Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Sets podcast.
Speaker 1: My guest today is writer Michael Connelly. Michael, Hey, how
Speaker 1: are you? Thanks for having me on your show. Okay,
Speaker 1: so where are you right now? I'm in Los Angeles
Speaker 1: on lockdown, hunkered down status, whatever you want to call it. Okay,
Speaker 1: So you're living in Los Angeles now? Yeah? Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1: So how's the self quarantining working for you? Well, I
Speaker 1: can't complain because I'm somebody who from most of my
Speaker 1: life I've worked from home, you know, writing books and
Speaker 1: solitude and uh, up until I got involved a TV show,
Speaker 1: that was what my life is like. So this is
Speaker 1: a bit of a throwback to the way I've been
Speaker 1: for most of my um creative life. So are you writing?
Speaker 1: What is filling your time these days? Well? It's interesting because, uh,
Speaker 1: I raped very contemporary stories set in Los Angeles and
Speaker 1: the um you know, the virus thing happens and you
Speaker 1: don't know the end of it, so it's very hard
Speaker 1: to be creative about it. And I was in the
Speaker 1: middle of a Lincoln Lawyer book that was actually set
Speaker 1: in April of this year, and that doesn't work anymore
Speaker 1: so because I don't know what's gonna happen. So I
Speaker 1: lost about a month and a half of creative quandary,
Speaker 1: wasn't really doing much at all. And then I kind
Speaker 1: of said, I'm going to back the book up started
Speaker 1: in December instead of April, and bring it up into
Speaker 1: the start of this virus and maybe reflect a little
Speaker 1: bit on that um. And then I got going again
Speaker 1: and I got some good momentum, and that's where I'm
Speaker 1: at now. Now I'm now though, I'm I guess bothered
Speaker 1: by the question of will people want to read about
Speaker 1: this virus after we've all lived through it. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's not gonna be the main emphasis of my book,
Speaker 1: but it's gonna be on the news, and the impending
Speaker 1: plague coming is going to be part of it. You know.
Speaker 1: I think that's over analyzing because I remember yesterday in
Speaker 1: the New York Times they had Jury Seinfeld interview and
Speaker 1: he taped his special before the coronavirus, and they're worried
Speaker 1: about what people can handle. I think primarily people are
Speaker 1: reading your books because they're fans of you, and then
Speaker 1: they turn other people onto the books. Would you agree
Speaker 1: with that? Well, that's the hope, you know, that's the
Speaker 1: domino effect, you think. You hope it has, you know
Speaker 1: that people read the book and spread the word about it. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I do think that there's a part of this audience
Speaker 1: that my audience, that's that's gonna go with me where
Speaker 1: I go. And that's great to have. But you know,
Speaker 1: these questions always kind of filter into your thinking anyway. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's let's when you do right, to what degree are
Speaker 1: you thinking about the audience? Um? Not a whole lot.
Speaker 1: I mean you do in general, you know, like um,
Speaker 1: in terms of I try to be very as I said,
Speaker 1: you were reflective of what's going on in the world,
Speaker 1: and and that includes politics and so forth, and so
Speaker 1: I you know, I wrote a book, for example, uh,
Speaker 1: maybe a year ago I think it came out or
Speaker 1: two years ago called uh, two kinds of Truth. I
Speaker 1: think it was called It's Weird I'm having my own books.
Speaker 1: But in that was was you know, a meditation on
Speaker 1: what is truth then? And who should be telling the
Speaker 1: truth no matter what? And this was at a time
Speaker 1: where in politics people were constantly talking about is the
Speaker 1: president lying as the president not lying? And and and
Speaker 1: and it's and truth became a political issue and that
Speaker 1: wasn't really what I wanted to put into the book,
Speaker 1: but that's how people read it. And you know, so
Speaker 1: you do get social media. Um, you get social media
Speaker 1: return on what you do. I do as well, and
Speaker 1: so it was interesting to see people take my meditation
Speaker 1: on the truth and what it means in the wrong
Speaker 1: way and take it through a political um uh strainer,
Speaker 1: if you will, um and react negatively in a lot
Speaker 1: of cases to my books and positively in other ways. Well,
Speaker 1: I guess being specific about that, since you wrote about
Speaker 1: truth and tomp Trump, I would assume the negative feedback
Speaker 1: came from supporters of Trump, irrelevant of the misinterpretation. As
Speaker 1: you move forward, are you anxious about alienating that part
Speaker 1: of your audience. I would say earlier in my career,
Speaker 1: I would have I would have had to have been.
Speaker 1: But now I'm on the tail end of my career
Speaker 1: and I have a I don't care type of attitude
Speaker 1: towards that. But I but definitely, early in your career,
Speaker 1: you know you're trying to sustain a career, and you
Speaker 1: just sustain it through readership and growing readership. So don't
Speaker 1: do anything that might dampen that readership. I mean I
Speaker 1: write about law and order. These are things that normally
Speaker 1: skew towards conservatives, and so there's a big population of
Speaker 1: conservatives I believe that read my books. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: this is all anecdotal. This is not anything I can
Speaker 1: say that we've done studies or anything like that. We're
Speaker 1: not that sophisticated in the publishing business. Um. But I
Speaker 1: was more aware of it back then that I was
Speaker 1: in the last decade or so of my career. And
Speaker 1: that's why something like this could happen. That I just
Speaker 1: put something in there that, um, you know, I think
Speaker 1: the line was even president's lie, president's plural, and that
Speaker 1: really set some people off, even the president. Sometimes president
Speaker 1: must have to stand naked, as Bob Dylan said. But
Speaker 1: I'm interested. I'm just a couple of years older than you.
