Michael Connelly

Creator of "Bosch," Michael Connelly's new book "Fair Warning" currently sits at number seven on the "New York Times" best-seller list. Listen as we cover Connelly's transition from newspaper reporter to full time novelist, and the intricacies of the production of the hit Amazon television show starring Titus Welliver.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Sets podcast.
My guest today is writer Michael Connelly. Michael, Hey, how
are you? Thanks for having me on your show. Okay,
so where are you right now? I'm in Los Angeles
on lockdown, hunkered down status, whatever you want to call it. Okay,
So you're living in Los Angeles now? Yeah? Yeah, okay.

(00:31):
So how's the self quarantining working for you? Well, I
can't complain because I'm somebody who from most of my
life I've worked from home, you know, writing books and
solitude and uh, up until I got involved a TV show,
that was what my life is like. So this is
a bit of a throwback to the way I've been

(00:52):
for most of my um creative life. So are you writing?
What is filling your time these days? Well? It's interesting because, uh,
I raped very contemporary stories set in Los Angeles and
the um you know, the virus thing happens and you
don't know the end of it, so it's very hard
to be creative about it. And I was in the

(01:13):
middle of a Lincoln Lawyer book that was actually set
in April of this year, and that doesn't work anymore
so because I don't know what's gonna happen. So I
lost about a month and a half of creative quandary,
wasn't really doing much at all. And then I kind
of said, I'm going to back the book up started
in December instead of April, and bring it up into

(01:36):
the start of this virus and maybe reflect a little
bit on that um. And then I got going again
and I got some good momentum, and that's where I'm
at now. Now I'm now though, I'm I guess bothered
by the question of will people want to read about
this virus after we've all lived through it. I mean,
it's not gonna be the main emphasis of my book,

(01:57):
but it's gonna be on the news, and the impending
plague coming is going to be part of it. You know.
I think that's over analyzing because I remember yesterday in
the New York Times they had Jury Seinfeld interview and
he taped his special before the coronavirus, and they're worried
about what people can handle. I think primarily people are

(02:17):
reading your books because they're fans of you, and then
they turn other people onto the books. Would you agree
with that? Well, that's the hope, you know, that's the
domino effect, you think. You hope it has, you know
that people read the book and spread the word about it. Um. Yeah,
I do think that there's a part of this audience
that my audience, that's that's gonna go with me where

(02:38):
I go. And that's great to have. But you know,
these questions always kind of filter into your thinking anyway. Okay,
let's let's when you do right, to what degree are
you thinking about the audience? Um? Not a whole lot.
I mean you do in general, you know, like um,
in terms of I try to be very as I said,

(02:59):
you were reflective of what's going on in the world,
and and that includes politics and so forth, and so
I you know, I wrote a book, for example, uh,
maybe a year ago I think it came out or
two years ago called uh, two kinds of Truth. I
think it was called It's Weird I'm having my own books.

(03:20):
But in that was was you know, a meditation on
what is truth then? And who should be telling the
truth no matter what? And this was at a time
where in politics people were constantly talking about is the
president lying as the president not lying? And and and
and it's and truth became a political issue and that

(03:40):
wasn't really what I wanted to put into the book,
but that's how people read it. And you know, so
you do get social media. Um, you get social media
return on what you do. I do as well, and
so it was interesting to see people take my meditation
on the truth and what it means in the wrong
way and take it through a political um uh strainer,

(04:03):
if you will, um and react negatively in a lot
of cases to my books and positively in other ways. Well,
I guess being specific about that, since you wrote about
truth and tomp Trump, I would assume the negative feedback
came from supporters of Trump, irrelevant of the misinterpretation. As
you move forward, are you anxious about alienating that part

(04:27):
of your audience. I would say earlier in my career,
I would have I would have had to have been.
But now I'm on the tail end of my career
and I have a I don't care type of attitude
towards that. But I but definitely, early in your career,
you know you're trying to sustain a career, and you
just sustain it through readership and growing readership. So don't

(04:50):
do anything that might dampen that readership. I mean I
write about law and order. These are things that normally
skew towards conservatives, and so there's a big population of
conservatives I believe that read my books. I mean, it's
this is all anecdotal. This is not anything I can
say that we've done studies or anything like that. We're

(05:11):
not that sophisticated in the publishing business. Um. But I
was more aware of it back then that I was
in the last decade or so of my career. And
that's why something like this could happen. That I just
put something in there that, um, you know, I think
the line was even president's lie, president's plural, and that

(05:32):
really set some people off, even the president. Sometimes president
must have to stand naked, as Bob Dylan said. But
I'm interested. I'm just a couple of years older than you.
Do you think your attitude changed about this when you
turned sixty. You're a few years past sixty. I don't

(05:53):
know if I would. Uh, I didn't have like a
big sixties moment. I think I had more one when
I was fifty turned fifty about being on the You know,
in my mind, I'm thinking about you're walking up a
roof and at some point you hit the top of
the riff and you're going down and it's and it's
supposed to be easier, although it really isn't. Um that
happened to me when I was fifty. Um, sixty kind

(06:13):
of came and went from me. So I don't think
that that had that kind of effect on me. Well,
I'm the reverse fifty was a breeze. Sixty I'm still
trying to recover from. But uh, now, the whole landscape
of media has changed. As you've alluded to earlier, the
book business is rather archaic. But if you the only

(06:35):
person with universal mind share is Donald Trump, so what
do we know? You have an established audience, you still
have to make them aware of the fact that a
new book is coming out. But did you have any
dream of even further cultural penetration which is now frustrated
as a result of so many messages and it's hard

(06:59):
to get any worry out there? Um, I don't think so.
I mean, that's that's a pretty deep question. And you
know I can always retreat to, hey, I write mysteries,
but you know the reality is that's that's the front
of the book, and I wouldn't be doing this for
so long and it's such a every day applying my

(07:20):
trade level of it, if I didn't have at least
secret motivations to tell story of a higher meaning or
a higher connection or a higher residence. And you know
they again not going back to sixty, but a coincide
it kind of I'm like about to turn sixty four,
so kind of coincided with when I turned sixty. They're

(07:42):
the divisiveness that has entered the politics of our world
has spilled out into everything, and therefore it does become
um here, you know, writing a story about a guy
just trying to solve a murder in Los Angeles becomes
political without that being your intention. Um. And so that

(08:02):
you know, I probably haven't even answered your question. I've
going off on a tangent here, but said something. You
said you had goals. I guess let me make it
more to the point. I believe when someone is an artist,
and you're an artist, your main goal is to reach
as many people as you can with your message. Of course,
you want to be remunerated, but you want to reach

(08:24):
as many people. That is inherently difficult for everybody. So
was that part of your dream or did you reach
an establish your audience a million books per book, and
that was satiating. Oh, I see what you're saying. No,
And I don't think I'd ever be satiated. And I
wish I could get to that level of a million
uh readers a book. I don't think I'm there, but

(08:47):
um there maybe in a list of libraries are doing
a lot of work for me that I'm there. But
um yeah, I mean I think you know. And and
it's not like I'm trying to be high salutin or
uh you know, didactic of anybody. I'm not trying to
tell anyone how to think. I'm trying to write about.
For the most part, let's just talk about Harry Bosh.

