lehane finally confronts the real world, where our troubles most often come not from psychopaths but from within ourselves.
The plot of Mystic River is well known, both from the novel and Clint Eastwood’s extraordinary movie. We meet Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus, and Dave Boyle when they are 11. Already, Jimmy is tough, a trouble-maker. Sean is cool and watchful; he knows that he’ll go to college and make something of himself. Dave is the hanger-on, “a kid with girl’s wrists and weak eyes.” The novel’s opening section is a dark poem about these boys and the world they and Lehane grew up in. Lehane calls it East Buckingham and says it is a blend of several working-class Boston neighborhoods:
“They all lived in East Buckingham, just west of downtown, a neighborhood of cramped corner stores, small playgrounds, and butcher shops where meat, still pink with blood, hung in the windows. The bars had Irish names and Dodge Darts by the curbs. Women wore handkerchiefs tied off at the backs of their skulls and carried mock leather snap purses for their cigarettes... Days, the mothers search the papers for coupons. Nights, the fathers went to the bars.”
Jimmy lives in the Flats, the poorest part of East Bucky, with a sad, silent mother and a drunken father who beats him. Yet Jimmy loves the Flats for the good times, the street parties – the way people could suddenly put aside their problems and complaints and lost jobs worries and old grudges and cut loose and enjoy their lives.
Dave is kidnapped by two pedophiles and suffers four days of sexual abuse before he escapes. This scene was inspired by a real-life incident when Lehane was 11. He and a friend got in a fight that continued until two detectives happened by, stopped the fight, and drove them home. Lehane recalls how upset his mother was. How, she asked, did she know the men were really detectives? Twenty years later, Lehane remembered the incident and took it “to the worst case scenario.” In the novel, Dave returns home and imagines himself a hero but unsympathetic neighbors see him as “damaged good” and other kids call him a faggot. Dave is a lonely, sensitive boy, destined for more tragedy.
The story jumps forward to 2000, and we see the three men in their 30s. Jimmy had been a successful criminal in his late teens, then went to prison for two years. He has a daughter, Katie, lost her mother to cancer, took another wife, Annabeth, and has two more daughters. He runs a corner grocery in the Flats. Jimmy’s life is all right until one Sunday morning his beloved Katie is found murdered. Sean, now a police detective, works the case. Dave, married and a father, comes to be suspected of the crime. In time, Jimmy murders Dave, only to have Sean prove that someone else killed Katie. As the curtain falls, Dave is senselessly dead, Jimmy plans to return to crime, and Sean vows to prove that Jimmy killed Dave, although there is little reason to think he can.
The power of the book arises from the most basic human emotions -- Jimmy’s love for his child and his fury at her death. There is a heartbreaking passage in which Jimmy, in a kind of prayer, tells his dead daughter that he loved her more than he had loved her mother, more than he loved her sisters, more than he loved his wife Annabeth. In the novel, this is part of an interior monologue. In the movie, writer Brian Helgeland, unwilling to lose these powerful words, injects them as dialogue in the scene when Jimmy bitterly tells Dave that he can’t cry for his dead daughter.
Lehane uses all his skill to twist the reader’s heartstrings. He stretches out Katie’s disappearance for a hundred pages until Sean finally confirms her death. We see Jimmy’s fears grow and when the news comes he explodes, wailing and fighting the police who keep him from her body. The scene is powerful in print and even more so in the film, as Sean Penn’s portrayal of Jimmy’s grief is seen up close and then from above in an almost unbearable image of rage and pain.
For all its moments of high drama, the greatness of the novel rests on the “depth of character” Lehane demanded of his students. We come to know Lehane’s people as well as we know anyone in recent American fiction. Few are entirely likable. Only the doomed Katie, briefly glimpsed, blazes with energy and hope, qualities that rarely survive in the Flats – and she dies trying to escape. We are taken inside these people and their tortured relationships until it is almost too much to bear. Lehane makes us understand people who do not understand themselves.
Serious characterizations require at least three elements. First, the writer must truly know his characters. Second, knowing them, he must have the talent to bring them to life. Third, he must have the courage to slow the action and take us deep into his characters, knowing that he runs the risk of losing some readers. He must trust his material, trust his talent, and trust his readers. Lehane does this both with his characters and with his loving but pitiless portrayal of their Boston neighborhood, which itself is a major character. Writing Mystic River, Lehane knew he would lose many Kenzie-Gennaro fans and he had no idea how many new readers would be drawn to his blue-collar tragedy.
His gamble paid off. The novel was praised as “powerful,” “gripping,” “brilliant,” “haunting,” “overwhelming,” “wrenching,” “disturbing,” fascinating” and “a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions.” Most reviewers approached it not as genre fiction but as a serious, mainstream novel about American life.