Speaker 1: Do you think your attitude changed about this when you
Speaker 1: turned sixty. You're a few years past sixty. I don't
Speaker 1: know if I would. Uh, I didn't have like a
Speaker 1: big sixties moment. I think I had more one when
Speaker 1: I was fifty turned fifty about being on the You know,
Speaker 1: in my mind, I'm thinking about you're walking up a
Speaker 1: roof and at some point you hit the top of
Speaker 1: the riff and you're going down and it's and it's
Speaker 1: supposed to be easier, although it really isn't. Um that
Speaker 1: happened to me when I was fifty. Um, sixty kind
Speaker 1: of came and went from me. So I don't think
Speaker 1: that that had that kind of effect on me. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm the reverse fifty was a breeze. Sixty I'm still
Speaker 1: trying to recover from. But uh, now, the whole landscape
Speaker 1: of media has changed. As you've alluded to earlier, the
Speaker 1: book business is rather archaic. But if you the only
Speaker 1: person with universal mind share is Donald Trump, so what
Speaker 1: do we know? You have an established audience, you still
Speaker 1: have to make them aware of the fact that a
Speaker 1: new book is coming out. But did you have any
Speaker 1: dream of even further cultural penetration which is now frustrated
Speaker 1: as a result of so many messages and it's hard
Speaker 1: to get any worry out there? Um, I don't think so.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's that's a pretty deep question. And you
Speaker 1: know I can always retreat to, hey, I write mysteries,
Speaker 1: but you know the reality is that's that's the front
Speaker 1: of the book, and I wouldn't be doing this for
Speaker 1: so long and it's such a every day applying my
Speaker 1: trade level of it, if I didn't have at least
Speaker 1: secret motivations to tell story of a higher meaning or
Speaker 1: a higher connection or a higher residence. And you know
Speaker 1: they again not going back to sixty, but a coincide
Speaker 1: it kind of I'm like about to turn sixty four,
Speaker 1: so kind of coincided with when I turned sixty. They're
Speaker 1: the divisiveness that has entered the politics of our world
Speaker 1: has spilled out into everything, and therefore it does become
Speaker 1: um here, you know, writing a story about a guy
Speaker 1: just trying to solve a murder in Los Angeles becomes
Speaker 1: political without that being your intention. Um. And so that
Speaker 1: you know, I probably haven't even answered your question. I've
Speaker 1: going off on a tangent here, but said something. You
Speaker 1: said you had goals. I guess let me make it
Speaker 1: more to the point. I believe when someone is an artist,
Speaker 1: and you're an artist, your main goal is to reach
Speaker 1: as many people as you can with your message. Of course,
Speaker 1: you want to be remunerated, but you want to reach
Speaker 1: as many people. That is inherently difficult for everybody. So
Speaker 1: was that part of your dream or did you reach
Speaker 1: an establish your audience a million books per book, and
Speaker 1: that was satiating. Oh, I see what you're saying. No,
Speaker 1: And I don't think I'd ever be satiated. And I
Speaker 1: wish I could get to that level of a million
Speaker 1: uh readers a book. I don't think I'm there, but
Speaker 1: um there maybe in a list of libraries are doing
Speaker 1: a lot of work for me that I'm there. But
Speaker 1: um yeah, I mean I think you know. And and
Speaker 1: it's not like I'm trying to be high salutin or
Speaker 1: uh you know, didactic of anybody. I'm not trying to
Speaker 1: tell anyone how to think. I'm trying to write about.
Speaker 1: For the most part, let's just talk about Harry Bosh.
Speaker 1: He's the guy who's the through line of my creative life.
Speaker 1: Um started with him and hopefully will end with him,
Speaker 1: whenever that is. And I just think he sets an
Speaker 1: example of fairness. You know, everybody counts or nobody counts.
Speaker 1: That's his message, and that would be my message. And
Speaker 1: that's that's pretty simple, and that's and you'd think it
Speaker 1: was something that would have universal agreement, but it turns
Speaker 1: out it doesn't. Um, there's the politicalness in that statement.
Speaker 1: Everybody counts. M nobody counts, um, you know, and and
Speaker 1: so that kind of has infected That's probably too strong word,
Speaker 1: but that's kind of infiltrated into my thinking and into
Speaker 1: my work and how and how it's responded to. And
Speaker 1: you know that's something I, you know, really can't control. Okay,
Speaker 1: someone like you with a profile, you a lot of
Speaker 1: opportunities to, let's just say, hang out with the people
Speaker 1: on the other side of fairness. Are you more of
Speaker 1: an introvert or do you uh take the opportunities to
Speaker 1: go to parties, to go to yachts, to hang out
Speaker 1: with some of these household named people. I'm definitely, I
Speaker 1: mean it goes to that question about how my faring
Speaker 1: with the lockdown. Um, I'm definitely an introvert. Um. It's
Speaker 1: it's just a weird contradiction because I think most writers
Speaker 1: are You're comfortable being in your own little world. You know.
Speaker 1: My little world is my laptop and what I put
Speaker 1: into it, and then I send it out into the world.
Speaker 1: And so once a year, usually for about four weeks,
Speaker 1: I have a book come out, and I'm supposed to
Speaker 1: be the opposite of that. I'm supposed to be out there. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, touring talking about this being on podcasts that
Speaker 1: are very cool and so forth, and um, that's not
Speaker 1: really my lifestyle. Um so I don't, you know, to
Speaker 1: use your examples parties and and things like that. I
Speaker 1: don't do a lot of that. I am lucky in
Speaker 1: that my books have um connected with some people that
Speaker 1: are well known and culturally important, and um, I've been
Speaker 1: invited to meet with them and things like that. And
Speaker 1: it's it's it's that's been, you know, pretty amazing that
Speaker 1: that I'm drilling down on the fair in his thing.
Speaker 1: Obviously we're talking to coronavirus era and David Geffen posted
Speaker 1: on Instagram that he was self quarantining on his yacht. Now,
Speaker 1: he's well known for choosing people to come hang on
Speaker 1: his yacht. So if somebody chose, somebody invited you, whomever
Speaker 1: it is, to come stay on their three d FT yacht,
Speaker 1: would you say wow, great opportunity, or in the back
Speaker 1: of your brain say well is this fair? Should I
Speaker 1: be doing this? I see what you mean. Well, I
Speaker 1: mean it's uh, at first of all, that's never happened
Speaker 1: to me, but um, well they must have the private
Speaker 1: jet example where someone is saying, hey, I'm going here,
Speaker 1: come ride with me, or let's go for the weekend somewhere.
Speaker 1: I think you're giving me more social and cultural importance
Speaker 1: that I deserve because that that hasn't really happened to
Speaker 1: me either. But um, you know I I I think of, um,
Speaker 1: you know, different gatherings that I've been invited to, like
Speaker 1: intellectual or cultural gatherings that I've been invited to, and
Speaker 1: I actually find that my introverted nature comes out of
Speaker 1: these things and I don't contribute in a fair way
Speaker 1: to to the ideas being exchanged and so forth. So
Speaker 1: usually those kind of invites a short lived I don't
Speaker 1: get invited to the next one, you know, that type
Speaker 1: of thing. Um, but I enjoy being there when I can. Well,
Speaker 1: the interesting thing is you're very articulate and you have
Speaker 1: no problem speaking. Many introverts I was just stroying the
Speaker 1: Times about this the other day, once they can be
Speaker 1: dragged to the situation, all of a sudden, they light up.
Speaker 1: Does that happen to you? Or you're anxious and you're
Speaker 1: still anxious when you're there a little bit of both. Um,
Speaker 1: It's funny you start with the idea that you're an
Speaker 1: introvert you're You're fine being in your room by yourself.