(09:07):
He's the guy who's the through line of my creative life.
Um started with him and hopefully will end with him,
whenever that is. And I just think he sets an
example of fairness. You know, everybody counts or nobody counts.
That's his message, and that would be my message. And
that's that's pretty simple, and that's and you'd think it

(09:28):
was something that would have universal agreement, but it turns
out it doesn't. Um, there's the politicalness in that statement.
Everybody counts. M nobody counts, um, you know, and and
so that kind of has infected That's probably too strong word,
but that's kind of infiltrated into my thinking and into

(09:49):
my work and how and how it's responded to. And
you know that's something I, you know, really can't control. Okay,
someone like you with a profile, you a lot of
opportunities to, let's just say, hang out with the people
on the other side of fairness. Are you more of
an introvert or do you uh take the opportunities to

(10:12):
go to parties, to go to yachts, to hang out
with some of these household named people. I'm definitely, I
mean it goes to that question about how my faring
with the lockdown. Um, I'm definitely an introvert. Um. It's
it's just a weird contradiction because I think most writers
are You're comfortable being in your own little world. You know.
My little world is my laptop and what I put

(10:33):
into it, and then I send it out into the world.
And so once a year, usually for about four weeks,
I have a book come out, and I'm supposed to
be the opposite of that. I'm supposed to be out there. Uh,
you know, touring talking about this being on podcasts that
are very cool and so forth, and um, that's not
really my lifestyle. Um so I don't, you know, to

(10:56):
use your examples parties and and things like that. I
don't do a lot of that. I am lucky in
that my books have um connected with some people that
are well known and culturally important, and um, I've been
invited to meet with them and things like that. And

(11:19):
it's it's it's that's been, you know, pretty amazing that
that I'm drilling down on the fair in his thing.
Obviously we're talking to coronavirus era and David Geffen posted
on Instagram that he was self quarantining on his yacht. Now,
he's well known for choosing people to come hang on

(11:40):
his yacht. So if somebody chose, somebody invited you, whomever
it is, to come stay on their three d FT yacht,
would you say wow, great opportunity, or in the back
of your brain say well is this fair? Should I
be doing this? I see what you mean. Well, I
mean it's uh, at first of all, that's never happened
to me, but um, well they must have the private

(12:01):
jet example where someone is saying, hey, I'm going here,
come ride with me, or let's go for the weekend somewhere.
I think you're giving me more social and cultural importance
that I deserve because that that hasn't really happened to
me either. But um, you know I I I think of, um,
you know, different gatherings that I've been invited to, like

(12:23):
intellectual or cultural gatherings that I've been invited to, and
I actually find that my introverted nature comes out of
these things and I don't contribute in a fair way
to to the ideas being exchanged and so forth. So
usually those kind of invites a short lived I don't
get invited to the next one, you know, that type
of thing. Um, but I enjoy being there when I can. Well,

(12:45):
the interesting thing is you're very articulate and you have
no problem speaking. Many introverts I was just stroying the
Times about this the other day, once they can be
dragged to the situation, all of a sudden, they light up.
Does that happen to you? Or you're anxious and you're
still anxious when you're there a little bit of both. Um,

(13:07):
It's funny you start with the idea that you're an
introvert you're You're fine being in your room by yourself.
But I'm a storyteller, and there's something very egotistical about
announcing that you're a storyteller and that you're going to
write books, because that means you think your book should
be read and they should be translated into movies and
in the TV shows and everyone in the world should
know your stories. That is not an introverted um view

(13:31):
of the world. Um, And I can I can kind
of knock it down to to something that's happened to
me in recent years, and that is part you know,
it's that roof again. For part of my career, I
was going walking up the roof are I was climbing
up the roof, trying to get established, trying to get
more readers, trying to get more attention. And so you know,

(13:52):
I did like forty city book tours and things like that.
And in each of these things, you you stand up
and you you explain yourself, and it's a speech, and
it would weigh heavy on me coming up of what
I would say. I didn't like the idea of doing
it by road and saying the exact same thing, right
down to the little side jokes. Every every night. I

(14:13):
just don't do that, And so I would be trying
to tailor every night a new discussion that centered around
the same thing for sure, um And it just was
so hard and it was so debilitating that at some point,
when I passed the crest of the roof and was
on the downside, I said, I'm not doing any more speeches.

(14:33):
I told my publicists and so forth in my publisher
I'm not doing any more speeches because it's not just
the thirty minutes that you're giving that speech, it's the
days leading up to it, thinking about that speech and
worrying about it and and and it takes away from
what I do, and that is writing my book. So
I stopped doing that, and I said, anytime someone wants

(14:54):
me to be on the stage, put someone with me,
and let's do a Q and A. That's how I
do it, exactly. And and and what happens is that you
go on and on and everything, like right now, every
answer becomes a speech. But because you were asked the question,
there's some kind of of a social acceptance and being
asked the question that you can just go on and
on and and and you know, keep talking. And I

(15:17):
think it's more interesting that way. I think it was.
It was one of those things like, Man, I can't
believe for fifteen or twenty years, I had to work
on all these speeches all the time, when when the
people who are in attendance are the people who are listening.
Got much better insight into who I am and what
I do and what my characters are about. When I
answer questions as opposed to just, you know, trying to

(15:40):
pontificate with a speech, well, as I say, I totally resonate.
And I felt good about it because I once interviewed
Michael Lewis uh and it was the same thing. He
has a question. I can make up my own questions,
but you don't have to cogitate and speak at the
same time. It's much different when you can just answer
the question. You can go down your nooks and cranny,

(16:00):
but if you're speaking, you're saying where you're going. Let's
go back to this issue with fairness. Okay, two things. One,
this is your personality in general to how do you
try to send the message such to change the world.
I think it does come out of my personality because
it comes out of my you know, growing up and

(16:21):
I had a big family, and then there's always fairness issues,
like with six kids, and my parents had this. So
it's not something I've originated. It's just something that was
bred into me by my parents and my brothers and sisters.
And so I've tried to, you know, uh, put it
into my books and and I just you know, I'm

(16:41):
not trying to change the world, as you say, um Forthfully,
I put the message in people in my books who
are very to my to my this is my take,
and you know I'm not saying it I'm right. I'm
just saying this is what I think. I think the
characters I've about face long odds and what they're doing,

(17:03):
they face difficulty, and most often they have to they
come to a point where they have to make a
choice to do the right thing at great expense to
themselves and those they love. And that's like the noble
moment of of every book. And and that's where the
fairness comes from. So I'm not trying to announce to

(17:24):
the world everybody counts, but nobody counts. I'm just writing
about a guy who has that at his core, and
hopefully that message comes across and um and it wins
people over or people take it as a social cue
or take it like, hey, I want to be like that. Um,
I want to I want to be uh noble too.

(17:46):
And you know, that's just a little ripple. It's a
pebble in the in the lake. And maybe the rings
go out and change some same lives and and in
a way, maybe that helps change the world. Um, so
you're talking about now you're on the downward slope. I
won't give it a negative connotation, but speak to your

(18:07):
motivation to continue to write books. I'm just the luckiest
guy I know. I mean, I have this facility to
do this in the first place, which you know, there's
there's a part of it is learned and part of
it is practiced, but a lot of it is just
mystical and it just has happened, and um, I can't.

(18:30):
You know, I have to treasure that. I have to
nurture it. I had to take care of it. And
that means writing every day. That's I mean, that's my answer.
I feel like I got to write every day. Okay,
So hypothetically, if you wrote and you knew no one
would read it, would you still write? I think I
would because that's how it started. For me, I wrote,

(18:51):
you know, my first book was published when I was
thirty five, but I've been writing for myself and at
night and learn. I mean part of it as a
learning experience, obviously, but but I was having great fulfillment
doing it. And you know, I wrote two books that
I didn't think we're good enough, and no one has
ever read other than myself. And I love those books

(19:12):
because the second one was way better than the first,
and so I could see myself getting better. And you know,
I think at some point you'd finally get swallowed by
like the feelings of fruitlessness and in it. And I
didn't have that, luckily. But it was a long time
from the point, you know, I said, hey, I want
to write novels. I want to and very specifically, I

(19:35):
said to myself and my parents, I want to write
crime fiction. That's what speaks to me. And it was
like almost twenty years later before I was holding a
book that I that, you know, a real book that
was that was getting published. Um, And so that was
a long time. But I don't look at it as like, Wow,
what a long journey, what a difficult up up slope

(19:55):
or whatever you wanna call it. It was. It was
a fun time because I didn't know anything about the
world of wishing, and I didn't know about the pressures
and and other things that would come once I did
get published. So I don't know. It's one of those
answers where I say, yes, I would still be doing
it for myself. But I think most people listening to
this would go like, yeah, right, Well, let's go back

(20:16):
to the beginning. There are how many kids in your family?
Six including me? And where are you in the hierarchy? Um? Second, um,
the oldest boy. Okay, so you got a little because
normally the oldest gets all the attention. Uh. This goes
back to our earlier topic in terms of feedback. But
in the world we live in, yes, the world we

(20:37):
grew up in, there was more attention towards the mail.
So to what degree were you the fair haired boy?
Was there attention on you? Um? I think my parents
were pretty equal and and um and delving out the
pats on the head and so forth. I mean, I
think I was a fair haired boy. Um. But the

