I've also met Michael Connelly once (and discussed with him
over the e-mail). He's a really nice man, easy to come along
with, comes up with good answers for your questions, has none
of the snickery you might expect from a bestseller writer.
(Well, "snickery" here isn't a very good word, I couldn't
come up with a better one.)
I've always liked everything I've read by Connelly, but I
would rather place him with hardboiled rather than noir.
Stylistically, he's not very hardboiled, though, and comes
close to being a thriller writer. His plots however have a
feel of a hardboiled novel, mainly Chandler (at his most
serious) and Ross Macdonald. He does use serial killers,
which, to my mind, have become a boring cliché¬ but I can stand
them in Connelly's stuff.
I thought ECHO PARK was a bit too early. The shifts between
the narrators were a bit clumsy. The title of him I've liked
the best is probably TRUNK MUSIC. There's a twist I sure
didn't see coming. As for THE LINCOLN LAWYER, I thought it
was very solid, but didn't come close to the Bosch novels.
Very much a thriller, neither hardboiled nor noir.
As for his short stories, you got a free story when you
joined his mailing list, but unfortunately I didn't save it.
Is it among the ones someone (John Lau?) counted? And has it
been published in a book?
There are also some bits of Bosch's teenager life on
Connelly's website. They were left out from some of the
novels. I translated one of them for the magazine of the
Finnish Whodunnit Society. You can find them here:
http://www.michaelconnelly.com/Other_Words/Lost_Chapters/lost_chapters.html
Juri
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