Speaker 1: But I'm a storyteller, and there's something very egotistical about
Speaker 1: announcing that you're a storyteller and that you're going to
Speaker 1: write books, because that means you think your book should
Speaker 1: be read and they should be translated into movies and
Speaker 1: in the TV shows and everyone in the world should
Speaker 1: know your stories. That is not an introverted um view
Speaker 1: of the world. Um, And I can I can kind
Speaker 1: of knock it down to to something that's happened to
Speaker 1: me in recent years, and that is part you know,
Speaker 1: it's that roof again. For part of my career, I
Speaker 1: was going walking up the roof are I was climbing
Speaker 1: up the roof, trying to get established, trying to get
Speaker 1: more readers, trying to get more attention. And so you know,
Speaker 1: I did like forty city book tours and things like that.
Speaker 1: And in each of these things, you you stand up
Speaker 1: and you you explain yourself, and it's a speech, and
Speaker 1: it would weigh heavy on me coming up of what
Speaker 1: I would say. I didn't like the idea of doing
Speaker 1: it by road and saying the exact same thing, right
Speaker 1: down to the little side jokes. Every every night. I
Speaker 1: just don't do that, And so I would be trying
Speaker 1: to tailor every night a new discussion that centered around
Speaker 1: the same thing for sure, um And it just was
Speaker 1: so hard and it was so debilitating that at some point,
Speaker 1: when I passed the crest of the roof and was
Speaker 1: on the downside, I said, I'm not doing any more speeches.
Speaker 1: I told my publicists and so forth in my publisher
Speaker 1: I'm not doing any more speeches because it's not just
Speaker 1: the thirty minutes that you're giving that speech, it's the
Speaker 1: days leading up to it, thinking about that speech and
Speaker 1: worrying about it and and and it takes away from
Speaker 1: what I do, and that is writing my book. So
Speaker 1: I stopped doing that, and I said, anytime someone wants
Speaker 1: me to be on the stage, put someone with me,
Speaker 1: and let's do a Q and A. That's how I
Speaker 1: do it, exactly. And and and what happens is that you
Speaker 1: go on and on and everything, like right now, every
Speaker 1: answer becomes a speech. But because you were asked the question,
Speaker 1: there's some kind of of a social acceptance and being
Speaker 1: asked the question that you can just go on and
Speaker 1: on and and and you know, keep talking. And I
Speaker 1: think it's more interesting that way. I think it was.
Speaker 1: It was one of those things like, Man, I can't
Speaker 1: believe for fifteen or twenty years, I had to work
Speaker 1: on all these speeches all the time, when when the
Speaker 1: people who are in attendance are the people who are listening.
Speaker 1: Got much better insight into who I am and what
Speaker 1: I do and what my characters are about. When I
Speaker 1: answer questions as opposed to just, you know, trying to
Speaker 1: pontificate with a speech, well, as I say, I totally resonate.
Speaker 1: And I felt good about it because I once interviewed
Speaker 1: Michael Lewis uh and it was the same thing. He
Speaker 1: has a question. I can make up my own questions,
Speaker 1: but you don't have to cogitate and speak at the
Speaker 1: same time. It's much different when you can just answer
Speaker 1: the question. You can go down your nooks and cranny,
Speaker 1: but if you're speaking, you're saying where you're going. Let's
Speaker 1: go back to this issue with fairness. Okay, two things. One,
Speaker 1: this is your personality in general to how do you
Speaker 1: try to send the message such to change the world.
Speaker 1: I think it does come out of my personality because
Speaker 1: it comes out of my you know, growing up and
Speaker 1: I had a big family, and then there's always fairness issues,
Speaker 1: like with six kids, and my parents had this. So
Speaker 1: it's not something I've originated. It's just something that was
Speaker 1: bred into me by my parents and my brothers and sisters.
Speaker 1: And so I've tried to, you know, uh, put it
Speaker 1: into my books and and I just you know, I'm
Speaker 1: not trying to change the world, as you say, um Forthfully,
Speaker 1: I put the message in people in my books who
Speaker 1: are very to my to my this is my take,
Speaker 1: and you know I'm not saying it I'm right. I'm
Speaker 1: just saying this is what I think. I think the
Speaker 1: characters I've about face long odds and what they're doing,
Speaker 1: they face difficulty, and most often they have to they
Speaker 1: come to a point where they have to make a
Speaker 1: choice to do the right thing at great expense to
Speaker 1: themselves and those they love. And that's like the noble
Speaker 1: moment of of every book. And and that's where the
Speaker 1: fairness comes from. So I'm not trying to announce to
Speaker 1: the world everybody counts, but nobody counts. I'm just writing
Speaker 1: about a guy who has that at his core, and
Speaker 1: hopefully that message comes across and um and it wins
Speaker 1: people over or people take it as a social cue
Speaker 1: or take it like, hey, I want to be like that. Um,
Speaker 1: I want to I want to be uh noble too.
Speaker 1: And you know, that's just a little ripple. It's a
Speaker 1: pebble in the in the lake. And maybe the rings
Speaker 1: go out and change some same lives and and in
Speaker 1: a way, maybe that helps change the world. Um, so
Speaker 1: you're talking about now you're on the downward slope. I
Speaker 1: won't give it a negative connotation, but speak to your
Speaker 1: motivation to continue to write books. I'm just the luckiest
Speaker 1: guy I know. I mean, I have this facility to
Speaker 1: do this in the first place, which you know, there's
Speaker 1: there's a part of it is learned and part of
Speaker 1: it is practiced, but a lot of it is just
Speaker 1: mystical and it just has happened, and um, I can't.
Speaker 1: You know, I have to treasure that. I have to
Speaker 1: nurture it. I had to take care of it. And
Speaker 1: that means writing every day. That's I mean, that's my answer.
Speaker 1: I feel like I got to write every day. Okay,
Speaker 1: So hypothetically, if you wrote and you knew no one
Speaker 1: would read it, would you still write? I think I
Speaker 1: would because that's how it started. For me, I wrote,
Speaker 1: you know, my first book was published when I was
Speaker 1: thirty five, but I've been writing for myself and at
Speaker 1: night and learn. I mean part of it as a
Speaker 1: learning experience, obviously, but but I was having great fulfillment
Speaker 1: doing it. And you know, I wrote two books that
Speaker 1: I didn't think we're good enough, and no one has
Speaker 1: ever read other than myself. And I love those books
Speaker 1: because the second one was way better than the first,
Speaker 1: and so I could see myself getting better. And you know,
Speaker 1: I think at some point you'd finally get swallowed by
Speaker 1: like the feelings of fruitlessness and in it. And I
Speaker 1: didn't have that, luckily. But it was a long time
Speaker 1: from the point, you know, I said, hey, I want
Speaker 1: to write novels. I want to and very specifically, I
Speaker 1: said to myself and my parents, I want to write
Speaker 1: crime fiction. That's what speaks to me. And it was
Speaker 1: like almost twenty years later before I was holding a
Speaker 1: book that I that, you know, a real book that
Speaker 1: was that was getting published. Um, And so that was
Speaker 1: a long time. But I don't look at it as like, Wow,
Speaker 1: what a long journey, what a difficult up up slope
Speaker 1: or whatever you wanna call it. It was. It was
Speaker 1: a fun time because I didn't know anything about the
Speaker 1: world of wishing, and I didn't know about the pressures
Speaker 1: and and other things that would come once I did
Speaker 1: get published. So I don't know. It's one of those
Speaker 1: answers where I say, yes, I would still be doing
Speaker 1: it for myself. But I think most people listening to
Speaker 1: this would go like, yeah, right, Well, let's go back
Speaker 1: to the beginning. There are how many kids in your family?