(20:57):
way it went was my sister was born, and then
three boys, and then two girls, and so the three
boys were I think we're five total five years apart.
All together, we were born in a five year period,
and so we've always been close and we always did
things together, like you know, with our father, we had
a natural golf force on them, for example, and we
would all go golfing and things like that. So I

(21:19):
think there was you know, my brothers would be first
say yeah, I was a favorite. I think there wasn't one. Okay,
now there's been a lot of documentation. Uh, there are
a lot of children and Mormon families, and the Mormons
tend to win the reality shows the people from Utah
because they can get along. So growing up with five siblings,

(21:39):
are you the kind of guy who's an iconic lass
or you can get along? No, I think I can
definitely get along. I mean, I don't know how rare
it is, but we're Uh, the six of us are
all still live. I think the six of us was
you know, Irish Catholic family. So I think all six

(22:00):
of us were born in less than ten years. And uh,
you know, we get together all the time. Uh, we
have traditional get togethers at Thanksgiving and at least another
time during the year and still a very close knit family.
Even though we're far flung in six different states. That's
kind of funny. Okay, so you're born where Philadelphia and

(22:24):
then you at what age you moved to Florida. I
was twelve and we moved to South Florida. Okay, we're
in South Florida, Fort Lauderdale. Okay, did you go to
the Inankee training gamps? I did? I remember they moved
to Fort Lauderdale. That was a big deal. Yeah, I, Um,
I actually worked. I mean it's kind of tied up

(22:45):
into my life as a writer too. I worked at
a hotel on the beach and Fort Lauderdale, and that's
where the Yankees stayed. And um, you know, they would
lock off the elevator. They had two floors. But I
was somebody who delivered towels to the floors and all
that kind of stuff for housekeeping, and I had interactions
with several of them and they would give me tickets.

(23:06):
Um at that time, there's no pro no MLB in
in um Florida like they have now. But um so
that was the baseball game in town to go see
the Yankees. And so even though I'm from Philadelphia have
uh don't really have a connection to New York. The Yankees.
Um where my favorite team for most of my life.

(23:29):
They were always my favorite team. And I grew up
in the mirrors mantel years and even then when they
were shitty. But once Steinbnner came in and they were
winning and everybody became a Yankee fan. Maybe that's my
personality kind of turned me off a little bit. Yeah,
they weren't uh that those days they had like um,
Reggie and I remember like Lupinel gave me a lot

(23:51):
of tickets to games and stuff like that. Um, when
I was working at that hotel. Okay, so you're growing
up and your father is doing what Uh he's always
he was always kind of involved in development and Um
he went from building houses in Pennsylvania, designing and building
houses to like being a realtor for a little while

(24:13):
in South Florida to working for a huge development company
where he put together shopping centers, helped lease the shopping centers,
helped design shopping centers. Uh. So he was kind of
like all over the place in terms of real estate
and development. And was that you know, if you go
on Wikipedia, because a lot of this stuff is available,

(24:35):
said of Gainesville, you studied that. Yeah, I went up
to UM, the University of Florida. UM. I worked summers
for my father's companies and so forth, going all the
way back to when I was twelve and eleven in Pennsylvania,
and uh, I just thought i'd What I liked about
him is he would design a lot of his stuff,
then he'd take it to an architect to get it,

(24:57):
you know, completely blueprinted and all that stuff, and then
he built it. And I liked the whole aspect of
doing all of that. So I went up there to
kind of following his footsteps. UM. They actually had a
major call Building Construction Sciences UM, and that's what I
was in for about a year. So I flunked out,
literally flunked out. Yeah, yeah, definitely flunked out. I mean,

(25:20):
you know, they had a they had a class I
took called the Introduction to Concrete. That's a hard course,
as they say now believe believe it or not. There's
like seven different kinds and there's seven recipes and you
know how much error is in it all the you know,
it was really was a science and I wasn't prepared
for that. Um. You know, I just knew how to

(25:43):
you know, turn to things so that the concrete came
out and went into the form UM. So anyway, I
did a lot of stuff that kids do, um when
they first get away from home. And so I was
asked to take a year off. And what did your
parents say about that? They weren't be um but UM,
I had two little sisters, um, who were still like

(26:06):
in elementary school at that point, and so my punishment
was I had to get up every morning and get
them to school, so they're gonna make sure I didn't like,
you know, stay up all night drinking and smoking or whatever,
and then sleep till noon. I had to get up
at seven every day to get my sisters to school.
And your your mother all day she was working in

(26:26):
the house or working outside the house. She it's hard
for me to remember exactly those years. She was a
bank teller through most of at least my high school years,
so I'm trying to think if she was when I
came back for that year off. I did stay at home,
well forgetting that year. Who was watching the kids and

(26:46):
she's working at the bank, or she just worked when
everybody was in school or what. Um. Back then, banks
were largely open when we nine to three, so she
had just nine to kind of eight thirty or three
thirty type job which kind of co side with school
school hours. My older sister, Susan really um was the
one who kind of ran things at home till my

(27:08):
parents got home. Um. But um, yeah, my the like
my remember I told you my three me and my
two brothers were kind of a triumvirate way and there
was like city parks and stuff that we would go
to together and you know, play sports and stuff like that.
So growing up, were you a big reader? Yeah? You know,

(27:32):
it doesn't appear. The appearances are not good. A guy
gets kicked out of school, he gets a job as
a dishwasher at night at a hotel, and then his
taking his sister to school and picking him up afterwards.
But I was voraciously reading that whole time, and that's
where I kind of formed the idea that, hey, I
want to try to do this. So even though on

(27:53):
paper it looks like probably one of the down years
or the worst years of my life, it was really
the best because I found my direct And Okay, how
much of a reader are you now? I still read
a lot, but I don't like Back then, I was
reading crime fiction. I was looking for hard boiled stuff
and and really forming my likes in terms of a

(28:14):
crime fiction. And now I still read it because I
want to be aware of what's going on out there.
But I've been doing this for like thirty years, and
you can kind of see between the lines. You can
see the writer back there and what they're doing. It's, um,
you know, it's kind of like in the last seven years,
I've been involved in producing a TV show, and so
now when I watched TV with my family, I'll just say, like, man,

(28:37):
that costs a lot of money, that show. You they
ruined it for you. Yeah, And I've I'm ruining it
from my family because they're telling me just I don't
really we don't really need to care, we don't really
need to know all that stuff. Just let's watch the show.
But that's that's how I became with crime fiction, and
so it's it's become it's not a totally is not

(28:57):
an escape for me anymore. Okay, but you write about
current events. Are you a voracious reader or reader at
all of periodicals or newspapers? Oh? Yeah, yeah, I have
several subscriptions, you know, Internet subscriptions to newspapers and magazines
and so forth and uh yeah, I mean part of
it is just wanting to know what's going on in

(29:18):
the world, but part of it is, yes, I'm looking
for something that um can somehow be folded into what
I'm doing, you know, just an offbeat story or uh,
you know anything. It's it's weird how different things will
inspire me, um and end up in books. How do

(29:43):
you decide to become to go back to school to
become a journalist? What's the whole process there? Well, that
was just basically it. I had to sit down with
my I told my parents, I don't want to be
It's not gonna be like Michael and my dad's name
is Michael to Michael con only and son, uh construction.
I'm not going to go back and do that. I

(30:03):
want to go back and uh you know, uh pursue writing,
writing as a career, being a being a writer. And um,
my father was it was interesting. I didn't know this
at the time, but he was a frustrated artist. He
wanted to be a painter when he was my that

(30:27):
same age that I was going to him and saying
I want to be a writer. At that age in
his life, he wanted to be a painter, and he
had gotten into a prestigious school in Philadelphia to learn
how to paint and all that, but he had to
make a living and it didn't work out for him,
and he got back into painting many years later later
and later in his life. But when I kind of
very intimidated, I went to them and said, I don't

(30:49):
want to do I don't want to go back to
introduction to concrete. I want to learn how to write
and um, and yeah, I didn't even know whether I
should go back to school to learn how to write,
but that's what I said. And um, my father's idea
was to go back into and get go into the
journalism school. Because I was very specific with them, I

(31:12):
want to write crime fiction, crime novels. Uh, not just novels,
crime novels. And so his suggestion was, you know, go
be a newspaper reporter and that will hopefully get you into, um,
into situations and relationships with people that you want to
write about. You know, cops use your press pass to

