By Sara Millbank
Michael Connelly was born on 21st July 1956 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania U.S.
Michaels’s father was a property developer (also called Michael) and his mother was a big fan of crime fiction. Mary introduced her son to the world of mystery novels and still reads through all of Michael’s books at an early stage and helps edit them.
At the age of 11, the family moved to Fort Launderdale Florida and attended St. Thomas Aquinas High School. At 16, Michael was on his way home from his job as a hotel dishwasher when he witnessed a man throwing an object into a hedge. Curiosity made him decide to investigate and he found the object to be a gun wrapped in a towel. He returned the gun and then followed the man to a bar before returning home to tell his father. Later, he brought the police to the bar, but the man had gone. This event introduced Michael to the world of the police and how they worked.
Another turning point in Michael’s life was during his second year at the University of Florida where he was expecting to follow his father’s footsteps into property development. Connelly went to see Robert Altman’s film The Long Goodbye , based on Raymond Chandler’s novel and this inspired Michael to read all of Chandler’s works featuring Philip Marlowe, a Los Angeles detective during the 1940’s and 50’s. Michael decided he wanted to become a mystery writer. His grades were not as good as expected, so he switched to courses to Journalism and Creative Writing.
After graduating from University, Connelly got a job as a crime beat writer at the Daytona Beach News Journal. He worked for two years until moving to Fort Lauderdale News in 1981 where he covered the crime beat during the South Florida cocaine wars; an era which bought with it much violence and murder. In 1986, he and two other reporters spent several months interviewing survivors of the 1985 Delta flight 191 plane crash. His story earned Connelly a place as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He met his wife Linda McCaleb at college and they married in 1984. They moved to California in 1987 when Michael got a job as a crime reporter at the Los Angeles Times. Three years later Connelly wrote his first novel The Black Echo, which was published by Little Brown in 1992 and is the first book featuring Harry Bosch. Connelly went on to write three more novels about Detective Bosch, The Black Ice (1993), The Concrete Blonde (1994) and The Last Coyote (1995) before quitting his job to write full time. More than twenty two novels later Michael still includes Bosch in his books, but also wrote Crime Beat in 2006, a non fictional collection of crime stories, The Lincoln Lawyer in 2005 , his first-ever legal thriller and The Poet 1996 which features Jack McEvoy and Rachel Walling.
Michael has one daughter and lives in Florida with his wife.
The Poet (1996)
Jack McEvoy specializes in death as a crime reporter but it doesn’t lessen the brutal shock when he learns his only brother is dead; a suicide. Jack’s brother was a homicide detective and he has been depressed about a recent murder case that he was unable to solve. Jack decides the best way to deal with his grief is to write a feature on police suicide, but when he begins his research, he arrives at a stunning revelation. Jack’s investigations continue and he realises he has a story of a life time in his hands, but that he is also making himself a visible target for a murderer.
The Lincoln Lawyer (2005)
Mickey Haller is a Lincoln Lawyer who operates out of the back seat of his Lincoln Town Car, traveling between the far-flung courts of Los Angeles. As a criminal defense attorney, his clients can be bikers, con artist, drunk drivers, drug dealers and the like. When a Beverly Hill playboy gets arrested for attacking a woman he picked up in a bar and chooses Haller to defend him, Mickey has his first high-paying client for many years. As the evidence stacks up, Mickey believes this to be the easiest money he has ever made, until someone very close to him is murdered. Mickey must deploy tactic and instinct to save his own life and protect the innocent.
Nine Dragons (2009)
Harry Bosch is assigned to a homicide case in South L A that takes him to Fortune Liquor. The owner has been shot dead behind the counter in a robbery and Harry soon identifies a suspect, a member of the Hong Kong triad. Before he can close in, Harry gets a call to say his young daughter, who lives with her mother in Hong Kong, is missing. Bosch drops everything to fly to Hong Kong, but could the cases be connected? Harry is up against it in a new city where the stakes are so high and personal and nothing is as it seems.