Reality is noir enough

Michael Connelly wanted his fiction to reflect the real world -- the world he had seen as a Los Angeles Times crime reporter in the ‘80s covering the San Fernando Valley, where the bad guys frequently got away and detectives were left with plenty of cold case files. So, seven years ago, Connelly wrote a novel called “The Poet,” about an FBI agent who becomes a serial killer and eludes capture.

Then Sept. 11 happened. By this point, Connelly was a hugely successful crime writer (“Blood Work,” “City of Bones,” “Angels Flight”) with a 5-year-old daughter. Like millions of Americans, he was disturbed by the evil that caused the twin towers tragedy. It “had ripple effects for many people in many different ways,” he says, “and to me, the world became more uncertain.”

What could he do? How could he cope? Connelly realized the one thing he had control over was his work. And that led him to think about the savagery he had let loose in his fictional world. Originally, he had wanted the Poet to stay free, as a reminder of the darkness that can envelop us all, of the murders that are never closed. But now? Now, he says, “it was my desire not to have that evil out there.”

Which is why Connelly wrote “The Narrows,” published this week, in which the Poet returns and comes up against Harry Bosch, the tortured, middle-aged detective who has been the lead character in nine other of Connelly’s 14 novels. Bosch is in his 50s now, retired from the Los Angeles Police Department and working as a private detective. But he misses the force, if not its bureaucracy, so when a major murder case is accidentally thrown in his lap he goes after it with a vengeance.

This time out, Bosch agrees to investigate the death of former colleague Terry McCaleb (the protagonist of “Blood Work”) and discovers that what looks like natural causes is really murder. In the meantime, the FBI is looking into a mass grave found outside Las Vegas. The two cases soon intertwine when it’s discovered that the Poet, a former FBI profiler so nicknamed because he left an Edgar Allan Poe verse on his victims’ bodies as a calling card, is alive and committing new mayhem. The plot reaches its climax in the storm drains of the L.A. River, a.k.a. the Narrows.

Reviews have been mixed. Some say the book is not Connelly’s best work, but Publishers Weekly calls it a “masterpiece.”

Bosch, says Connelly, 47, a low-key, unassuming man who sports a Vandyke beard, smiles infrequently and wears stylish casual clothes, “is completely different from me. When I first created him, I thought it would be more fun figuring out what someone unlike me would do in certain situations.”

But that is definitely changing. Now that Connelly is a parent, some of his personal life has overlapped into the Boschian world. In “Lost Light,” Connelly’s previous book, Bosch discovered he had a daughter by an ex-wife who had divorced him and moved to Los Angeles. That father-child relationship is a key subplot in the new book.

Connelly, who decided to become a crime novelist after reading Raymond Chandler’s “The Long Goodbye” as a university student, says that over the years his path and Bosch’s have gotten closer. “The daughter is the most significant,” he says. “My daughter is a year older than his, so I can take what’s happening in her life and my relationship with her and put it in a Bosch book. So in ‘The Narrows,’ there are lines in there like his daughter asks him if the Dairy Queen and Burger King are married, and that’s a line my daughter asked me while I was writing this book.”

There’s another way in which “The Narrows” differs from previous Bosch efforts. Some who buy the book will receive a limited-edition DVD called “Blue Neon Night: Michael Connelly’s Los Angeles.” The 50-minute production features a visual tour of places mentioned in Connelly’s books, with scenes from those works narrated by “CSI’s” William Petersen (visit www .michaelconnelly.com to find out what stores will carry the DVD).

The DVD idea is “an absolute promotion, to get more people to buy the book quickly,” Connelly admits. “But I saw it as a giveback, not just a gimmick to get people into bookstores. I love L.A., and you might not pick that up in my books. While I endeavor to cast a good light to balance that dark picture, I’m not sure I do it enough. I see this as a love letter to Los Angeles.”

Not that this foray into the visual world means that a film featuring the Harry Bosch character will be popping up at the local theater anytime soon. Connelly says at least six Bosch screenplays have been written, but none has ever been produced. Connelly’s “Blood Work” did make it to the screen in 2002, starring Clint Eastwood in the McCaleb role.

Kel Simon, head of development for Mace Neufeld Productions, which owns the rights to several of the Bosch books, says three of Connelly’s novels are under option at Paramount and Columbia, and his company is shopping a film version of “The Black Ice,” with Paul Verhoeven attached to direct.

Unfortunately, says Simon, “Bosch has got a very dark personality that most Hollywood movies tend to shy away from. It’s not the kind of movies they want to make these days.”

In a sense, cinematic glory doesn’t really matter. Connelly moved to the Tampa, Fla., area three years ago to be closer to his wife’s family, and to “ensure [our] anonymity.” He fishes for tarpon and kingfish on his boat (he’s a catch-and-release guy), and lives a low-key life that has nothing at all to do with celebrity. (“The only place I actually get recognized is in Paris,” he says.)

But even a continent away, Connelly still seems to be energized by that combination of sunlight and shadow that has made the City of Angels the point of origin for so many dark crime novels.

“It’s because of the contradictions at play,” Connelly says. “It’s a sunny, beautiful place, with the mountains and the sea, but there’s this underlying sense of danger, of things going wrong. As they used to say in The Times’ newsroom, ‘a sunny place for shady people.’ ”

And make no mistake: Despite the cross-country move, Connelly has absolutely no plans to write a “Harry Bosch goes to Florida” book. None. Even though he was initially concerned that the move would thoroughly distance him from a sense of L.A. ambience, Connelly feels that hasn’t happened at all.

“I go back all the time to absorb the atmosphere and hang out,” he says. “I think it was James Ellroy who said, ‘Sometimes you have to move away from a place to see it.’ I think moving from L.A. has actually helped me. The three books I’ve written in Florida about L.A. are my best takes on the physicality of the city, as far as description goes.”

Besides, there’s always Chandler to guide him. Connelly is now in the middle of writing “Blue Religion,” in which Bosch returns to the LAPD and becomes involved in the murder of a 16-year-old Chatsworth girl who was abducted from her home in the middle of the night. Before beginning the writing, however, Connelly did what he has done for every one of his books. He sat down and reread Chandler’s 1949 novel “The Little Sister,” particularly Chapter 13, a mini-driving tour of the city that begins:

“I drove east on Sunset but I didn’t go home.... I drove on past the gaudy neons and the false fronts behind them, the sleazy hamburger joints that look like palaces under the colors, the circular drive-ins as gay as circuses with the chipper hard-eyed car hops....”

“I love reading those books,” Connelly says. “And even though that book was written over 50 years ago, it still holds up, and that to me is a high-water mark.”

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Author appearances

Michael Connelly will be making several stops in the Southland this weekend for readings and book signings. At some appearances he’ll be accompanied by L.A. jazz musician George Cables, who composed the music for the “Blue Neon Night” DVD.

* Saturday -- Noon: Vroman’s Bookstore, 695 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, (626) 449-5320; 3 p.m.: Barnes & Noble at The Grove, 189 Grove Drive, Los Angeles, (323) 525-0270; 5 p.m.: Mystery Bookstore, 1036 Broxton Ave., Los Angeles, (310) 209-0415; 7:30 p.m.: Borders Books & Music, 9301 Tampa Ave., Northridge, (818) 886-5657.

* Sunday -- 1 p.m.: Mysteries to Die For, 2940 Thousand Oaks Blvd., Thousand Oaks, (805) 374-0084; 3:30 p.m.: Book ‘Em Mysteries, 1118 Mission St., South Pasadena, (626) 799-9600; 6 p.m.: Book Carnival, 348 S. Tustin Ave., Orange, (714) 538-3210.