Some reviewers compared the novel to Greek tragedy. If classical Greek tragedy demands a great man brought down by a tragic flaw, Mystic River isn’t one; like Theodore Dreiser’s novel, it is better seen as an American tragedy. Dave, raped as a child, broken as an adult, was always doomed. When he is killed for the murder he didn’t commit rather than for the one he did, it is pitiful and ironic but not tragic. Sean is a smart cop with a bad marriage – Everyman, perhaps, but not a tragic figure. Finally there is Jimmy and if he is tragic it is not because he is a great man brought down, but a man both strong and weak who can’t overcome the flaws – “the burdens of my nature,” he calls them – that lure him back to crime. Jimmy is conflicted, in some ways sympathetic, but not tragic. We share his heartbreak when his daughter dies, but it cannot be said that suffering ennobles him.
The novel’s tragedy is more encompassing. Insofar as Jimmy is tragic, it is because he lives in a world where violence can only lead to more violence, a world that has taught him to think only in terms of revenge, not of forgiveness or understanding. The tragedy is the nature of the world these people inhabit, a world of alcoholism, wife-beating, and crime, a world in which poverty, ignorance, and violence beget more poverty, ignorance, and violence, generation after generation. Lehane, the boy the nuns brought to books, managed to escape that world and, like Larry McMurtry in The Last Picture Show, he looks back on his childhood with love, pity, pain, and anger. The tragedy in Mystic River is that of people who never had a chance.
Lehane was blessed – luck of the Irish -- that Clint Eastwood bought the film rights to his novel, hired a fine writer, assembled a brilliant cast, and made one of the best American movies in years. Sean Penn and Tim Robbins won Academy Awards as Jimmy and Dave, and many called Penn’s performance the best since those of the young Marlon Brando. It is fascinating to read the book and then watch the movie. The novel provides vastly more detail about the lives and thoughts of the characters, while the movie offers images that give the story a new dimension. It is the achievement of the movie that much is condensed but not much is lost.
I came to Lehane backwards. When his novel, Shutter Island, arrived for review in 2003 I had never read him. But its strange, dark story blew me away and sent me back to the earlier novels. Here’s how I began my review:
“To read Dennis Lehane’s Shutter Island is to enter a nightmare of madness, violence, and deception. To finish the novel – and it would be criminal even to hint at its ending – is to be disoriented, perhaps angered, and finally to reflect on the ability of a master storyteller to play havoc with our minds. If we could bring back Edgar Allan Poe and equip him with today’s postmodern bag of tricks, he might give us a tale as unexpected and unsettling as Shutter Island.”
Lehane knew he couldn’t follow up Mystic River with more of the same: “So why not go 360 degrees away and play with something I’ve always been enamored with: the Gothic. That’s what I did.” He called the novel “an homage to Gothic, but also an homage to B movies and pulp.”
Shutter Island is perverse, a trick. We read along with one set of assumptions and abruptly, at the end, we find that reality is the opposite of what we have been gulled into believing. Not all readers liked the final twist. Some were angered, some confused. Personally, I was pole-axed by the ending – and delighted, too, to have been so neatly fooled. Shutter Island wasn’t a step forward for Lehane, but more of a holding action while he girds himself for the next big one. Such a novel is now in progress. It is set in part during the Boston police strike of 1919 and touches on other events of the period. It will, he sighs, be very long.
For now, the question is this: How good is Mystic River? It seems to me that, in terms of American popular fiction, it is a great novel, like Main Street, Lonesome Dove, From Here to Eternity, All the King’s Men, or The Grapes of Wrath. Not many of our major writers have attempted tragedy among the working class. McMurtry portrayed cowboys, Jones gave us soldiers, Steinbeck looked at dispossessed farmers, and Dreiser’s masterpiece examined a young man who tried to rise beyond his origins. Mystic River doesn’t suffer by comparison with any of these fine novels.
Although several murders occur in Mystic River, it ignores the conventions of crime fiction. Sean is a cop, trying to solve a murder, but he’s not the protagonist, and although he finds out who killed Katie he can’t prove that Jimmy killed Dave. In the central murder, the killers are not evil – Katie’s death was unintended. The novel offers no conventional love interest; the three principals are married, and of them Jimmy is the most happily married – to a working-class Lady Macbeth who wants him to return to crime. There is room for a sequel that would show Jimmy becoming a crime czar and Sean trying to bring his old friend down. But Lehane says he plans no sequel. Insofar as Mystic River is a crime novel, it is one that transcends and transforms the genre, as Hamlet transcended and transformed the revenge plays that inspired it.
In one interview, Lehane said, “I believe that the crime novel is where the social novel went. If you want to write about the underbelly of America, if you want to write about the second America that nobody wants to look at, you turn to the crime novel.”
In terms of the social novel, the big novel about the real America that Tom Wolfe and others have called for, Lehane has placed himself in a line that goes back to Dreiser and Steinbeck. In terms of our theme – the triumph of the thriller – Mystic River is a milestone. In the eighty or so years since Hammett, thousands of writers have produced crime novels that followed more or less the same formula. Some, within the confines of that formula, have been brilliant but were nonetheless limited by its demands. Lehane, having mastered the crime thriller in his early books, moved beyond it in Mystic River, to the highest level of American popular fiction. Other writers have tried to do that and will again. But the artistic and commercial success of Mystic River makes it the one that changed the landscape, the novel that will inspire and challenge other writers for years to come.
Patrick Anderson. The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction. Random House, 2007.