Connelly Joined the Elite with this Novel
The third Harry Bosch novel reveals his deft character development and his peerless research.
Spoiler Alert: This blog reveals plot details of The Concrete Blonde.
In The Concrete Blonde, Michael Connelly hits his stride as a crime novelist.
His first two novels, The Black Echo and The Black Ice, were splendid, but Connelly revealed a maturity in his third novel in deepening his hero’s character and surrounding him with a fantastic supporting cast. For the first time, he delved into both halves of what would become his literary universe – police procedural and courtroom drama.
The splendor of this book (published in 1994) starts with the first glance at the cover, because it even has a great title. The Concrete Blonde. Slightly rugged, slightly sexy, it harkens back to dime-store potboilers of the 1950s.
And the excellence continues in the first few chapters. There’s immediate tension as the book opens with Bosch and the LAPD being sued for the fatal shooting of a serial sex killer known as the Dollmaker. As we learned in The Black Echo, Harry Bosch had been demoted a few years earlier after he fatally shot a man called Norman Church. The LAPD determined that Church was the Dollmaker, who had killed nine women (mainly sex workers) and applied garish amounts of makeup to their faces afterward so they resembled dolls. Internal Affairs determined that Bosch found the serial killer, but he had violated protocol by entering Church’s room without backup.
As The Concrete Blonde opens, Norman Church’s widow has hired hotshot civil rights attorney Honey Chandler to sue Bosch and the LAPD for the wrongful killing of her husband. Bosch’s defense is that Church was definitely the Dollmaker and he had ignored Bosch’s orders to freeze and show his hands. Chandler counters that the LAPD can’t even prove that Church was the Dollmaker and Bosch is a renegade who killed the wrong guy.
Bosch and his hapless lawyer Rodney Belk have an uphill battle because so much of their case relies on Bosch’s own testimony, and they’re sunk if the jury accepts that Church was not the Dollmaker. Then the crisis hits. The body of a young woman is found encased in the concrete of a construction site. She bears all the hallmarks of a Dollmaker killing, and it appears she was killed after Church had died. While Bosch is going through the court case, he has to find the killer of the Concrete Blonde. If he fails, he’s finished as a cop because he screwed up the Dollmaker case so badly.
This brilliant plot is the frame of the novel, and Connelly knows that plot alone won’t produce a great novel. One constant throughout Connelly’s career has been his peerless research, and it’s on full display in this book. In The Concrete Blonde, Connelly delves into federal court procedures, the psychology of sexual violence and the Los Angeles porn industry. And, as always in Connelly’s work, this research results in fascinating exposition that strengthens the story. It may be the most under-appreciated part of Connelly’s writing.
With Bosch on the witness stand, the reader gains a more penetrating view of Bosch’s psyche, especially when Chandler cross-examines him about a psychiatric report prepared by the LAPD following the Church shooting. Though the report had appeared in The Black Echo, Chandler dives into it to reveal Bosch’s character – the residual effects of his mother’s murder, his devil-may-care attitude, his single-minded determination to nail killers. This deep-dive into Bosch’s psychology begins in The Concrete Blonde and continues in such books as The Last Coyote and A Darkness More than Light. Rather than weigh the books down, these studies help to elucidate a brilliant literary character.
And who better to bring out these observations than Honey Chandler, one of Connelly’s greatest characters. Known to local cops as “Money” Chandler (because she got rich suing the LAPD), she is ferocious in the courtroom, but during the breaks she goes outside for a cigarette and chats with Bosch. If Connelly made one strategic mistake in this book it was probably removing Honey Chandler from the series too soon. (It’s an error he corrected in the Bosch TV series, in which Mimi Rogers plays the role with elan over several years.)
Another splendid character in this novel is – surprisingly – Deputy Chief Irvin Irving. I say surprisingly because Connelly’s handling of this character, so important to the Bosch story, was shoddy in the first Bosch book and little better in the second. In The Black Echo, Irving is like a villain in a cartoon strip, ridiculously prudish and hellbent on Bosch’s demise, for no good reason. Two books later, he’s a stronger character with a begrudging respect for Bosch, backing him throughout the trial.
If there’s a weakness in The Concrete Blonde, it is that Irving is still surrounded by caricatured bureaucrats that simply don’t come off as real. Case in point: Lieut. Hans Rollenberger, who holds a key role in the task force set up to catch the Dollmaker copycat. Connelly describes him as “another cookie-cutter bureaucrat who . . . was a climber and, therefore, he couldn’t be trusted.” Sure, such characters are needed to portray Connelly/Bosch’s view of the LAPD, but the author goes too far with Rollenberger, even having him recite a bureaucratic phone greeting each time he answers a call.
This is a minor point about a minor character. Overall this book is sheer brilliance, and proved Connelly’s mettle as a crime novelist. By 1994, he had developed a cop series in Los Angeles in the wake of the Rodney King beating and O.J. Simpson trial, when people around the world were fascinated with L.A. policing. He had created three distinct plots, each superb, and showed he could bring out fascinating aspects of policing. And above all, he had developed a legendary hero in Harry Bosch.
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Peter Moreira is the author of The Haight Mystery Series — retro mystery novels set in San Francisco in the late 1960s. Go to the home page of this website to sign up for a free prequel.
