I LOAD UP ON MICHAEL CONNELLY BOOKS : READING FOR HIS WRITING

I recently got two Michael Connelly books, The Fifth Witness - a Lincoln Lawyer Novel, 

which manages to involve the sell of a criminal murder case for movie making, and The Drop - a Harry Bosch Novel, about the hunt for and arrest of a child molester. 

I wrote about discovering Michael Connelly as a writer of local (Los Angeles) crime fiction a while back and am only sorry that I didn't hear about his work sooner because I love to read about events - fiction or nonfiction - that take place in a topography and cityscape I'm familiar with.  Now, I think that some day, far in the future I'm going to have to read one or both series from the first book forward.  Of course each book stands alone but still, there are the subtle nuances of character building from the start, and I feel maybe I've missed out. 

SO I DON'T KNOW IF PERHAPS Connelly has revealed this bit of information before or if I caught it, on page 132 of the hardback of The Fifth Witness, as the first of the revelation but it turns out that The Lincoln Lawyer has a half brother who is...  Harry Bosch.   Interestingly both men have teenage daughters and are divorced.  And Connelly has set it up that at least one of these daughters may follow her father into police work so... does that mean that in a few years there will be crime fiction based in LA from a FEMALE POINT OF VIEW!  I kind of hope so and I can't wait to see what he does, if so, with the sex scenes!

As I was reading I felt my self with the literary training turn on.  This is not the self that usually reads for enjoyment nor the self that writes in long deep sessions of uninterruptable concentration.  It's the self that says "Now exactly how did he pull this story off?"  How much is in flow and how much is calculation?  Does he have the plot charted before hand?

BLUE NEON NIGHT : MICHAEL CONNELLY'S LOS ANGELES : CHRISTINE TRZYNA FILM REVIEW

BLUE NEON NIGHT is one of the first films I've seen that is about a writer's reasons why and I'm already ordering his book "The Narrows," as the first Micheal Connelly I'm going to read.

His genre is detective fiction. He has a consistent character - the detective - through his whole series of books. In this DVD Connelly discusses the way Los Angeles as a city, a city that is a sunny place full of shady characters, informs his fiction. The film itself consists of brief passages in which the author discusses his writing, along with readings of various passages that mention the streets and buildings of Los Angeles, which are filmed as if you were going on a ride with the detective. Prior to making his living as an author, Connelly was a journalist with a beat. Not a native, he found LA to be his city, a city where you can find everything including the contradictions.

LINKING TO HIS OFFICIAL WEB SITE NOW!