(31:35):
get into police stations and crime scenes and things like that.
So I followed that suggestion and it turned out to
be pretty genius. Um, and I think I had to
go down that road to be in a position to
do what I'm doing now. So you graduate from college,
what's your first journalistic job? It wasn't that great, um,

(31:58):
because it doesn't really matter what your grades are or
anything in journalism or you know, in UM, your pedigree
doesn't matter. It's what you can put on a paper,
can you write? And so I applied to jobs. I
didn't have very many clips. UM. I kind of worked
part time at the college newspaper, but they didn't pay anything,
and I had I was sending my I was paying

(32:19):
my way through college, so I had a real job.
So I ended up with not a lot of clips
compared to other people in my class. So I really
ended up with a kind of a second tier job,
which was just an hour or two down the road
from college and Daytona Beach working for a paper called
the Daytona Beach News Journal. And I was I was

(32:40):
signed out in the sticks. I wasn't on the beach
or I never saw any water. I was like way
out in the boonies, UH, covering four cities and anything
that happened from city council meetings to crimes. And I
lasted nine months doing that, and I covered one murder
and it happened to happen UM. I think the day

(33:02):
after Ronald Reagan was shot, so that news took over everything,
and my my big murder story. I finally got a
murder story, and it was very it was cut to
like six inches. Anyway, anyway I got. I was there
for nine months, and UM was constantly checking in on

(33:23):
my hometown paper and Fort Lauderdale to see if there's
any openings. And something came open. I went down, applied
for a job there, and moved there. So my first
job only lass than nine months. And then when I
got the job at Fort Lauderdale Paper, I stayed there
for seven years. And what was your beat there? It changed,
but it was primarily crime. What changed about it was UM.

(33:45):
Initially I was in their Palm Beach County UM addition,
because back then newspapers were fat and happy and they're
spreading everywhere. And the Fort Lauderdale News was also called
the Sun Sentinel and the Sun Sentinel. How at outposts
UM from Miami up to West Palm Beach, and I
was in the West Palm Beach office covering crime the

(34:07):
city of West Palm Beach and so forth, and um.
Eventually though, I became a police reporter in Fort laud
Ordal And did you feel like your dream had come
true or were you saying, hey, there's something beyond here.
I felt pretty good about it. I felt I was
in this stage where I mean, I'm writing it at night.
I'm trying to write fiction and trying to learn how

(34:27):
to write fiction. So I was always doing that, but
I was also feeling like that is a long shot
and if it doesn't come through, this is a very
interesting job. So I can be happy with it. Not
a lot of money in it, but I can be
happy here. And this was before the internet, and so
you really had this sense that you were an insider
like you were. I used to call myself the prince

(34:48):
of the city. I felt like, at the end of
the day, I knew so much about this town that
no one knows. They're not going to know it till
they read my my story in the paper in the morning.
And it was a very heavy thing to have at
you know, when you're in your mid twenties. And so
I really enjoyed that job, and um, you know, if
if it didn't work out, uh that I wrote with

(35:10):
the book stuff that I was gonna be okay with it.
But the first two books I wrote that no one's
ever read. We're all setting for Lauderdale and so how
did you get out of Fort Lauderdale. Um. I eventually
was going up the ladder at the paper, and UM
they put me on the Sunday magazine to write feet
crime related features. And I wrote a story about a

(35:31):
plane crash with two other writers. We spent a whole
year and they actually cut us loose for a year
to write the definitive. So for that, for that entire
year with the newspaper, you only researched and wrote about
the plane crash. Yeah it was, you know, it's a
Delta crash. It was. It left Fort Lauderdale and crashed
in Dallas and people survived, and so this is the

(35:55):
wind Shear crash. Yeah, yeah, I believe was. And Uh.
The the interesting thing was that most people, mostly a
huge crash like that has no survivors. This one had
twenty nine survivors. So we, me and two other reporters
spent a year tracking those people somewhere the flight with

(36:16):
Fort Laurida, the Dallas, Dallas of l A. So people
were from Texas. People from California and people were from
South Florida, and we we got to all of them
except for one, and you know, so we kind of
weave this story about surviving that and and some people
were survived without a scratch, some people had devastating burns

(36:37):
and so forth, and so it's all these levels of
what surviving is and how to cope with it. And
then we go also not this not to my credit
to one of the other reporters, credits he got the
um the investing in the MTSB investigation they got he
got the file before it was public, and so we
were able to piece together what happened on that flight

(36:59):
and the wind shear and all that, and it was
all part of this three part magazine story that broke
new ground around the crash. But also it was just
a really good human story about surviving and it got
the attention of the Los Angeles Times because several of
the people were from l A. And so I got

(37:20):
a call from uh, the l A Times to come
out to interview, and I ended up going out there,
And that's a whole that was a whole different level
of journalism. What was the gig at the l A Times? Again,
it was crime. Um. I started in the the northern
part of the county, the or the city of the

(37:41):
Valley as it's called San Fernando Valley, where there was
six l a p D Division. So like, my first
job was covering those six divisions and anything that happened there.
And then eventually I was covering a lot more. Okay,
so you're writing at night, and at what point in
this do you get married. I got married when I

(38:03):
was about halfway through my gig in four lauder deal.
And then you have a child. When did that child arrive? Oh,
that didn't happen until I had already retired from journalism. Okay,
so what does your wife say when you're driving around
the valley all day long and then come home and say, hey, honey,
I gotta go to the bedroom and right, Uh, that

(38:25):
was a deal. We had to make a deal. I
mean it was a big impact on her life because
we moved to Los Angeles and we didn't know anybody.
We just had each other. But I had this long
term dream or goal of writing a book and publishing
a book. So I made a deal with her that
four work nights a week I would work in we

(38:46):
had a two bedroom, and I set up the second
bedroom as my writing room. Four nights a week and
one weekend. I had to dedicate to this. And I
told her I'd have a book. I'd sell a book
in three years if she could live, if she could
make that deal, and she did, and I was wrong
by two years. It took me five years to get Um,

(39:07):
once I moved to l A. Took me about five
years to get a book published. Okay, So how long
does it take you to write your first book, which
is a bosh book? Um, it's hard to say. I'll
just throw out three years because I overwrote it. But
but I I came to l A and the weekend

(39:31):
I got there, there was a crime that inspired the book.
So in a way, you could say, you know, my
first book came out in two so you could don't
could claim it took five years, but it really took
about three. Okay? Uh? And did you know you had
something when you were done? I felt I did because
I had written those two previous books, and any writer

(39:54):
is going to be their harshest critic, and and I
know that those two books could should not be published.
I they were missing something. It was it was something
in the character. The lead characters were not connecting enough
with the reader, which at the time was just me.
And I'm thinking, like, if if my own creation is
not connecting with me, then there's something seriously wrong here.

(40:14):
And so I moved on and I had to write
those two books to write the third one, which was um,
the Bosh Book. And so at the when I when
I had that book, I felt, you know, and again
I'm at this point, I'm still a voracious reader of
crime fiction. I just felt this should be published. I
didn't know if it would be published well, or or

(40:36):
be embraced or anything like that. I just knew from
my sampling of reading contemporary crime fiction, this book fit
in and should be published. So I had did have
that confidence. How hard was it to get the deal
and what was the reception once it came out? The
hard part was getting an agent. Um, you know, and

(40:56):
again this is dating ourselves there, you know. It's pre internet.
So like I'm going to a library and looking up
agents in books and stuff like that, and I came
across one of my favorite writers still to this day.
His name James Lee Burke, and um, he writes about
New Orleans most of the time, or or Montana sometimes

(41:18):
Texas crime fiction. And he's just an amazing writer. And um,
I was reading one of his books and lo and
behold is dedicated to his agent, you know. And I'm
kind of like groping around in the dark, you know
about like what what makes a good agent? How do
you find a good agent? And um, you know, so

(41:41):
I wrote to this guy's names Philip Spitzer and um,
and he said, I'll read I'll read the book. This
is all done by letters. It takes forever, like six weeks.
You hear it in the answer and um, he said,
I'll read your manuscript if you promised me. I'm reading
it exclusively because I don't want to be in competition
with a bunch of other agents. And I said, yes,

(42:03):
you haven't exclusively, which was a big lie because I
had already sent it out to some to some other
agents who had asked for the exact same thing. But
you know, at that pace it would take five years
to get get everybody, you know, um, the manuscript, uh solo.
So anyway, he ended up calling me on a Saturday afternoon, um,

(42:27):
which is I thought was unusual. Um, and saying he
went he liked the book and he wanted to wrap it.
And this was probably eleven months into my process of
trying to find an agent. And so there I had
an agent. And if I had ranked my top ten
choices of agents I sent to, he would be number one.
So I got very lucky there because I loved James

(42:48):
Lee Burke's books, and I thought anyone who would dedicate
a book to an agent, that agent has got to
be honest, and the agent has got to have the
long view of what you're doing. And so AS really
ecstatic that um PHILP. Spencer took took me on, and
and I knew enough from what I was reading to
know that, you know, agents don't make any money unless

(43:10):
they sell your books. That are not going to take
you on as a favor, whereas for a lark. So
I felt confident. He felt he could sell this thing
and it wouldn't take too long, and it didn't. It
took it took about uh two months, and he sold
it to the second editor he sent it to. And
how much did you change the book after it was accepted? Um?