Speaker 1: Six including me? And where are you in the hierarchy? Um? Second, um,
Speaker 1: the oldest boy. Okay, so you got a little because
Speaker 1: normally the oldest gets all the attention. Uh. This goes
Speaker 1: back to our earlier topic in terms of feedback. But
Speaker 1: in the world we live in, yes, the world we
Speaker 1: grew up in, there was more attention towards the mail.
Speaker 1: So to what degree were you the fair haired boy?
Speaker 1: Was there attention on you? Um? I think my parents
Speaker 1: were pretty equal and and um and delving out the
Speaker 1: pats on the head and so forth. I mean, I
Speaker 1: think I was a fair haired boy. Um. But the
Speaker 1: way it went was my sister was born, and then
Speaker 1: three boys, and then two girls, and so the three
Speaker 1: boys were I think we're five total five years apart.
Speaker 1: All together, we were born in a five year period,
Speaker 1: and so we've always been close and we always did
Speaker 1: things together, like you know, with our father, we had
Speaker 1: a natural golf force on them, for example, and we
Speaker 1: would all go golfing and things like that. So I
Speaker 1: think there was you know, my brothers would be first
Speaker 1: say yeah, I was a favorite. I think there wasn't one. Okay,
Speaker 1: now there's been a lot of documentation. Uh, there are
Speaker 1: a lot of children and Mormon families, and the Mormons
Speaker 1: tend to win the reality shows the people from Utah
Speaker 1: because they can get along. So growing up with five siblings,
Speaker 1: are you the kind of guy who's an iconic lass
Speaker 1: or you can get along? No, I think I can
Speaker 1: definitely get along. I mean, I don't know how rare
Speaker 1: it is, but we're Uh, the six of us are
Speaker 1: all still live. I think the six of us was
Speaker 1: you know, Irish Catholic family. So I think all six
Speaker 1: of us were born in less than ten years. And uh,
Speaker 1: you know, we get together all the time. Uh, we
Speaker 1: have traditional get togethers at Thanksgiving and at least another
Speaker 1: time during the year and still a very close knit family.
Speaker 1: Even though we're far flung in six different states. That's
Speaker 1: kind of funny. Okay, so you're born where Philadelphia and
Speaker 1: then you at what age you moved to Florida. I
Speaker 1: was twelve and we moved to South Florida. Okay, we're
Speaker 1: in South Florida, Fort Lauderdale. Okay, did you go to
Speaker 1: the Inankee training gamps? I did? I remember they moved
Speaker 1: to Fort Lauderdale. That was a big deal. Yeah, I, Um,
Speaker 1: I actually worked. I mean it's kind of tied up
Speaker 1: into my life as a writer too. I worked at
Speaker 1: a hotel on the beach and Fort Lauderdale, and that's
Speaker 1: where the Yankees stayed. And um, you know, they would
Speaker 1: lock off the elevator. They had two floors. But I
Speaker 1: was somebody who delivered towels to the floors and all
Speaker 1: that kind of stuff for housekeeping, and I had interactions
Speaker 1: with several of them and they would give me tickets.
Speaker 1: Um at that time, there's no pro no MLB in
Speaker 1: in um Florida like they have now. But um so
Speaker 1: that was the baseball game in town to go see
Speaker 1: the Yankees. And so even though I'm from Philadelphia have
Speaker 1: uh don't really have a connection to New York. The Yankees.
Speaker 1: Um where my favorite team for most of my life.
Speaker 1: They were always my favorite team. And I grew up
Speaker 1: in the mirrors mantel years and even then when they
Speaker 1: were shitty. But once Steinbnner came in and they were
Speaker 1: winning and everybody became a Yankee fan. Maybe that's my
Speaker 1: personality kind of turned me off a little bit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they weren't uh that those days they had like um,
Speaker 1: Reggie and I remember like Lupinel gave me a lot
Speaker 1: of tickets to games and stuff like that. Um, when
Speaker 1: I was working at that hotel. Okay, so you're growing
Speaker 1: up and your father is doing what Uh he's always
Speaker 1: he was always kind of involved in development and Um
Speaker 1: he went from building houses in Pennsylvania, designing and building
Speaker 1: houses to like being a realtor for a little while
Speaker 1: in South Florida to working for a huge development company
Speaker 1: where he put together shopping centers, helped lease the shopping centers,
Speaker 1: helped design shopping centers. Uh. So he was kind of
Speaker 1: like all over the place in terms of real estate
Speaker 1: and development. And was that you know, if you go
Speaker 1: on Wikipedia, because a lot of this stuff is available,
Speaker 1: said of Gainesville, you studied that. Yeah, I went up
Speaker 1: to UM, the University of Florida. UM. I worked summers
Speaker 1: for my father's companies and so forth, going all the
Speaker 1: way back to when I was twelve and eleven in Pennsylvania,
Speaker 1: and uh, I just thought i'd What I liked about
Speaker 1: him is he would design a lot of his stuff,
Speaker 1: then he'd take it to an architect to get it,
Speaker 1: you know, completely blueprinted and all that stuff, and then
Speaker 1: he built it. And I liked the whole aspect of
Speaker 1: doing all of that. So I went up there to
Speaker 1: kind of following his footsteps. UM. They actually had a
Speaker 1: major call Building Construction Sciences UM, and that's what I
Speaker 1: was in for about a year. So I flunked out,
Speaker 1: literally flunked out. Yeah, yeah, definitely flunked out. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, they had a they had a class I
Speaker 1: took called the Introduction to Concrete. That's a hard course,
Speaker 1: as they say now believe believe it or not. There's
Speaker 1: like seven different kinds and there's seven recipes and you
Speaker 1: know how much error is in it all the you know,
Speaker 1: it was really was a science and I wasn't prepared
Speaker 1: for that. Um. You know, I just knew how to
Speaker 1: you know, turn to things so that the concrete came
Speaker 1: out and went into the form UM. So anyway, I
Speaker 1: did a lot of stuff that kids do, um when
Speaker 1: they first get away from home. And so I was
Speaker 1: asked to take a year off. And what did your
Speaker 1: parents say about that? They weren't be um but UM,
Speaker 1: I had two little sisters, um, who were still like
Speaker 1: in elementary school at that point, and so my punishment
Speaker 1: was I had to get up every morning and get
Speaker 1: them to school, so they're gonna make sure I didn't like,
Speaker 1: you know, stay up all night drinking and smoking or whatever,
Speaker 1: and then sleep till noon. I had to get up
Speaker 1: at seven every day to get my sisters to school.
