It's not fair, but I can't help it: Every time I read (or in this case, listen to) one of Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch novels, I visualize Clint Eastwood as Bosch. Maybe that stems from seeing Eastwood in the film Blood Work, which is based on a Michael Connelly novel, albeit a non-Bosch one. I don't care for much of Eastwood's work over the last ten or fifteen years, so maybe I'm trying to recapture the Dirty Harry Eastwood, the "Go ahead, make my day" Eastwood.
Or maybe it's because Bosch, like Eastwood's Dirty Harry, is constantly one thread away from stepping over the line that both he and the reader knows is there, the line separating what you're supposed to do, according to the law, and what you must do to make things right. Walking that thin line is what makes Bosch so interesting as a character. In Angels Flight, Connelly drops Bosch into the middle of a very tricky murder investigation: African American lawyer Howard Elias, famous for suing a long line of LAPD cops for police brutality, has been murdered inside an LA transit train car called Angels Flight. All signs indicate that the murderer was a member of the LAPD and everyone in the city knows it. So why has Bosch, who's not even at the top of the rotation assignment list, been handed the case? And can he solve the case before another riot breaks out?
Early on I feared Angels Flight (1999) might spin out of control, relying too much on a Rodney King-like atmosphere, pushing the reader's emotional buttons too frequently, but Connelly is way too smart to resort to such tactics. Instead, he concentrates on character and procedure, things he knows inside and out, especially where Bosch is concerned. In the three years he was a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times, Connelly really kept his eyes and ears open. If what he's writing in his novels isn't the real thing, it sure feels like it.
Angels Flight isn't my favorite Harry Bosch novel and it's probably not a good place to start the series (which would be The Black Echo, the first Harry Bosch novel), but it is a good Summer (or any time of the year) read.
2 comments:
Interesting. I'm just about to finish Connelly's Crime Beat, which of course includes his reporting on one of the big police brutality cases in LA in the early '90s. I wondered if he had written this very book: a lawyer specializing in suing the police department is murdered. I'm getting Black Echo on audio to take on our vacation. I'll have to hurry through the rest of the Bosch books because now I really want to read Angels Flight.
I certainly have not read them in order, but wish I had. I tend to get them on audio from the library when I see them, regardless of the correct order. Either way, they're quite good.
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