(43:35):
Not a whole lot. Um. So it's actually hard for
me to remember. Um, I had my editor the editor
who bought it left. She did some editing on it
and she was very good, and then she left before
it was published. And then I got assigned to a
to a new guy they had just hired, and then

(43:55):
I was with him for like twenty some years and
he's still now. He graduated out of editing, is the
CEO of the company, so I'm still have a relationship
with him. He just doesn't edit my books. But um,
editing is. I've always benefited greatly with my books and editing.
So while I don't remember exactly what happened with my

(44:16):
first book, I'm sure it was it went through some
editing and um, and it was improved. So in any event,
your book is published, Okay, how long after that does
it start to take off? Well, the one thing was
which I didn't understand when I went into this was that, um,

(44:37):
they have to find a hole in the schedule to
stick you in because I'm a new writer. And and
so it was a bad thing and a good thing.
They didn't publish my book for twenty months, and I
was like, I had told people, Hey, I sold a book,
and then after about ten months people thought I was lying.
But anyway, what was good about that was they said,
you can avoid the sophomore slump with by writing your

(45:01):
second book before this one even comes out, and then
you don't have any of the pressures of following something up.
You don't know any of the things you're gonna learn
once your book comes out. You can just it's a bubble,
take advantage of this bubble and write your second book.
So I did that, and so my book came out
twenty months later, and um, I already had a second
one already done, and which you know, it was. It

(45:24):
was interesting they gave me that advice because they didn't
have I didn't have a two book deal or anything,
you know, So then I then I was in a
position with to negotiate it. And you know, I'm not
an overnight John Grisham like success. They put published twelve
thousand copies of that book and probably sold half of them,
and so it's very incremental. Um, but that was the

(45:47):
book business was different back then. They allowed that. I
don't even know if they do that anymore. It seems
like all the publishers just want to get a big
hit right away and they don't allow a writer to
grow and to learn and so forth. And um, what
happened about a year later was that first book, One
an Edgar, which is like the Oscars of of crime

(46:10):
writing for best first novel, and that really established me
and bumped up my sales of books that came out
afterwards and so forth. So that was the key thing
that happened to me. And you know, very fortunate too
for that to get that recognition. Okay, let's talk about
your style. If you read the first book, The Black Echo,

(46:31):
it's very dense, and now I'm reading Poet, and Poet
is a lot less dense. Did you see an evolution
of your style? I think so. I mean, you really
got to kick out the first book because you don't
know what you're doing in terms of publishing, and and
it's like, um, you know, it's your heart and soul,

(46:52):
so you you baby that thing for so long. And
I over written or over wrote that book. I kept
rewriting it. I kept it in the little details I'm
picking up on the police beat and all the stuff.
So it is very dense. And it's because the whole
time I was writing it was like this is my
one shot. I got throwing everything but the kitchen sink,

(47:13):
and that's what I did, and um, you know, and
so uh, you know, through editing, through counsel from editors
and so forth, you know, you learn to let a
little bit more air in. You learn more about momentum.
Density slows down momentum, And the key to reading and
writing is momentum. You gotta have momentum in the day

(47:34):
that you're writing. You know, you want you want to
put a lot of words on the page, and then
you can go back and sculpt them, you can edit them,
you can do a lot, you can kick hundreds of
words out, doesn't matter. But you want to keep moving
because what happens in the writing process is going to
happen in the reading process. And so in those first
few books, I kind of learned that. And um, it's
interesting you mentioned the poet. So the Poem is my

(47:56):
fifth book. But it was the first time I broke
away from Harry Bosh and started writing about a world
I knew much better than I knew, um, the police world.
You know, I was writing about a reporter. I was
basically writing about an alter ego. And um that um,
I think you know, entered into the writing process and

(48:19):
and made that book. I don't look at in terms
of it's less dense, but it just moved quicker, um
you know. And there's the style that developed of short sentences,
staccato writing, keep keeps the reader's eyes moving, keeps them
going through pages, and that became something that was very

(48:42):
conscious of at that point in my writing. Let's jump
all the way today. So you essentially write a book
a year. What's the process? Do you ever do two
books at once? Or you start one and you're on
that one until you're done. As far as books go,
it's one and done one until done. Um, I've never
done that. I mean yes, sometimes, like this year, I'm

(49:03):
I'm actually publishing two books, but I wrote them in
consecutive one. The one thing that I have been able
to do is to break away from writing a book
to writing scripts for the TV show based on Bosh.
I think it's maybe because it's the same character and
the same um mil you. I don't seem to have
a problem with that. So I've been able to spend

(49:25):
days like where I love getting up early to write,
so I'm usually writing by about five thirty or six
in the morning in a day. In my life for
the last four or five years has been writing to
about writing a book until about ten and then going
to a studio and sitting in a writing room or

(49:46):
actually writing a script um for a few hours, and
then coming back to my book in the afternoon, and
and I'm writing about Harry Bosh, who's very different from
They're different. The guy in the book is very different
from the guy in the show. The guys in the
book is like ten ten, at least ten years older.
He's not even a cop anymore. So, so it's the

(50:07):
same character but a totally different set up. So it's
always been surprising to me that I can jump from
one to the other, and I don't think it. I
think I do that jump pretty seamlessly. Um, But I
can't do that between two book projects. Are you more
of a get it down right first? You're more of
a rewriter? Uh, definitely a rewriter. Um. I go through

(50:33):
my books two or three times, and the first draft
is always to me unreadable. I wouldn't want anyone to
see it because I think, I it's always too long.
I always cut pages as I go through my rewrites,
and I kind of like sharpen it down to what's
important and what counts. Get rid of a lot of
superflous stuff. And then I also find ways of disguising

(50:57):
where I'm going, or trying to disguise where I'm going.
I take out stuff like that's too much of a hint,
that type of thing. Yes, you're more of a rewriter.
But let me ask you this, Uh, do you have
to be motivated? I mean, do you ever sit down
and you say, hey, you know it's time to write.
But I'm not really in the groove. And is that
stuff you right end up being usable? Or when you're hot,

(51:19):
is this stuff better? Well? He goes back to your
question about rewriting. Yeah, I rewrite. So I feel like
even on a bad day, if I get you know,
if I moved the story along, I'm going to have
something I can, you know, rewrite and make better later
on my next go round. Do you ever one day

(51:40):
accomplished or nothing? Yeah, but you know before the virus,
those were few and far between. I just have this
weird drive. I mean, I had this teacher at University
of Florida named Harry Cruz who was a great novelist,
one of my heroes, and I don't remember anything he
taught me. I had two classes with him other than
he just one time said, if you're gonna be a writer,

(52:02):
you got it write every day, even if it's only
for fifteen minutes, because if you write for fifteen minutes,
the story is gonna keep swirling in your head all
through the day. And he was very right about that.
And so I've I've practiced that where I write for
at least fifteen minutes, even if I'm I got the
flu or whatever, I try to power through. And I

(52:22):
just had this conversation with my wife a couple of
days ago that during the virus, the beginning of the virus,
I was so creatively unmotivated that six weeks went by
without me writing. And I think that was, um, the
longest I've ever gone without writing in my life. Um,
you know, since I was twenty, since I was working