Speaker 1: And your your mother all day she was working in
Speaker 1: the house or working outside the house. She it's hard
Speaker 1: for me to remember exactly those years. She was a
Speaker 1: bank teller through most of at least my high school years,
Speaker 1: so I'm trying to think if she was when I
Speaker 1: came back for that year off. I did stay at home,
Speaker 1: well forgetting that year. Who was watching the kids and
Speaker 1: she's working at the bank, or she just worked when
Speaker 1: everybody was in school or what. Um. Back then, banks
Speaker 1: were largely open when we nine to three, so she
Speaker 1: had just nine to kind of eight thirty or three
Speaker 1: thirty type job which kind of co side with school
Speaker 1: school hours. My older sister, Susan really um was the
Speaker 1: one who kind of ran things at home till my
Speaker 1: parents got home. Um. But um, yeah, my the like
Speaker 1: my remember I told you my three me and my
Speaker 1: two brothers were kind of a triumvirate way and there
Speaker 1: was like city parks and stuff that we would go
Speaker 1: to together and you know, play sports and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: So growing up, were you a big reader? Yeah? You know,
Speaker 1: it doesn't appear. The appearances are not good. A guy
Speaker 1: gets kicked out of school, he gets a job as
Speaker 1: a dishwasher at night at a hotel, and then his
Speaker 1: taking his sister to school and picking him up afterwards.
Speaker 1: But I was voraciously reading that whole time, and that's
Speaker 1: where I kind of formed the idea that, hey, I
Speaker 1: want to try to do this. So even though on
Speaker 1: paper it looks like probably one of the down years
Speaker 1: or the worst years of my life, it was really
Speaker 1: the best because I found my direct And Okay, how
Speaker 1: much of a reader are you now? I still read
Speaker 1: a lot, but I don't like Back then, I was
Speaker 1: reading crime fiction. I was looking for hard boiled stuff
Speaker 1: and and really forming my likes in terms of a
Speaker 1: crime fiction. And now I still read it because I
Speaker 1: want to be aware of what's going on out there.
Speaker 1: But I've been doing this for like thirty years, and
Speaker 1: you can kind of see between the lines. You can
Speaker 1: see the writer back there and what they're doing. It's, um,
Speaker 1: you know, it's kind of like in the last seven years,
Speaker 1: I've been involved in producing a TV show, and so
Speaker 1: now when I watched TV with my family, I'll just say, like, man,
Speaker 1: that costs a lot of money, that show. You they
Speaker 1: ruined it for you. Yeah, And I've I'm ruining it
Speaker 1: from my family because they're telling me just I don't
Speaker 1: really we don't really need to care, we don't really
Speaker 1: need to know all that stuff. Just let's watch the show.
Speaker 1: But that's that's how I became with crime fiction, and
Speaker 1: so it's it's become it's not a totally is not
Speaker 1: an escape for me anymore. Okay, but you write about
Speaker 1: current events. Are you a voracious reader or reader at
Speaker 1: all of periodicals or newspapers? Oh? Yeah, yeah, I have
Speaker 1: several subscriptions, you know, Internet subscriptions to newspapers and magazines
Speaker 1: and so forth and uh yeah, I mean part of
Speaker 1: it is just wanting to know what's going on in
Speaker 1: the world, but part of it is, yes, I'm looking
Speaker 1: for something that um can somehow be folded into what
Speaker 1: I'm doing, you know, just an offbeat story or uh,
Speaker 1: you know anything. It's it's weird how different things will
Speaker 1: inspire me, um and end up in books. How do
Speaker 1: you decide to become to go back to school to
Speaker 1: become a journalist? What's the whole process there? Well, that
Speaker 1: was just basically it. I had to sit down with
Speaker 1: my I told my parents, I don't want to be
Speaker 1: It's not gonna be like Michael and my dad's name
Speaker 1: is Michael to Michael con only and son, uh construction.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to go back and do that. I
Speaker 1: want to go back and uh you know, uh pursue writing,
Speaker 1: writing as a career, being a being a writer. And um,
Speaker 1: my father was it was interesting. I didn't know this
Speaker 1: at the time, but he was a frustrated artist. He
Speaker 1: wanted to be a painter when he was my that
Speaker 1: same age that I was going to him and saying
Speaker 1: I want to be a writer. At that age in
Speaker 1: his life, he wanted to be a painter, and he
Speaker 1: had gotten into a prestigious school in Philadelphia to learn
Speaker 1: how to paint and all that, but he had to
Speaker 1: make a living and it didn't work out for him,
Speaker 1: and he got back into painting many years later later
Speaker 1: and later in his life. But when I kind of
Speaker 1: very intimidated, I went to them and said, I don't
Speaker 1: want to do I don't want to go back to
Speaker 1: introduction to concrete. I want to learn how to write
Speaker 1: and um, and yeah, I didn't even know whether I
Speaker 1: should go back to school to learn how to write,
Speaker 1: but that's what I said. And um, my father's idea
Speaker 1: was to go back into and get go into the
Speaker 1: journalism school. Because I was very specific with them, I
Speaker 1: want to write crime fiction, crime novels. Uh, not just novels,
Speaker 1: crime novels. And so his suggestion was, you know, go
Speaker 1: be a newspaper reporter and that will hopefully get you into, um,
Speaker 1: into situations and relationships with people that you want to
Speaker 1: write about. You know, cops use your press pass to
Speaker 1: get into police stations and crime scenes and things like that.
Speaker 1: So I followed that suggestion and it turned out to
Speaker 1: be pretty genius. Um, and I think I had to
Speaker 1: go down that road to be in a position to
Speaker 1: do what I'm doing now. So you graduate from college,
Speaker 1: what's your first journalistic job? It wasn't that great, um,
Speaker 1: because it doesn't really matter what your grades are or
Speaker 1: anything in journalism or you know, in UM, your pedigree
Speaker 1: doesn't matter. It's what you can put on a paper,
Speaker 1: can you write? And so I applied to jobs. I
Speaker 1: didn't have very many clips. UM. I kind of worked
Speaker 1: part time at the college newspaper, but they didn't pay anything,
Speaker 1: and I had I was sending my I was paying
Speaker 1: my way through college, so I had a real job.
