MATT MCCLAIN/ THE WASHINGTON POST - Best-selling author Michael Connelly
By Neely Tucker,
Michael Connelly was a cops reporter for about a dozen years, most notably with the Los Angeles Times. He has sold 43 million of his 23 crime-based novels around the world since hanging up his press card nearly 20 years ago. Still, he has found some journalistic habits hard to break, such as researching the background of his thrillers.
“I hate revealing this stuff,” he says good-naturedly during a lunch conversation at the Ritz-Carlton in Georgetown recently while in town to promote the film. “I want people to think I’m a creative genius.”
There’s plenty of creativity in the process, of course; it’s a trick of seeing things in the real world and “knowing what works, and where it works” in fiction.
He has figured out what works pretty well by now.
He’s 54, about 6 feet tall, with close-cropped hair, a full Vandyke beard and round, wire-frame glasses. He’s big-shouldered but soft-spoken. He lives with his wife, Linda, and a teenage daughter, McCaleb, near Tampa. He has basketball season tickets for his alma mater, the University of Florida. He also has a 23-foot Boston whaler, which he likes to take out in the bay, where he fishes and thinks out plot development.
Connelly’s also got the one talent any reporter and writer has to have: an ear for a great story.
Writing “The Lincoln Lawyer” began a decade ago, on opening day at Dodger Stadium in 2001. A mutual friend brought along David Ogden, a criminal defense attorney. Connelly politely asked Ogden in which courthouse he most often worked. Ogden said, “Well, I pretty much work out of my car.” Connelly, the storyteller, knew then to be really interested.“I drove a Lincoln Town Car or a Crown Vic,” Ogden, now retired and living in Montana, said in a phone interview. “It was a great thing. Some of it was show. It allowed me to make three or four [court] appearances every morning. And it made an impression on clients walking out of the courthouse, when this car would pull up and I’d get in.”
Connelly loved this story, about how the Lincoln trunks were big and boxy enough to house filing cabinets. He loved that his driver was a former client, Lonnie Henderson, who’d spent a lot of time in prison before going straight.
Both men recall that Ogden, who felt slightly self-conscious about practicing law out of the back seat of a vehicle, volunteered to Connelly that day at the ballpark, as evidence of his success, that he lived a “couple of doors down from Matthew McConaughey.” (The lawyer and the actor had never met; that McConaughey wound up portraying Ogden on screen is happy coincidence.)
So Connelly had a premise — a defense lawyer working out of a Lincoln — but that wasn’t yet a story. He was concerned. He wrote about cops, most particularly Harry Bosch, an LAPD homicide detective, not lawyers. He thought John Grisham and Scott Turow, novelists who had been attorneys, knew their way around the courtroom drama a lot better than he did.
Rest at The Washington Post.
He has figured out what works pretty well by now.
He’s 54, about 6 feet tall, with close-cropped hair, a full Vandyke beard and round, wire-frame glasses. He’s big-shouldered but soft-spoken. He lives with his wife, Linda, and a teenage daughter, McCaleb, near Tampa. He has basketball season tickets for his alma mater, the University of Florida. He also has a 23-foot Boston whaler, which he likes to take out in the bay, where he fishes and thinks out plot development.
Connelly’s also got the one talent any reporter and writer has to have: an ear for a great story.
Writing “The Lincoln Lawyer” began a decade ago, on opening day at Dodger Stadium in 2001. A mutual friend brought along David Ogden, a criminal defense attorney. Connelly politely asked Ogden in which courthouse he most often worked. Ogden said, “Well, I pretty much work out of my car.” Connelly, the storyteller, knew then to be really interested.Connelly loved this story, about how the Lincoln trunks were big and boxy enough to house filing cabinets. He loved that his driver was a former client, Lonnie Henderson, who’d spent a lot of time in prison before going straight.
Both men recall that Ogden, who felt slightly self-conscious about practicing law out of the back seat of a vehicle, volunteered to Connelly that day at the ballpark, as evidence of his success, that he lived a “couple of doors down from Matthew McConaughey.” (The lawyer and the actor had never met; that McConaughey wound up portraying Ogden on screen is happy coincidence.)
So Connelly had a premise — a defense lawyer working out of a Lincoln — but that wasn’t yet a story. He was concerned. He wrote about cops, most particularly Harry Bosch, an LAPD homicide detective, not lawyers. He thought John Grisham and Scott Turow, novelists who had been attorneys, knew their way around the courtroom drama a lot better than he did.
Rest at The Washington Post.
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