(52:44):
at newspapers. Um, it was like a long time not
to be writing. And I was not a pleasant guy
to be with and all that. But finally, and I
can't explain why, my mojo came back, and I started
writing about two weeks ago at a very high clip.
I think I was making for the six weeks before, UM,
and it was going very quickly. And and I think, well,

(53:06):
I don't go back. I don't you know. I usually
start my morning by reading what I wrote the day
before and editing it, so I kind of have a
build in edit, but I don't have the big picture.
Um I won't. I won't see that till I finished
this book and start over at the page one. So
why do a series on Bosch and then why jump

(53:28):
from Bosch to start a couple of news series? UM,
I don't know. Just to stay fresh, to stay stay involved.
I do think Bosch is, you know, what I'm about
as a writer, but I think it's good to take
breaks from him kind of let kind of my mind
wonder what's he doing that kind of thing, or I

(53:49):
can't or to build up this idea of I can't
wait to write about him again. And you know there's
other every everything I guess is you know that rights
around the um, crime and justice and all that, but
there's different angles on it. So I like this thing
like having a defense lawyer's angle, having a journalists angle

(54:11):
on it, and uh, I think it keeps it interesting
to me in terms of being the writer. I mean,
I think there's a bigger fan base for Harry Bosh,
but I just don't feel I can write about him
every time. Okay, so you're talking about writing screenplays. That's
a different art, and it's generally speaking difficult to write dialogue.
You know. You say there was essentially no learning curve

(54:34):
for you. Yeah, the the learning curve for me was
not dialogue. It was when I write a book. When
I write a Harry Bosh book, for example, you're in
his head. You know what he's thinking, you know what
he's feeling, you know what hurts him, you know what
aggravates him. All that is inside his head, and you
and you you you, that's a third of it, you
know third. One third is interior, one third is um

(54:57):
action what he does, and one third is dialogue. And
so when you go to script, you lose a huge component.
You lose a third of what what you have when
you're writing a book. And you know, there's people who
come out of school and just write scripts and that's
their lives, so they don't even know what they're missing.
But I, you know, I came to the show after

(55:18):
almost twenty years twenty five years almost of writing novels,
and so to me, it was a huge change to
have to write a story without saying what someone is thinking.
And that's where I um, it's you know, I think
the scripts I wrote in the first couple of seasons
needed needed, uh to be rewritten, and they were UM.

(55:40):
And I think I've kind of overcome that um impediment
uh that I felt in scriptwriting in the more recent years.
But that was the tough part, not the dialogue, because
dialogue has been important to me ever since I was
a reporter, you know, and you had to um, you
had little space to write. You know. Crime fiction was
the whinted stepchild in newspapers, not crime fiction, crime reporting,

(56:05):
and and so you were never given enough space to
tell what you thought was a great story or an
interesting story. So you learn to use dialogue to advance
the information delivery. Um, you had get an ear for dialogue.
Dialogue that advances the story. It doesn't just uh say
what was already said. And so dialogue, you know. So

(56:28):
I carried that into my books, and I carry that
into my scripts. I just don't feel like dialogue is
being a barrier to me. It's more like losing that
interior thought that that's been tough to deal with. So
tell us about the development of of Bosh the TV show. Yeah,
well Blash had been down the tortuous road in Hollywood. Um,

(56:50):
you know, initially what looked like great success. Um. By
the time the second book was published, Hollywood came calling
and they made a big deal to buy the first
three books. UM. I got involved. They said you could
write one of the screenplays, and so everything looked like
it was going somewhere. Um. It was bought by Paramount,
assigned to the producers who made the Tom Clancy movies

(57:14):
with Harrison Ford, and we were tailoring scripts to Harrison Ford. UM,
and uh, you know, they'll all look good, and then
it didn't look good. He passed on them, and the
stuff got on the shelf the way Holly Hollywood. Um
deals are. Um, things stay on shelves for a long time.
You need a lot of money to to leverage them out.

(57:36):
And so the books kind of were basically gathering dust
for almost two decades, and then I finally got the
rights to them back. And it was really at a
time when TV was really fantastic. There was a lot
of serialized television going on, UM, a lot of good
character studies. And so I just told my reps, my

(57:58):
agent and so forth that I'm not interested in. And
and also at this point I had several Harry Bosh
books written. I said, you can't cover this guy in
a two hour movie. Let's try to get a TV
deal somewhere. And so that was the initial um start
of it. And then also at the same time, Amazon

(58:19):
was deciding to get into UM streaming television and so forth,
and um, you know, we kind of went from there,
and uh, it was weird. This goes back to the Yankees.
I I had a friend I lived part of the
year in Tampa, Florida, where now the Yankees do spring ball.

(58:39):
So I had a friend who was a former publisher
come down from New York to go to a spring
training game with me. And he had left publishing to
go to work at Amazon because they were also trying
to get into publishing. So anyway, I was driving him
to the airport and he said to me, you know,
they're gonna start making TV shows UM to stream on Amazon.
Would that be something you'd be interested in. I said, yeah, sure,

(59:02):
because I've thought of the nexus of book sales and
TV and so forth. And so that was my entree
into Amazon. So it was very much unlike a normal
process in Hollywood where you pitch your show and they
develop and all that stuff. Amazon just basically I probably
punched up a couple of numbers to see how what

(59:23):
my book sales were and said let's do it. So
that's where it came from. How long after that conversation,
it's bring training until they say yes, no. I mean
what happened was what what this was all new to
Amazon as it was to me, and uh so they

(59:45):
were very accommodating. And they also this is like when
I go in to have a meeting, there'll be two
people there. Now when I go into a meeting, they
have a long board room, uh you know, and there's
like fifteen or sixteen people. So Amazon was learning as
they were going and that gave us great freedom. And
as far as you know, I'm not really involved in

(01:00:06):
the money, but as far as I know, we told
them what we would need to make the show the
way the way I wanted to make it, the way
my partners wanted to make it, and they gave us
that money. Um, one of the key things to me,
and I actually got this in a contract with my partner.
So before I went to Amazon, I should say when

(01:00:27):
I told my agent, let's look at TV. He hooked
me up with a production company. Amazon is not the
production company, Amazon is the delivery system. So I made
a deal with a producer of television and I got
him to sign an agreement and put it in a contract,
which is almost unheard of in Hollywood, that every scene

(01:00:50):
of Vosh would be filmed in Los Angeles, even interiors,
because I felt we had to have to act really
reflect with in the books where and where in the
books Los Angeles as a character. We had to do
that on the TV show. So so my partner, my
producing partner, readily agreed. He was very familiar with the books.

(01:01:12):
He came He actually sought me out. I didn't seek
him out. He readily agreed, and then he had to
live with that, and he had to sell that to
Amazon because that did add a big expense to it.
But Amazon um agreed to it and also saw the
light that that if you're going to try to adapt
these books, then adapt the books. Don't go to Canada
to do that. And so it worked out well. And

(01:01:34):
I think that in the show, the the city is
a character that there's a tone to the visuals of
the show, uh that I love and that I think
are accurate to the books. And so it's been a
very happy, um, you know agreement. Tell us about the casting,

(01:01:59):
the I mean, everything comes down to who's Harry Bosh?
And you know the I remember, so we have a showrunner.
The head creative person on the show is called the showrunner,
and his name is Eric Overmeyer. And I happen to
have previously known him, not that well, but I had
dinner with him a couple of times because of some

(01:02:20):
mutual friends in New York City. And um, he said,
our biggest Um, there's two things that are our biggest challenges.
One finding the right Harry Bosh and two your books
are very interior. You're you're writing inside Harry Bosch's head,
and we can't do that in the script. And so

(01:02:41):
not only do we have to find a way of
of of showing his feelings of how what he says,
what he does, and so forth, but we also have
to break the storytelling out to other characters. Um. In
the Bosh books, you're usually only with Bosh in every scene,
and you can't do that in a TV show. But anyway,
going back to the casting, that was that was obviously
a key thing, and Amazon had a schedule for when

(01:03:04):
we would shoot the pilot, and we basically had about
seven weeks to find our Harry Bosh and I went
into the first meeting, and we had really good casting agents.
They were at that time casting Madman UM. They were,
you know, they had cast that show and we're continuing
to cast it UM year after years. So they were

