Michael Connelly writes about things lost—lost innocence, lost life, lost love, lost and missing persons, lost souls, Lost Angeles, and, most of all, lost light. He can do this because nothing is lost on him.
He is a quiet, deliberate man—as much Pinkerton as reporter—continually taking everything in.
Harry Bosch, Connelly’s cop is a man intimately acquainted with loss. He lost his mother when he was only eleven years old. He’s lost partners and fellow foot soldiers, lost victims and predators, and, little by little, he’s losing his city and maybe even his own soul.
Harry Bosch inhabits a world so dark even the light is lost.
It’s a world he’s familiar with and at home in. In Vietnam, he was a tunnel rat with the 25th Infantry Division who specialized in making his way through the Vietcong’s underground maze of absolute blackness.
In honor of my friend and in homage to his complex character and concepts, I wrote the following passage in my new novel, “Double Exposure:”
“Glancing down at his camera, he pulls up the information for the last image. According to the time and date stamp encoded in the picture, it was taken less than two hours ago.
“The murderer had been finishing up about the time Remington was unloading the ATV and talking to Heather. And hearing what he thought were screams. He wonders if, like lost light, the horrific screams had been trapped in the swamp until someone had arrived to hear them.”
I have not mentioned this to anyone—including Michael—until this moment, and didn’t know that I ever would, but I felt it an apt example of the ubiquitous influence and impact of Michael Connelly and Harry Bosch on contemporary crime fiction.
It may well be that Harry Bosch is in the dark searching for light—the light at the end of the tunnel or some lost light trapped in the claustrophobic tube with him—but I think it more likely that Harry Bosch is that lost light. As if some of the lost light from his time in the tunnels in Vietnam clung to him, Harry is a faint, lost light in a city of oppressive, overwhelming darkness—a darkness more than night.
Down the dark, mean streets of LA, people grope around, night-blind, bumping into one another, doing damage, and the best that they can hope for is help from a tunnel rat from Vietnam, a lost light bearer.
Interviewing Michael this past weekend as part of the 10th Annual Gulf Coast Writers Conference, I was reminded just how gifted he really is.
Back when I was in college, we’d sit around in my lit class and discuss what we thought poems and stories meant. More often than not, when we’d concluded our analysis, I’d think there’s no way the author ever intended half of what we got out of his or her work, but occasionally, you could tell no matter what you took from a work, the author had intended it—and much beside that you didn’t get.
Years later, listening to filmmaker commentaries on DVD, I was struck by writer/directors who fully intended everything I got out of their films and far more that I completely missed.
The thing is, regardless of the art form—book or film or whatever—the author or artist who consistently produces emotionally resonant and thought-provoking work, isn’t doing so by accident.
Michael Connelly’s books are meaningful—mean so much to so many—because he takes every opportunity, uses every name or location or event or description to communicate something. Harry Bosch’s name is significant (he’s named after the 15th Century Dutch artist, Hierynomus Bosch)—more so as the series continues. His house, propped precariously on the side of a mountain, is a metaphor—as is the jazz he listens to, the relationships he’s involved in, the lone, lost coyote way he operates as an outsider within his own department, and every single space of what used to be Raymond Chandler’s, but is now Michael Connelly’s Los Angeles.
The Bosch books are about being in a dark tunnel journeying into light—an arduous, treacherous journey that is slow and painful and costly. Connelly knows what Milton knew, and what Harry and his many fans are learning—that “Long is the way, And hard, that out of hell leads up to light.” And this deep, this dark, lost light is all there is—all we can hope for—as we stumble around with Harry during his long day’s journey through the night.
No comments:
Post a Comment