Speaker 1: So I ended up with not a lot of clips
Speaker 1: compared to other people in my class. So I really
Speaker 1: ended up with a kind of a second tier job,
Speaker 1: which was just an hour or two down the road
Speaker 1: from college and Daytona Beach working for a paper called
Speaker 1: the Daytona Beach News Journal. And I was I was
Speaker 1: signed out in the sticks. I wasn't on the beach
Speaker 1: or I never saw any water. I was like way
Speaker 1: out in the boonies, UH, covering four cities and anything
Speaker 1: that happened from city council meetings to crimes. And I
Speaker 1: lasted nine months doing that, and I covered one murder
Speaker 1: and it happened to happen UM. I think the day
Speaker 1: after Ronald Reagan was shot, so that news took over everything,
Speaker 1: and my my big murder story. I finally got a
Speaker 1: murder story, and it was very it was cut to
Speaker 1: like six inches. Anyway, anyway I got. I was there
Speaker 1: for nine months, and UM was constantly checking in on
Speaker 1: my hometown paper and Fort Lauderdale to see if there's
Speaker 1: any openings. And something came open. I went down, applied
Speaker 1: for a job there, and moved there. So my first
Speaker 1: job only lass than nine months. And then when I
Speaker 1: got the job at Fort Lauderdale Paper, I stayed there
Speaker 1: for seven years. And what was your beat there? It changed,
Speaker 1: but it was primarily crime. What changed about it was UM.
Speaker 1: Initially I was in their Palm Beach County UM addition,
Speaker 1: because back then newspapers were fat and happy and they're
Speaker 1: spreading everywhere. And the Fort Lauderdale News was also called
Speaker 1: the Sun Sentinel and the Sun Sentinel. How at outposts
Speaker 1: UM from Miami up to West Palm Beach, and I
Speaker 1: was in the West Palm Beach office covering crime the
Speaker 1: city of West Palm Beach and so forth, and um.
Speaker 1: Eventually though, I became a police reporter in Fort laud
Speaker 1: Ordal And did you feel like your dream had come
Speaker 1: true or were you saying, hey, there's something beyond here.
Speaker 1: I felt pretty good about it. I felt I was
Speaker 1: in this stage where I mean, I'm writing it at night.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to write fiction and trying to learn how
Speaker 1: to write fiction. So I was always doing that, but
Speaker 1: I was also feeling like that is a long shot
Speaker 1: and if it doesn't come through, this is a very
Speaker 1: interesting job. So I can be happy with it. Not
Speaker 1: a lot of money in it, but I can be
Speaker 1: happy here. And this was before the internet, and so
Speaker 1: you really had this sense that you were an insider
Speaker 1: like you were. I used to call myself the prince
Speaker 1: of the city. I felt like, at the end of
Speaker 1: the day, I knew so much about this town that
Speaker 1: no one knows. They're not going to know it till
Speaker 1: they read my my story in the paper in the morning.
Speaker 1: And it was a very heavy thing to have at
Speaker 1: you know, when you're in your mid twenties. And so
Speaker 1: I really enjoyed that job, and um, you know, if
Speaker 1: if it didn't work out, uh that I wrote with
Speaker 1: the book stuff that I was gonna be okay with it.
Speaker 1: But the first two books I wrote that no one's
Speaker 1: ever read. We're all setting for Lauderdale and so how
Speaker 1: did you get out of Fort Lauderdale. Um. I eventually
Speaker 1: was going up the ladder at the paper, and UM
Speaker 1: they put me on the Sunday magazine to write feet
Speaker 1: crime related features. And I wrote a story about a
Speaker 1: plane crash with two other writers. We spent a whole
Speaker 1: year and they actually cut us loose for a year
Speaker 1: to write the definitive. So for that, for that entire
Speaker 1: year with the newspaper, you only researched and wrote about
Speaker 1: the plane crash. Yeah it was, you know, it's a
Speaker 1: Delta crash. It was. It left Fort Lauderdale and crashed
Speaker 1: in Dallas and people survived, and so this is the
Speaker 1: wind Shear crash. Yeah, yeah, I believe was. And Uh.
Speaker 1: The the interesting thing was that most people, mostly a
Speaker 1: huge crash like that has no survivors. This one had
Speaker 1: twenty nine survivors. So we, me and two other reporters
Speaker 1: spent a year tracking those people somewhere the flight with
Speaker 1: Fort Laurida, the Dallas, Dallas of l A. So people
Speaker 1: were from Texas. People from California and people were from
Speaker 1: South Florida, and we we got to all of them
Speaker 1: except for one, and you know, so we kind of
Speaker 1: weave this story about surviving that and and some people
Speaker 1: were survived without a scratch, some people had devastating burns
Speaker 1: and so forth, and so it's all these levels of
Speaker 1: what surviving is and how to cope with it. And
Speaker 1: then we go also not this not to my credit
Speaker 1: to one of the other reporters, credits he got the
Speaker 1: um the investing in the MTSB investigation they got he
Speaker 1: got the file before it was public, and so we
Speaker 1: were able to piece together what happened on that flight
Speaker 1: and the wind shear and all that, and it was
Speaker 1: all part of this three part magazine story that broke
Speaker 1: new ground around the crash. But also it was just
Speaker 1: a really good human story about surviving and it got
Speaker 1: the attention of the Los Angeles Times because several of
Speaker 1: the people were from l A. And so I got
Speaker 1: a call from uh, the l A Times to come
Speaker 1: out to interview, and I ended up going out there,
Speaker 1: And that's a whole that was a whole different level
Speaker 1: of journalism. What was the gig at the l A Times? Again,
Speaker 1: it was crime. Um. I started in the the northern
Speaker 1: part of the county, the or the city of the
Speaker 1: Valley as it's called San Fernando Valley, where there was
Speaker 1: six l a p D Division. So like, my first
Speaker 1: job was covering those six divisions and anything that happened there.
Speaker 1: And then eventually I was covering a lot more. Okay,
Speaker 1: so you're writing at night, and at what point in
Speaker 1: this do you get married. I got married when I
Speaker 1: was about halfway through my gig in four lauder deal.
Speaker 1: And then you have a child. When did that child arrive? Oh,
Speaker 1: that didn't happen until I had already retired from journalism. Okay,
Speaker 1: so what does your wife say when you're driving around
Speaker 1: the valley all day long and then come home and say, hey, honey,
Speaker 1: I gotta go to the bedroom and right, Uh, that
Speaker 1: was a deal. We had to make a deal. I
Speaker 1: mean it was a big impact on her life because
Speaker 1: we moved to Los Angeles and we didn't know anybody.