(01:03:26):
very good UM casting people. And they had a list
of like four pages of names of different actors and
so forth in UM. You know, I'm Mr. Bookwriter. I
don't really know a lot about Hollywood, but I had
seen Titus Welver playing as a guest star on a
TV show just recently, just recent to this meeting, where

(01:03:50):
he played a ex soldier with PTSD, and he was
clearly able to convey that this guy had inner demons.
And that's what I wanted, um in Bosh, That's what
Eric Overmeyer wanted, That's what Henrik Baston, our producing partner wanted,
and so I. But his name wasn't on these four pages,
and so I was very kind of intimidated to even

(01:04:12):
bring him up because I'm the I'm the guy in
the room hasn't had no experience really with TA Television
that much. So anyway, I brought him up and they
said we'd love him and he'd be great for the part,
except he's making a movie in Hong Kong and during
our six seven weeks where we can casts, he's not
going to be in l A. So that kind of

(01:04:33):
went out the window. And then we proceeded down over
the next days and weeks UH with the list that
they had, and we kept talking to different people and
we would um people would come in and try out
and so forth, and nobody really connected with the group
as being Harry Bosh. And then we were actually at
the point where we were gonna have to call Amazon

(01:04:54):
on him. It was like Thursday or Friday, and we
had the we're gonna call Amazon on Monday and say
we have to push um shooting the pilot because we
don't want to do it with someone we're not convinced
as Harry Bosh. And then that same day we got
word that Titus was flying home for the weekend to
see his kids, and so we kind of cajoled this

(01:05:16):
idea that he would come and see see us for
like an hour just so we could talk to him,
and and instead he worked up this the audition scene
for Bosch on the plane ride back and came in
all jet lagged and auditioned and even in his jet
lagged capacity, we all knew this. We just had this instinct,
the instinctual thing that this is the guy, this is

(01:05:37):
this is Harry Bosh. So he basically got the job
right there. Now, you say the Bosch on TV is
different from the Bosch in the book. So are you
writing for the character Titus has established? How do you
do that? Yeah, you definitely feed off of what you've
got so far on the TV show, And um, we
are you know, all the writers know Titus very well.

(01:05:59):
Titus is a contributor, collaborator, comes to the writing room,
talks about things that he'd like to see Bosch do
and things like that, and so it's it's all under
the umbrella of the book for sure. Um, and you know,
there's other aspects of adapting it. Many of the books
we've adapted are from the nineties and we're you know,

(01:06:20):
twenty l a. It's it's a different city twenty years later,
twenty five years later, So we have to make changes anyway.
And so you know, Bosch Bosch has become tight as
tightest has become Bosh. I mean, I think he has
a sense of that character as as strong as mine.

(01:06:40):
UM and I think, uh and I trust him with
that character. So when he says I want to do
this or I want to say that, um, I I
really listened to him because I think he comes from
a place of of character knowledge that UM I have
to certainly respect. So you're on amas on and when

(01:07:00):
you launch five years ago, uh, amazons that people think
of streaming is still relatively new when it's on Netflix.
What is the reception? What is the experience after the
series is up on your end? Oh? Yeah, yeah, So
we know we have a good show. Um, I'm very
proud of it. It's very reflective of the books, and
it's very reflective of the accuracy, um of of that job.

(01:07:24):
I mean, we have to um. Actually in the first
season we had three active LAPD homicide detectives being our consultants.
So so we're very confident in the show. And Amazon
is kind of like in its nascent stages of coming
out with UM with streaming product. I think they had
one two other shows that were comedies to come out

(01:07:45):
before UM Bosh. So we have the show that we
think is good, and it becomes a matter of how
do we get how do we draw people to it?
And so you know, Amazon did a lot, you know,
billboard all over to place all kinds of social media
times Square. Um, it seemed like it was everywhere, and

(01:08:06):
I think that got us off to a good start. Um.
You know, I have obviously have my social media, and
I think the core audience was was the the readers
of the books, but television demands a much bigger audience
than that, so we had to expand it well beyond
the book readers who who loved the series. Well from

(01:08:27):
my viewpoint, just as ah and I was not a
Bosh reader at the time. Um, I didn't get into
it until season three. At what point did you feel
the show was really picking up with the public. I
think around then. I mean I think definitely the first season. Um,
we were getting to know everybody on the show. I

(01:08:50):
mean we basically have um, you know, the cast is
the cast, but our crew we've probably because we suit
in l A and everyone wants to work on l
A show, so they want to travel. We've had probably
like nine return rate of our crew and so all
that kind of comes together in making a show. It's
all very important, and um, you know, it's a learning experience.

(01:09:14):
You get better the more you do something. And I
think we refine. We made some changes in the writing room,
We made some changes in um, the look of the
show and so forth, the cameras and so forth. And
I think, um, we really came into our own, um
late in the second season into three. And uh, you know,

(01:09:34):
it's not that we made any bad seasons or anything,
but I just think we got better. I think it's
a rare show that season. The season it gets better.
I completely agree, and I certainly tell people that. Speaking
of which, uh, supposedly next year's your last season? What's
up with that? Um? Exosedly? Yeah, I think everything it changes,

(01:09:54):
you know, because of the virus. I think, um, the
every every, every provider of content, cable network, streaming is
gonna face content issues because of the shutdown, um of
everything in life and but but in in in the
entertainment industry as well. So I'll never say never. Maybe

(01:10:17):
it will be our last, maybe not, but as of now,
it's scheduled to be our last, And um, you know,
I'm not on the level of making those decisions. Or
why they make those decisions. I mean, I think Bosch
is going to live on their platform for for many
years to come, maybe decades to come, and I think
at some point they they make decisions based on you know,

(01:10:39):
this show costs this x amount of money a year
to make, and we already have that audience in our
back pocket, so why don't we try to connect them
to something new and different? You know, I think those
are kind of the creative situations that go into it.
I do know that we that these discussions were happening
all the time that we were making the sixth season,

(01:11:02):
and uh, you know, to Amazon's credit, the creative people
at the top of that, you know, we sat down
with them and they said, you know, we want to
we want you to write to an ending next year
so that we have a show that has that is complete,
you know that it starts from the beginning and has
an ending, and that we want you to know the

(01:11:22):
whole season you'll be writing towards an ending. And that
was from a creative standpoint, that was really good to have.
And we're doing that now. You know, the sixth season
just came out, but we're well into writing the seventh season.
And writing two towards an ending. The one thing that's
kind of odd is that the books are not ending.
I'm still writing about Harry Bosh. I'm writing a book

(01:11:43):
right now that he's in and so forth. So whereas
I have not written a book on on the book track,
I have not written to an ending. We're gonna be
doing that with the TV show. And to what degree
has the TV show impacted the sales of your books? Um,
it's it's anecdotal. I know it's impacted it. Um you know,
I know, you know, Amazon is the biggest seller of

(01:12:05):
books in the world, so or you know, one screen
away you can go from uh watching the bos show
to reading the Bosh books, and so I know it's
had an impact, but it's not something I can measure.
I know, you know, I sold more books than but
my profile has always been growing since each book has
sold more than the one before, And that's what's going

(01:12:27):
on now. And I have to attribute a big chunk
of that to the show, But you know I can't.
There's no science about it that says exactly what the
impact has been. Let's just say hypothetically, you know, shooting
begins soon. You're right, to an ending, there's no obvious renewal. Uh.
To what degree are you going to be depressed? I

(01:12:52):
don't think I'll be depressed at all, because, um, I've
always been a bookwriter first, UM, and and being in
that room by myself and writing and pleasing myself for
feeling satisfaction of something I've done has never been something
that's gone away. This the TV show has been great.
I've I've kind of gone from being the introvert of
being in the uh, part of a crew of like

(01:13:15):
two people. Um, and that's been a really fun part
of my life for the last seven years. And so
I'll definitely miss that. I don't know if I'll go
into depression. Um. And then you know, you know, you
can always live for the day that Amazon says, well,
let's do a movie, let's chick in on Harry Bosh.
So I don't I don't really think it will be
the end of Harry Bosh in terms of video. Since

