What is Bosch’s Code?

In 1952, Penn State Professor Philip Young published Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration, one of the first academic studies of Hemingway’s work. The book had a lasting effect on Hemingway studies because Young was the first to postulate that Hemingway’s heroes all lived by a code, which involved courage, stoicism, and enduring after injury.

“This is the Hemingway ‘code’,” wrote Young. “It is made of the controls of honor and courage which in a life of tension and pain make a man a man and distinguish him from people who follow random impulses, let down their hair, and are generally messy, perhaps cowardly, and without inviolable rules for how to live holding tight.”

As I’ve read and reread Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch series, I’ve often wondered if there’s a “Bosch Code” as much as a Hemingway Code. Some readers may respond: that Bosch’s code is “Everybody counts or nobody counts.” And that’s more a motto or a tagline than a code. I’m thinking of a set of principles that the hero lives by, that guide his actions, especially in highly charged ethical dilemmas. 

I think the Bosch Code emphasizes fairness, action, hard work and an ironclad belief that all people, dead or alive, deserve dignity and compassion.

Here are a few components of the Bosch Code:

Everybody Counts or Nobody Counts

Tagline or not, this five-word phrase first muttered in The Last Coyote is the cornerstone of the Bosch Code. Bosch’s mission in life is to bring justice to the dead, and the “everybody counts” ethos stipulates that every single human deserves such justice. It embodies Bosch’s humanism and compassion, and highlights Connelly’s ability to bring all levels of society into his fictional world.

In Echo Park, the Everybody Counts mindset is especially strong. Bosch is ridden with guilt that a mistake by his team years ago let a serial killer go undetected, and he’s infuriated that Jerry Edgar doesn’t feel similar guilt.  “He remembered one of his early teachers in Homicide,” Connelly writes in this novel. “Ray Vaughn had a special sympathy for the ones he called ‘murders’ nobodies.’ He taught Bosch early on that in society not all victims are created equal, but to the true detective they must be.”

Get Off Your Ass and Knock on Doors

In Crime Beat, we learn that Connelly saw the above instruction pinned on the wall of the Fort Lauderdale homicide division by Detective George Hurt. Bosch adopted it and it embodies Bosch’s commitment to actively investigating each case. It became part of the Bosch schtick, even taped next to Bosch’s desk in the TV series.

In The Closers (which still seems like a recent book but is now the middle of the series), Bosch hopes the lumpy chair at his new desk doesn’t give him backache. Maybe, he thought, it would give him an incentive to go out. “In his first run as a homicide detective he had lived by the adage Get off your ass and knock on doors. He didn’t see any reason that should change this time around.”

 Dead People Deserve Justice

The adage Everybody Counts or Nobody Counts applies to both the living and the dead, and in Bosch’s universe the dead may even have priority as no one is looking out for them but the people investigating their demise. Terry McCaleb drills down into this in his profile of Bosch in A Darkness More than Night when he categorizes the detective as “an avenging angel” – the type of detective to feel it’s a mission to find retribution for the wronged individual. 

Connelly really spells out this part of the code in Two Kinds of Truth, when Bosch feels bad because he assumed a Chinese-American murder victim had been in a gang when he had actually tried to clean up crime. “It bothered him deeply because a relationship was always established between the victim and the detective charged with solving the crime. Bosch had doubted the goodness of the victim and let him down.”

 Money Means Virtually Nothing

This became apparent when Bosch became a quasi-private eye (and Connelly adopted the first person) in Lost Light. The wealthy Alexander Taylor offers Bosch about $50,000 to solve the Angella Benson case and later ups the payment, but Bosch isn’t interested in the pay package. “He gave the number but I didn’t bother writing it down. I thought about the money for all of five seconds and then erased the message and closed the phone.”

In fact, Bosch is a sort-of private eye in four novels, which was really the only time he had to negotiate for a fee. He sure didn’t get rich off it. In The Narrows, he worked free for Graciella McCabe, a friend’s widow.

In The Crossing, Bosch works for defence attorney Mickey Haller, who tells Bosch his pay will be some paintings from their client, an impoverished artist. And in The Wrong Side of Goodbye, Bosch gets an upfront payment of $10,000 from a dying billionaire to find an old flame, and won’t accept more when the job increases. Oh, and this is while he’s working as a volunteer for the San Fernando Police Department.

 Rules Can Be Bent for Cops

Angels Flight shows this part of the code best. Pursuing the killer of civil rights attorney Howard Elias, Bosch chooses not to wait for a search warrant and breaks into Elias’ apartment to search it. He would have done the same with Elias’ office had an official not stopped him.

Later in the novel, Bosch learns some detectives from the Robbery-Homicide Division, who have a motive to have murdered Elias, tampered with the murder scene. They took Elias’ watch and wallet to make it look like a robbery to divert attention from themselves. Bosch confronts them and tells them to reveal where the watch and wallet are or he’ll tell Deputy Chief Irvin Irving the robbery took place after the shooting. “Personally, I wouldn’t mind it going that way, seeing you people get what you got coming,” Bosch tells them. “But it will fuck the case – put hair on the cake, taint it beyond repair. So I’m being selfish about it and giving you a chance it makes me sick to give.”

 Racism and Sexism are Repulsive

Harry Bosch is decent and unselfish in his dealings with women, in both his personal and professional life. The most complicated relationship is with Eleanor Wish, the mother of his daughter and his greatest love. He shows his devotion to her in Trunk Music, rescuing her from kidnappers and then fully claiming responsibility for her becoming entangled in his investigation. “Everything that’s happened, it’s my fault,” he said. “And I want to try to make it up to you.”

Connelly never holds back when portraying the systemic sexism in the LAPD, but Harry Bosch – both old and old school – stands out as a paragon of gender enlightenment when he teams up with Renée Ballard. In fact, Bosch worked better with female partners – Ballard, Bella Lourdes, Lucia Soto, and Kiz Rider – than most of his male partners.

The handling of racism is more complicated – not least because the LAPD in the real world has been widely criticized for racism throughout the ranks. Bosch is disgusted when he encounters this, as he shows in his dealings with Ray Powers in Trunk Music.

But that isn’t to say Bosch is immune from prejudicial feelings. Fellow cop David Chu calls him out in Nine Dragons for his treatment of a Chinese family and Chu himself. Though Bosch at first denies it, “He had to admit Chu had a point. And he was embarrassed that he had been so easily pegged as someone who had come back from Vietnam with a racial prejudice.” The important thing is that Bosch realizes this attitude is wrong and works to change it.

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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.