WrapPRO Roundtable: ”We always make time for him to look down on the city he is trying to protect,“ the bestselling crime novelist says of the ”Bosch“ TV detective
MIchael Connelly‘s brooding LAPD detective Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch may have morphed from Connelly’s popular crime novels into a TV detective in Amazon Prime’s “Bosch” series, but a major inspiration for the character has remained the same: Batman.
“I did draw a kinship, in a way, to Batman,” Connelly said in a conversation with TheWrap’s Diane Haithman about “Bosch,” which stars Titus Welliver and returns for its seventh and final season on June 25. “Of all the different superheroes when I was growing up, Batman was probably the one that I was most interested in.
“And you know, Batman stands on the top of his building looking down on his corrupt city,” Connelly continued. “It is very important to both the books and the TV show — we always make time for him to look down on the city he is trying to protect, so there’s that Dark Knight kind of thing. I’ve always felt that was Harry, but (without) the cape and mask and stuff.”
Connelly revealed that the new season of “Bosch” will focus on his 2014 book “The Burning Room,” which was based on a true crime that occurred in the early 1990s L.A. and remained unsolved for many years. “It was an arson fire in an apartment building where 12 people died, including nine children,” Connelly said. “I was a (Los Angeles Times) reporter back then, I didn’t really write about it because it was off my beat, but it was an awful story… it’s a story that’s very emotional because of the children involved, and we thought that would be the perfect story to kind of finish the Bosch story on Amazon Prime Video.”
While the Amazon series is ending, Welliver will reprise his role as Bosch in an untitled spinoff series for Amazon’s ad-supported streaming service IMDb TV that focuses more on Bosch’s daughter Madeline, portrayed by Madison Lintz.
Since introducing Bosch in his 1982 debut novel “The Black Echo,” Connelly has included the character in two thirds of his 30-plus books. “I have no plans to stop writing about Harry Bosch in one form or another,” Connelly said. “In my books, you know I aged him in real time and that was probably was a mistake. In the early books, I (established) that he was born in 1950 so I’m stuck with that. So he has aged out of being a detective.”
Connelly, who began his career as a police reporter including stints at Florida newspapers and the Los Angeles Times, said that though Bosch’s detective status is changing with age, he’s unlikely ever to find true peace and happiness. He said with a laugh that a detective who can sustain a reader’s interest over the years requires a personal quest as well as the requisite searching to solve a case.
“I mean, you need two things — you need someone who’s searching to solve a crime — in most cases, searching for a murderer,” Connelly said. “But they have to be searching for something inside themselves, there’s got to be a hollow spot. That’s why you get a lot of brooding detectives. Detectives who open the door and say: ‘Honey, I’m home’ at the end of their shift, they’re just not going to go the distance. So, I write about a guy, Harry Bosch… who wants to be able to say, ‘Honey, I’m home.’ But if you see that in the book or on a TV show, you know, it’s the last episode because that means he’s found what he’s looking for.”
Readers seem to feel a connection to Bosch’s sense of yearning. “Everyone in real life can feel like they’ve got their life together and things are going well, but we’re all looking for something,” Connelly said. “No matter what station or what achievement, we’ve been able to make we’re still looking for something. And so there’s a connecting point and empathic connection between a detective, you know, most of us, including me, who never solved a murder.”
For more of this conversation, watch the video above.
Diane Haithman
Senior Entertainment Business Reporter • diane@thewrap.com • @dhaithman Diane came to TheWrap from a position as Staff Reporter at The Los Angeles Business Journal, covering Entertainment/Media, Philanthropy and Style. Diane was a Los Angeles Times Staff Writer for two decades, covering arts, culture and the TV industry. Her novel Dark Lady of Hollywood was published to critical acclaim by Harvard Square Editions in 2014. She serves on the adjunct faculty of Emerson College Los Angeles and has taught feature writing at USC. Diane is co-author of the nonfiction book The Elder Wisdom Circle Guide for a Meaningful Life (Penguin/Plume 2007) and is a member of the National Association of Black Journalists-Los Angeles Chapter.