Connelly, Michael

Michael Connelly (born July 21, 1956 is an American author of detective novels and other crime fiction, notably those featuring LAPD Detective Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch and criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller. His books, which have been translated into 39 languages, have garnered him many awards. Connelly was the President of the Mystery Writers of America from 20 03 to 2004. Connelly was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the second oldest child of W. Michael Connelly, a property developer, and Mary Connelly, a homemaker. According to Connelly, his father was a frustrated artist who encouraged his children to want to succeed in life and was a risk taker who alternated success with failure in his pursuit of a career. Connelly's mother was a fan of crime fiction and introduced her son to the world of mystery novels. At age 12, Connelly moved with his family from Philadelphia to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where he attended St. Thomas Aquinas High School. At age 16, Connelly’s interest in crime and mystery escalated when, on his way home from his work as a hotel dishwasher, he witnessed a man throw an object into a hedge. Connelly, curious, decided to investigate and found that the object was a gun wrapped in a lumberjack shirt. After putting the gun back, he followed the man to a bar and then left to go home to tell his father. Later that night, Connelly brought the police down to the bar, but the man was already gone. This event introduced Connelly to the world of police officers and their lives, impressing him with the investigators’ hard faces and the way they worked.

Connelly had planned on following his father’s early choice of career in building construction and started out at the University of Florida in Gainesville as a building construction major. After earning grades that were lower than expected, Connelly went to see Robert Altman’s film The Long Goodbye (1973) and was enchanted by what he saw. The film, based on Raymond Chandler’s 1953 novel of the same name, inspired Connelly to want to become a mystery writer. Connelly went home and read all of Chandler's works featuring Philip Marlowe, a detective in Los Angeles during the 1940s and ‘50s, and decided to switch majors to journalism with a minor in creative writing. After graduating from the University of Florida in 1980, Connelly got a job as a crime beat writer at the Daytona Beach News Journal, where he worked for almost two years until he got a job at the Fort Lauderdale News and Sun-Sentinel in 1981. There, he covered the crime beat during the South Florida cocaine wars, an era that brought with it much violence and murder.He stayed with the paper for a few years and in 1986, he and two other reporters spent several months interviewing survivors of the 1985 Delta Flight 191 plane crash, which story earned Connelly a place as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The honor also brought Connelly a job as a crime reporter at the Los Angeles Times. He moved to California in 1987 with his wife Linda McCaleb, whom he met while in college and married in April 1984.

My Opinion: I love Harry Bosch. He is dogged, determined and has a very strong moral code. He also has an anti-authority attitude which puts him constantly at odds with his superiors. (Wonder why that appeals to me?) I strongly

recommend him to you .

Here are his novels:

Dark Sacred Night

For more information about this author, go to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Connelly