Michael Connelly Has No Interest in Slowing Down
I was struck recently by a few pieces of content Michael Connelly and his team put out that heightens my respect for him.
I’ve always respected Connelly’s consistently high standards and his peerless research. But these days I’ve come to admire the work ethic of this writer, who will turn 69 in July and who is my senior by just five years. Connelly has reached a time of life when, for many, the golf course holds more allure than the laptop, but there’s no sign of him slowing down.
Connelly recently posted this video on YouTube, set on Catalina Island, where his next book Nightshade is set. This novel (out in May) involves Los Angeles County Sheriff Detective Stilwell who has been demoted to the island off L.A. where Terry McCaleb lived in A Darkness more than Night. When a body is found wrapped in plastic in the harbor, Stilwell investigates and soon discovers – who could have predicted it? – closely guarded secrets about the serene island.
The video and all the blurb about Nightshade make it clear that this will be Book 1 in the new Stilwell series. As he enters his seventies, Connelly has plans for a new body of work.
But Nightshade isn’t the only Connelly book coming out this year. In the past week, he announced that a new Lincoln Lawyer novel, The Proving Ground, will be published in October. In this novel, Mickey Haller sues an AI company whose product may have been responsible for the murder of a young girl.
This will be Connelly’s 41st novel and the eighth published during the first six years of this decade. It’s a phenomenal output for a writer of any age. It’s enough to ask whether the quality of Connelly’s writing is suffering as he pumps out so many books. I’d say the answer is a qualified no.
The hallmark of Connelly’s work is his research. Three decades after he left his job as a police reporter for the Los Angeles Times, Connelly still does an incredible job of keeping abreast of current developments in the justice system. He has never let up in this and works his research deftly into the fabric of his novels. In Desert Star (2022), we found Ballard maintaining her standards as morale in the LAPD tanked amid the movement to defund police departments across the U.S. In Resurrection Walk (2023), Connelly delved into the growing branch of law that fights to free wrongfully convicted people.
Connelly’s research shapes his plots and I’ve come to believe it even determines his style. His prose has never been florid, but he writes with authority – an authority that comes from knowing his turf better than anyone.
Having said that, there are problems with the recent Bosch-Ballard novels, but it has little to do with the speed at which they’re written. Connelly has chosen to write novels with three or four main plots, and this deprives many of the recent books of a dominant dramatic arc. I think he’d be following this pattern regardless of the number of books he’s writing.
There’s another indication that Michael Connelly is not lowering his standards dramatically, and again it was shown in a public statement he made in January. During the wildfires in Los Angeles (which reportedly consumed one of his homes), Connelly posted on his website that he’d been working on the new Lincoln Lawyer novel, set in January 2025, when the wildfires consumed swaths of the city.
“Now I must start over and rebuild the story to include what has happened here in the last week,” Connelly wrote. “I don’t want to be exploitive or merely put it in as background. I have to find a way to make it mean something in the story and maybe to the people who read it in the fall.”
So in a year when he was putting out two novels, Connelly went back to rewrite the second novel to ensure authenticity. Age isn’t slowing down Michael Connelly. Neither is the financial lure of television deals, even though his TV series continue to increase. If you take a look at the video on Catalina Island, you’ll learn something else about this man’s discipline.
Looks to me like he’s slimmed down a bit, which is no mean feat for a fellow in his sixties. Or so I’m told.
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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.
