How good a first novel was The Black Echo?
Spoiler Alert: This article reveals the plot of The Black Echo.
The interesting thing about rereading Michael Connelly’s first few novels – other than the fact that they’re cracking great reads – is understanding the educational process he went through with each book. His first, The Black Echo, won the Edgar Allan Poe Prize for the best first novel of 1992. It is a tremendous first book that ably kicks off one of THE great police procedural series ever. There are also a few flaws in the novel, especially in secondary characters.
As I wrote in a previous blog, Connelly got the idea for this novel when he interviewed for his job as a police reporter for the Los Angeles Times in August 1986. During the interview, he learned of recent bank heists in which the burglars tunneled from storm sewers to the institutions’ vaults. There are thousands of miles of storm sewers under Los Angeles, some so wide that the crooks could drive ATVs through them to get to their digging site. It was enough to excite anyone’s imagination, and it certainly piqued Connelly’s.
[Warning: These blogs analyze Connelly’s books and reveal plots. If you haven’t read The Black Echo, don’t read any further. Just go buy the book. If you have read the book, carry on.]
Every mystery novel plot relies on an underlying crime, and Connelly crafted a dynamite crime for this book. An FBI agent named Eleanor Wish had once believed her brother had been killed in action in Vietnam, but she learns her brother had been killed by his collaborators in a drug ring running heroin from Saigon to the U.S. The group was led by a senior official named John Rourke, who later joined the FBI. Rourke had helped get two South Vietnamese grandees from the drug ring, Tran and Binh, into America when Saigon fell. Before fleeing, the Vietnamese officials had converted their wealth into diamonds, which they smuggled into the U.S.
Eager for revenge, Wish had herself transferred to L.A. to work with Rourke and proposes the bank heist to steal the diamonds from Tran and Binh. Working with Rourke’s former collaborators from Vietnam, they tunnel into bank vaults from storm sewers. One of the burglars is a former Army tunnel rat named Billy Meadows. When Meadows ignores Rourke’s orders that nothing from the heist can be sold in the short-term, Meadows’ partners murder him.
Even though Bosch says repeatedly in the series that he doesn’t believe in coincidences (Bosch on Page 26 of this novel: “There are no coincidences.”), the series opens with a massive coincidence. Bosch knows the victim in the case he grabbed. He and Meadows were tunnel rats (soldiers who descended into enemy tunnels to clear them) in the Vietnam war.
Connelly conceals this intriguing crime under layers of investigation. All the reader knows as the story opens is that a body has been found in a drainpipe and Bosch takes the case. Then Connelly shows great restraint in slowly revealing snippets of information to his readers to drive the story forward.
Page 10 – Bosch begins the investigation.
Page 41 – Bosch finds a pawn shop slip in the dead man’s apartment.
Page 48 – Bosch learns the pawn shop was broken into and a bracelet stolen.
Page 55 – Bosch learns the bracelet was originally stolen from WestLand National Bank.
Page 57 – An LA Times reporter tells Bosch about the tunnel job at WestLand.
Page 85 – Bosch meets FBI Agent Eleanor Wish, and they begin working on the case together.
And so the plot develops, with Wish and Bosch focusing on the tunnel job, going through the list of people who lost items in the bank’s safe deposit boxes until they hone in on a former Vietnamese general. Gradually, they figure out the burglars are planning another hit and even work out which savings institution they are planning to tunnel into. This climaxes with a shootout at the lending institution and a pursuit through the tunnels, comprising 25 pages of raw action.
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The reader by this time knows that Rourke was in on the plot, but the novel’s epilogue shows that Eleanor Wish the brains behind the bank job. Like Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, Bosch ignores his own love for the villain and forces Wish to turn herself in.
For a first-time novelist, the plot was tremendous. Actually, any crime writer would be proud of this plot. It’s hard charging, with enough pauses for character development, complex without being confusing.
In creating Harry Bosch, Michael Connelly gave birth to a character that would dominate his career for the next three decades. Though Connelly dives deeper into Bosch’s character in later books, he’s painted the portrait in broad brushstrokes in this debut novel.