(01:13:38):
you have other characters, written books about other people, are
you developing now that you know theoretically there's an end
to Bosh? Are you developing shows based on these other characters?
And well, yeah, I have a whole slew of characters
out there, and I hope to UM, you know, take
another shot at UM Hollywood in that way. So yeah,

(01:13:59):
they're in different various stages of development. I almost had
a Lincoln Lawyer show on CBS, but the virus kind
of killed that, UM and so we'll start over on
that and see what happens. Okay, So what do you
do with your money? What I do with my money? UM,
I give a lot of it away. My wife and

(01:14:20):
I have a foundation that we UM support a lot
of causes. I'm really UM. One of my main focuses
is journalism and UM supporting journalism schools, supporting investigative news
sites on the Internet. I think because of the downsizing

(01:14:42):
of the newspaper business, a lot of good stuff is
going out into the Internet and it's hard to be
profitable or or to even pay the bills, and so
there's a lot of nonprofit UM news sites with with
particular focuses. My next book is actually called fair Warning,
and it's and it has Jack McAvoy, the reporter from

(01:15:03):
The Poet, working for a new site called fair Warning,
which is consumer oriented investigative reporting. UM. And I mean
I've been involved in supporting that I'm on the board
and so forth, and so that it filtered into my
creative process, where you know, I've written about this reporter
on and off for I don't know, twenty five years,

(01:15:25):
and so it was kind of obvious to me that
while I check in on Jack McAvoy now and have
them working at one of these news sites, and so
it's a kind of a blending of of of reality,
um with fiction. And what about your personal viewpoint on

(01:15:46):
the future of journalism, Well, I'm concerned about it, and
I've voiced that concern I think through Jack, especially in
this book. But but you know, the last book I
wrote about him, The Scarecrow, was right in the middle
the newspaper crunch, and um, I reflected on that. Um,
you know, in my day, and I'm not one of

(01:16:07):
these guys that goes it was always better when nic
really you know, the old days, in my days, But
I am from a time in journalism where the newspaper
was a tent pole in a community for discussions about everything, culture, politics, crime, everything,
and and that central point of debate and discussion is

(01:16:30):
pretty much gone in almost every city except for a few.
And and that to me, you know, so I think
that society's loss and like I said, alive it has
filtered out onto the Internet. But it's almost like, go
see your question of how do you find how do
people find Bosh in his early years? It's hard to

(01:16:51):
find this stuff, the incredible stuff, the stuff that is
not um politically biased and so forth, out on the Internet.
And that's where we are right now, having that issue
of of trust and media that I think is um,
you know, a very uh telling issue. Okay, let's just
say hypothetically, I can snap my fingers. You own the

(01:17:14):
l A Times. What would you do differently? Oh man,
I think I Well, I mean they still I'll probably
get help for this because they've they've out of pride
and so forth. They've maintained many of their postings around
the world and they've cut them back immensely, but they
still maintain them. And I just think the way to

(01:17:36):
survive now as a newspaper, unless you're The New York
Times in Washington Post, is to really double down on
local reporting and local investigative reporting, and you know, maybe
not worried so much about having an office in Beijing,
but instead have um a reporter who just watches the

(01:17:58):
money in the county budget, you know, things like that,
and I think that would would connect the paper to
it's populous better. And it can also, um you know,
serve that function that is I think is being lost
in terms of being, um a watchdog. And to be

(01:18:20):
a watchdog, you gotta start with your own community before
you start worrying about the world. And I think that's
where I think the future of newspapers surviving for the
most part is in that local attention to the local scene.
And you know what what you said, You write so
much about l A and you live about live in

(01:18:41):
l A. What's your viewpoint on Los Angeles. I'm still
very enthusiastic about l A, and I think by Harry
Bosh would be too. To me. It goes back to
back when I told you about when I was a
young reporter and I felt like I was a prince
of the city because I knew things that were going
on that people didn't know. Yet I feel that way
about l A. I still feel like it's on the

(01:19:03):
front line of change and and trends and culture and
and there's there's a pride in that that I take
in as as a writer of this place, as a
resident of this place, as just someone who loves this place.
And so I still so I think l A is
going to be okay no matter, no matter what happens,

(01:19:23):
you know, post post Corona. Well, I guess, thinking back,
the reason I got into Bosh is I knew someone
who worked at Amazon and they said to watch Goliath.
And I wrote about Goliah saying how had the l
A look? And someone wrote to me said, well, if
you're into the l A look, you gotta watch Bosh.
Now you really get the richness and the color, the visibility.

(01:19:45):
You know, you do this better than any series. To
what degree is that conscious? And to what degree did
you try to nail it and get a specific just
you know, with the DP, etcetera. Well, it started with
the books, and then it was really surrounding the books
with people in this industry, the television industry, who wanted
to get it right, you know. So you know, I

(01:20:06):
pretty much consciously when I had choices of going to
people and eventually it becomes so big that I have
no no saying a lot of different things, but I
went to people that knew the books and loved the books.
So our line producer, which is a usually important nuts
and bolts producer. Um was a guy who read the
books and the guy who produced the movie Heat back

(01:20:29):
in the nineties, which influenced me as a writer. So,
you know, you start start with this, you start with
people who love l A and they want to make
something that is realistic, but at the same time it's
also kind of a love letter to l A. And
then you keep adding to that circle of people of
the same kind of sentiment and a view of this place. Um.

(01:20:51):
And you know, it's a rare thing, I think. Um,
I don't know if it works every time on every shows.
I don't I don't have those experiences to to know.
But but we just have a bunch of people who
wanted who went to to l A to be a
character in this show. You know, you mentioned about the
look of the show. You know, our director of photography,

(01:21:13):
Patrick Katie, he works on that so much. You know,
he's always out there shooting, trying to get the tone right,
trying to get the tone that we're looking for, that
he's looking for. And we just have a lot of
individuals that give their all to the show and it's
it's amazing to be a part of that. What about
the house facing l A as opposed to the valley.

(01:21:36):
It's funny I mentioned the guy who was the line
producer of Heat. That house was in Heat and um
and he you know, I don't know if anyone has
Roll Indexes anymore, but he's kept every contact he's ever
made in Hollywood. And so we end up running that
house because we had a connection to that house through
this uh producer we have. Um. I think that to

(01:22:00):
get back to your question though, I think that's a
good way of looking at the difference between writing a
book and making a television show. The visual needs of
the television show. Harry Bosh and the books has a
pretty decent view of part of the city and the
freeway and things that are you know, part parcel of

(01:22:21):
the city. But when it came to the TV show,
we wanted the bright lights and and you know, then
that sets up a whole question of whether he could
even afford a place like that, and you know, which
we I think have taken care of a few times
in the storytelling. But um, yeah, I think in the
TV show we have more of guardian of the city

(01:22:43):
feel to Bosh, and we wanted a place where he
would look out on the city that he protects and serves.
He's a big jazz fan and he plays Vinyl in
the book. He's playing CDs, So hey, are you a
big jazz fan? And b was her conscious choice to
have him play vine, Yeah, that was part of the
playing in the Vinyl was, you know, part of the

(01:23:04):
visual setup. Um, I personally have gone to Vinyl myself.
I but I'm I'm a newspaper reporter. So I decided
way back when I was first writing Bosch, I wanted
him to listen to jazz. It was not because of
my knowledge or or love of jazz. It was more
like a creative decision, a character decision. Jazz fit this

(01:23:26):
guy who was a loner detective. So being a reporter though,
I know how to ask questions and I know how
to find good stuff, and so the jazza Harry listens
to comes out of my reporting a little bit. It
comes out of my father's is my father's music. But um,
it was mostly me finding people that would support the

(01:23:49):
character of Harry Bosh as a loner out there in
the world who has to fight to make his way,
just as the musicians that he listens to had to
do Um, So there's a correlation there. Some people who
read the books get it, some who some don't, but
but they get the aspect of what the music means

(01:24:10):
to him. Well, you know, as I say, the show
and carry himself certainly in body l A. Especially in
an era where everyone's attacking California. It certainly makes Los
Angeles look like a unique police and good In any event, Michael,
thanks so much for doing this. Hey, thank you for
having me. I'm sorry for the technical interruptions, but if

(01:24:33):
we ever do it again, I'll get it right. Okay,
that's part of the coronavirus era. Until next time, it's
Bob left Sex eight