Speaker 1: We just had each other. But I had this long
Speaker 1: term dream or goal of writing a book and publishing
Speaker 1: a book. So I made a deal with her that
Speaker 1: four work nights a week I would work in we
Speaker 1: had a two bedroom, and I set up the second
Speaker 1: bedroom as my writing room. Four nights a week and
Speaker 1: one weekend. I had to dedicate to this. And I
Speaker 1: told her I'd have a book. I'd sell a book
Speaker 1: in three years if she could live, if she could
Speaker 1: make that deal, and she did, and I was wrong
Speaker 1: by two years. It took me five years to get Um,
Speaker 1: once I moved to l A. Took me about five
Speaker 1: years to get a book published. Okay, So how long
Speaker 1: does it take you to write your first book, which
Speaker 1: is a bosh book? Um, it's hard to say. I'll
Speaker 1: just throw out three years because I overwrote it. But
Speaker 1: but I I came to l A and the weekend
Speaker 1: I got there, there was a crime that inspired the book.
Speaker 1: So in a way, you could say, you know, my
Speaker 1: first book came out in two so you could don't
Speaker 1: could claim it took five years, but it really took
Speaker 1: about three. Okay? Uh? And did you know you had
Speaker 1: something when you were done? I felt I did because
Speaker 1: I had written those two previous books, and any writer
Speaker 1: is going to be their harshest critic, and and I
Speaker 1: know that those two books could should not be published.
Speaker 1: I they were missing something. It was it was something
Speaker 1: in the character. The lead characters were not connecting enough
Speaker 1: with the reader, which at the time was just me.
Speaker 1: And I'm thinking, like, if if my own creation is
Speaker 1: not connecting with me, then there's something seriously wrong here.
Speaker 1: And so I moved on and I had to write
Speaker 1: those two books to write the third one, which was um,
Speaker 1: the Bosh Book. And so at the when I when
Speaker 1: I had that book, I felt, you know, and again
Speaker 1: I'm at this point, I'm still a voracious reader of
Speaker 1: crime fiction. I just felt this should be published. I
Speaker 1: didn't know if it would be published well, or or
Speaker 1: be embraced or anything like that. I just knew from
Speaker 1: my sampling of reading contemporary crime fiction, this book fit
Speaker 1: in and should be published. So I had did have
Speaker 1: that confidence. How hard was it to get the deal
Speaker 1: and what was the reception once it came out? The
Speaker 1: hard part was getting an agent. Um, you know, and
Speaker 1: again this is dating ourselves there, you know. It's pre internet.
Speaker 1: So like I'm going to a library and looking up
Speaker 1: agents in books and stuff like that, and I came
Speaker 1: across one of my favorite writers still to this day.
Speaker 1: His name James Lee Burke, and um, he writes about
Speaker 1: New Orleans most of the time, or or Montana sometimes
Speaker 1: Texas crime fiction. And he's just an amazing writer. And um,
Speaker 1: I was reading one of his books and lo and
Speaker 1: behold is dedicated to his agent, you know. And I'm
Speaker 1: kind of like groping around in the dark, you know
Speaker 1: about like what what makes a good agent? How do
Speaker 1: you find a good agent? And um, you know, so
Speaker 1: I wrote to this guy's names Philip Spitzer and um,
Speaker 1: and he said, I'll read I'll read the book. This
Speaker 1: is all done by letters. It takes forever, like six weeks.
Speaker 1: You hear it in the answer and um, he said,
Speaker 1: I'll read your manuscript if you promised me. I'm reading
Speaker 1: it exclusively because I don't want to be in competition
Speaker 1: with a bunch of other agents. And I said, yes,
Speaker 1: you haven't exclusively, which was a big lie because I
Speaker 1: had already sent it out to some to some other
Speaker 1: agents who had asked for the exact same thing. But
Speaker 1: you know, at that pace it would take five years
Speaker 1: to get get everybody, you know, um, the manuscript, uh solo.
Speaker 1: So anyway, he ended up calling me on a Saturday afternoon, um,
Speaker 1: which is I thought was unusual. Um, and saying he
Speaker 1: went he liked the book and he wanted to wrap it.
Speaker 1: And this was probably eleven months into my process of
Speaker 1: trying to find an agent. And so there I had
Speaker 1: an agent. And if I had ranked my top ten
Speaker 1: choices of agents I sent to, he would be number one.
Speaker 1: So I got very lucky there because I loved James
Speaker 1: Lee Burke's books, and I thought anyone who would dedicate
Speaker 1: a book to an agent, that agent has got to
Speaker 1: be honest, and the agent has got to have the
Speaker 1: long view of what you're doing. And so AS really
Speaker 1: ecstatic that um PHILP. Spencer took took me on, and
Speaker 1: and I knew enough from what I was reading to
Speaker 1: know that, you know, agents don't make any money unless
Speaker 1: they sell your books. That are not going to take
Speaker 1: you on as a favor, whereas for a lark. So
Speaker 1: I felt confident. He felt he could sell this thing
Speaker 1: and it wouldn't take too long, and it didn't. It
Speaker 1: took it took about uh two months, and he sold
Speaker 1: it to the second editor he sent it to. And
Speaker 1: how much did you change the book after it was accepted? Um?
Speaker 1: Not a whole lot. Um. So it's actually hard for
Speaker 1: me to remember. Um, I had my editor the editor
Speaker 1: who bought it left. She did some editing on it
Speaker 1: and she was very good, and then she left before
Speaker 1: it was published. And then I got assigned to a
Speaker 1: to a new guy they had just hired, and then
Speaker 1: I was with him for like twenty some years and
Speaker 1: he's still now. He graduated out of editing, is the
Speaker 1: CEO of the company, so I'm still have a relationship
Speaker 1: with him. He just doesn't edit my books. But um,
Speaker 1: editing is. I've always benefited greatly with my books and editing.
Speaker 1: So while I don't remember exactly what happened with my
Speaker 1: first book, I'm sure it was it went through some
Speaker 1: editing and um, and it was improved. So in any event,
Speaker 1: your book is published, Okay, how long after that does
Speaker 1: it start to take off? Well, the one thing was
Speaker 1: which I didn't understand when I went into this was that, um,
Speaker 1: they have to find a hole in the schedule to
Speaker 1: stick you in because I'm a new writer. And and
Speaker 1: so it was a bad thing and a good thing.
Speaker 1: They didn't publish my book for twenty months, and I
Speaker 1: was like, I had told people, Hey, I sold a book,
Speaker 1: and then after about ten months people thought I was lying.