The son of a murdered prostitute, Bosch was raised in institutions and foster homes until he joined the Army and fought in Vietnam. He was an LAPD lifer. He had been a “detective superstar” (as Eleanor Wish says) who was demoted because of a controversial shooting and ended up in “the sewer” (as Wish calls Hollywood homicide).
Bosch is tough, courageous, judgmental, loyal to friends and unsparing to enemies. He loves jazz and Los Angeles restaurants, and lives in a cantilever house with a million-dollar view. He smokes cigarettes and drinks just enough to make him everyman. He never suffers fools nor bureaucrats gladly. His constant thumbing his nose to authority places him on the LAPD brass’ shitlist in indelible ink, but also entrenches him in the hearts of readers.
In this first book, Connelly also introduces a carousel of secondary characters who support Bosch throughout the series: Jerry Edgar, Bosch’s dapper partner whose nonchalance about his job provides a foil to Bosch’s focused professionalism; Harvey “Ninety-Eight” Pounds, the lieutenant who makes Bosch’s life hell; and of course, Bosch’s nemesis Irvin Irving.
This is where the rookie errors appear. Deputy Chief Irvin Irving is an absolutely integral character in the Bosch series, but he did not have an auspicious start. An imposing man with a shaved head, whose jawline was wider than his ears, Irving is more caricature than character in this novel. He’s impossibly prudish, forbidding subordinates to swear in his presence, and the motivation for his obsessional vendetta against Bosch is never fully explained.
Irving’s hapless attack dogs are a pair of Internal Affairs officers called Pierce Lewis and Don Clarke, who appear to be in the novel for comic relief. During surveillance, they bicker about who’s driving and who’s taking photos. They’re subservient to Irving and constantly outsmarted by Bosch.
In a really weird scene, Lewis and Clarke are staking out Bosch’s house, when Harry surprises them, throws open their car door and pulls them out by their neckties. Yes, Bosch is strong, but no one can pull two men out of a car by their ties. He wrestles them to the ground, handcuffs them to one another around the trunk of a palm tree and leaves them with their pants around their ankles. It’s a scene that shows Bosch’s devil-may-care moxie but seriously strains credulity.
If there is one thing Connelly learned from writing The Black Echo it’s that he is not a funny writer, and would never be able to write in the style of his hero Raymond Chandler. It was a valuable lesson because Connelly has greatly improved his writing by not trying to be funny. (There’s no shortage of crime writers who could follow that example.) No one buys Connelly’s novels for the belly-laughs. They buy his work for the taut, suspenseful plots, great settings and excellent characters.
We’ve got to remember this was a first novel, and first novels are difficult. I literally lost track of how many rewrites my first novel The Haight went through, because with each draft I found problems, huge problems, that had to be corrected. With its splendid plot and enduring hero, The Black Echo was a magnificent debut that really left readers with one question: Can this young writer do it again in subsequent novels?
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Hi, I’m Peter Moreira, author of The Haight Mystery Series, and I hope you’ve enjoyed this article. If you want to receive my blogs regularly, please sign up for the mailing list at my website by clicking here. As well as regular blogs about Michael Connelly and other crime fiction writers, you’ll receive The Ashbury Hideaway, a free novella in ebook format. In this prequel to The Haight Mystery Series, Jimmy Spracklin’s teenage daughter runs away to Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love. Spracklin knows about the drugs, sexual predators and bikers in Haight-Ashbury, and he has to find her before she comes to harm.
The Haight Mystery Series is set in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in the late 1960s. Each book is a whodunnit with hippies. Described as ‘Gritty and Groovy” (Tampa Bay author George L. Fleming) and “Fabulous” (Pamela Callow, author of the Kate Lange series), the Haight books chronicle the investigations of SFPD Lieutenant Jimmy Spracklin into homicides in the hippie enclave. If you’re interested in the 1960s, fond of San Francisco or just love great page-turners with strong characters, check out the series with The Ashbury Hideaway. I hope you enjoy the novella enough to move on to the five novels (so far) in the series.
If you do read them, let me know what you think. I love hearing from my readers.
