How Major LA Events Shaped the Bosch Series
When Michael Connelly conceived of Harry Bosch, he had no idea what was coming his way.
You’ve got to wonder when Michael Connelly realized he was sitting on a gold mine – not just in terms of wealth, but in literary fodder.
Connelly has written about his excitement to land a job as a police reporter at the Los Angeles Times in 1987, and how he was soon working on a novel about a renegade cop in the city’s police department. What’s astonishing is how a few tragic events changed the world he was exploring. As he developed his series, he found his fiction chronicling an institution that was under the world’s microscope, making his work relevant in ways he couldn’t have imagined before. Those events, of course, can be summed up in the names of two African-American men – Rodney King and O.J. Simpson.
As the accompanying timeline shows, Connelly conceived of the Harry Bosch series years before four L.A. cops were caught on video mercilessly beating Rodney King, after pulling him over for speeding. Connelly began working on his first Bosch novel shortly after joining the Times. Given that his first novel, The Black Echo, was published in January 1992, it’s a safe assumption that he wrote a few drafts and got his first book deal with Little, Brown and Company sometime around 1990, by which time the novel would be pretty well finished.
As Connelly prepared the novel for his editors, the big crime story in L.A. time was Lyle and Eric Menendez brothers being charged with the murder of their wealthy parents. Everything changed when the video of the King beating was broadcast around the world. And I mean, around the world. I was living in Hong Kong at the time and it was front page news there.
When the video aired on March 5, 1991, it plunged the LAPD into controversy. Harry Bosch recalled that day in Lost Light (one of the few Bosch novels written in the first person), saying: “The defining moment for me as a police officer did not occur on the street or while I worked a case. It occurred on March 5, 1991.” He describes the shock he and other cops felt as they saw the video for the first time.
The four officers were charged with the beating ten days later, and soon a blue-chip panel headed by Warren Christopher (later Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State) was delving into the culture and conduct of the LAPD. The Christopher Commission worked fast, producing a report 126 after the tape went public, and finding a significant number of LAPD officers repetitively used excessive force against members of the public. These “ugly incidents” would not diminish until ranking officers know they’d be held responsible, said the report.
The Christopher Commission was important in influencing the world Connelly was creating in his novels for two reasons. First, the report was written not by disenfranchised minorities or even the news media seeking to attract viewers of readers. It was authored by a group of highly respected individuals from the community. And second, it wasn’t focusing on police forces in general but specifically on the LAPD, adding to its notoriety.
The conduct of police officers across the developed world would become the touchpoint of racial and civic issues in the Twenty-First Century, culminating with the Black Lives Matter Movement in the 2020s after the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota. The LAPD retained its notoriety as the force whose officers beat King and that gave a badge to Mark Fuhrman, the detective in the O.J. case who was accused of frequently using racial slurs. It meant that Connelly was not just writing potboilers; he was chronicling an important institution in American life at a critical time.
Rereading the first two Bosch novels, there’s scant mention of the thundering criticism of the LAPD that had erupted shortly before they were published. But that all changed with The Concrete Blonde, the third Bosch novel, and likely the first that was fully written after the King beating.
This splendid novel, in which Connelly hits his stride as a master of crime fiction, is great mainly because of the strength of the plot, which I’ll discuss in a later blog. But it also signals something new in Connelly’s writing: a recognition that Bosch is part of an organization despised by broad swaths of the community it serves. And in Honey Chandler, he created a magnificent character who embodied the public outrage.
Chandler is a lawyer suing Bosch and the LAPD for shooting and killing a man believed to be a serial killer known as the Dollmaker. Smart and sassy, Chandler and Bosch begrudgingly chat during cigarette breaks, and she reminds him that the atmosphere had changed since he was first exonerated in the shooting. “This was before Rodney King, back when the wide majority of people in this city did not believe that their police engaged in horrible abuses as a matter of routine,” she said.
The legacy of the Rodney King beatings hangs over the next several Bosch books, which represented the zenith of Connelly’s writing. In Lost Light, for example, Connelly mentions that the North Hollywood station was built “post Rodney King” so it was like a fortress on the outside and a civil service office on the inside. Connelly had even more to work with after June 1994 when the former football star O.J. Simpson was charged with the murder of his ex-wife and her friend, resulting in his sensational trial in 1995. Once again, the LAPD was global front-page news.
Angels Flight, the first Bosch novel after the O.J. trial, delves into the groundswell of popular resentment against the LAPD more than any of Connelly’s novels. The main murder victim is a lawyer called Howard Elias, another lawyer who specializes in suing the LAPD, and again he symbolizes the anger felt by many – especially African-Americans – against the department. The novel is brilliantly nuanced in several ways. Bosch’s partners Kiz Rider and Jerry Edgar are African-American, and resent it when the LAPD brass wants them in photo ops to demonstrate Black detectives are working the Elias case. And Connelly depicts one detective – overall, a sympathetic character – going too far and torturing a kidnapping suspect.
The public reaction to these earthshaking events also shaped Connelly’s greatest creation, Harry Bosch. This becomes most apparent in The Last Coyote, in which Bosch is forced into psychiatric analysis with Carmen Hinojos, a psychiatrist whose patients include many cops. She struggles to convince Bosch that he’s suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome, and finally cries out: “Can you think of anything more stressful to be in this city during the last few years than a police officer? Between Rodney King and the scrutiny and villainy that brought, the riots, fires, floods and earthquakes, each officer on this force has had to write the book on stress management and, of course, mismanagement.”
As an artist, Connelly casts light on an important chapter of modern American history. Race relations are a paramount issue in the U.S. today, and no aspect of this issue is more fraught that the minorities’ experience with the justice system. And no police department has come under greater scrutiny than the LAPD. As a writer of police procedurals, Connelly take the policeman’s point of view when examining the issue, but he doesn’t shy away from the culpability of some police officers. It’s one reason Connelly’s work rises above the level of mere entertainment.
The echoes of Rodney King and O.J. Simpson reverberate through the series. The riots of 1992, for example, are the foundation of The Black Box and influence the stories of both Angels Flight and Nine Dragons. And throughout the series, the backdrop of social tension and the shortcomings endemic to the Los Angeles Police Department pervade the text.
It should be a surprise to none of Connelly’s millions of fans that these events shaped the series. What I find astonishing is that Connelly worked on the nascent Bosch series for three or four years before anyone ever heard of Rodney King. He could not have known how the scandals would impact the motivations of Bosch and so many of the supporting characters.
In City of Bones, Lt. Grace Billets reacts bitterly when Bosch tells her she sounds like the imperious Irvine Irving in trying to save the LAPD from more humiliation. “Yeah, maybe I sound like him because maybe I agree with him for once. The department has had nothing but scandal after scandal. Like most of the decent cops around here, I for one am sick of it.”
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