Speaker 1: But anyway, what was good about that was they said,
Speaker 1: you can avoid the sophomore slump with by writing your
Speaker 1: second book before this one even comes out, and then
Speaker 1: you don't have any of the pressures of following something up.
Speaker 1: You don't know any of the things you're gonna learn
Speaker 1: once your book comes out. You can just it's a bubble,
Speaker 1: take advantage of this bubble and write your second book.
Speaker 1: So I did that, and so my book came out
Speaker 1: twenty months later, and um, I already had a second
Speaker 1: one already done, and which you know, it was. It
Speaker 1: was interesting they gave me that advice because they didn't
Speaker 1: have I didn't have a two book deal or anything,
Speaker 1: you know, So then I then I was in a
Speaker 1: position with to negotiate it. And you know, I'm not
Speaker 1: an overnight John Grisham like success. They put published twelve
Speaker 1: thousand copies of that book and probably sold half of them,
Speaker 1: and so it's very incremental. Um, but that was the
Speaker 1: book business was different back then. They allowed that. I
Speaker 1: don't even know if they do that anymore. It seems
Speaker 1: like all the publishers just want to get a big
Speaker 1: hit right away and they don't allow a writer to
Speaker 1: grow and to learn and so forth. And um, what
Speaker 1: happened about a year later was that first book, One
Speaker 1: an Edgar, which is like the Oscars of of crime
Speaker 1: writing for best first novel, and that really established me
Speaker 1: and bumped up my sales of books that came out
Speaker 1: afterwards and so forth. So that was the key thing
Speaker 1: that happened to me. And you know, very fortunate too
Speaker 1: for that to get that recognition. Okay, let's talk about
Speaker 1: your style. If you read the first book, The Black Echo,
Speaker 1: it's very dense, and now I'm reading Poet, and Poet
Speaker 1: is a lot less dense. Did you see an evolution
Speaker 1: of your style? I think so. I mean, you really
Speaker 1: got to kick out the first book because you don't
Speaker 1: know what you're doing in terms of publishing, and and
Speaker 1: it's like, um, you know, it's your heart and soul,
Speaker 1: so you you baby that thing for so long. And
Speaker 1: I over written or over wrote that book. I kept
Speaker 1: rewriting it. I kept it in the little details I'm
Speaker 1: picking up on the police beat and all the stuff.
Speaker 1: So it is very dense. And it's because the whole
Speaker 1: time I was writing it was like this is my
Speaker 1: one shot. I got throwing everything but the kitchen sink,
Speaker 1: and that's what I did, and um, you know, and
Speaker 1: so uh, you know, through editing, through counsel from editors
Speaker 1: and so forth, you know, you learn to let a
Speaker 1: little bit more air in. You learn more about momentum.
Speaker 1: Density slows down momentum, And the key to reading and
Speaker 1: writing is momentum. You gotta have momentum in the day
Speaker 1: that you're writing. You know, you want you want to
Speaker 1: put a lot of words on the page, and then
Speaker 1: you can go back and sculpt them, you can edit them,
Speaker 1: you can do a lot, you can kick hundreds of
Speaker 1: words out, doesn't matter. But you want to keep moving
Speaker 1: because what happens in the writing process is going to
Speaker 1: happen in the reading process. And so in those first
Speaker 1: few books, I kind of learned that. And um, it's
Speaker 1: interesting you mentioned the poet. So the Poem is my
Speaker 1: fifth book. But it was the first time I broke
Speaker 1: away from Harry Bosh and started writing about a world
Speaker 1: I knew much better than I knew, um, the police world.
Speaker 1: You know, I was writing about a reporter. I was
Speaker 1: basically writing about an alter ego. And um that um,
Speaker 1: I think you know, entered into the writing process and
Speaker 1: and made that book. I don't look at in terms
Speaker 1: of it's less dense, but it just moved quicker, um
Speaker 1: you know. And there's the style that developed of short sentences,
Speaker 1: staccato writing, keep keeps the reader's eyes moving, keeps them
Speaker 1: going through pages, and that became something that was very
Speaker 1: conscious of at that point in my writing. Let's jump
Speaker 1: all the way today. So you essentially write a book
Speaker 1: a year. What's the process? Do you ever do two
Speaker 1: books at once? Or you start one and you're on
Speaker 1: that one until you're done. As far as books go,
Speaker 1: it's one and done one until done. Um, I've never
Speaker 1: done that. I mean yes, sometimes, like this year, I'm
Speaker 1: I'm actually publishing two books, but I wrote them in
Speaker 1: consecutive one. The one thing that I have been able
Speaker 1: to do is to break away from writing a book
Speaker 1: to writing scripts for the TV show based on Bosh.
Speaker 1: I think it's maybe because it's the same character and
Speaker 1: the same um mil you. I don't seem to have
Speaker 1: a problem with that. So I've been able to spend
Speaker 1: days like where I love getting up early to write,
Speaker 1: so I'm usually writing by about five thirty or six
Speaker 1: in the morning in a day. In my life for
Speaker 1: the last four or five years has been writing to
Speaker 1: about writing a book until about ten and then going
Speaker 1: to a studio and sitting in a writing room or
Speaker 1: actually writing a script um for a few hours, and
Speaker 1: then coming back to my book in the afternoon, and
Speaker 1: and I'm writing about Harry Bosh, who's very different from
Speaker 1: They're different. The guy in the book is very different
Speaker 1: from the guy in the show. The guys in the
Speaker 1: book is like ten ten, at least ten years older.
Speaker 1: He's not even a cop anymore. So, so it's the
Speaker 1: same character but a totally different set up. So it's
Speaker 1: always been surprising to me that I can jump from
Speaker 1: one to the other, and I don't think it. I
Speaker 1: think I do that jump pretty seamlessly. Um, But I
Speaker 1: can't do that between two book projects. Are you more
Speaker 1: of a get it down right first? You're more of
Speaker 1: a rewriter? Uh, definitely a rewriter. Um. I go through
Speaker 1: my books two or three times, and the first draft
Speaker 1: is always to me unreadable. I wouldn't want anyone to
Speaker 1: see it because I think, I it's always too long.
Speaker 1: I always cut pages as I go through my rewrites,
Speaker 1: and I kind of like sharpen it down to what's
Speaker 1: important and what counts. Get rid of a lot of
Speaker 1: superflous stuff. And then I also find ways of disguising
Speaker 1: where I'm going, or trying to disguise where I'm going.
Speaker 1: I take out stuff like that's too much of a hint,
Speaker 1: that type of thing. Yes, you're more of a rewriter.
Speaker 1: But let me ask you this, Uh, do you have
Speaker 1: to be motivated? I mean, do you ever sit down
Speaker 1: and you say, hey, you know it's time to write.
Speaker 1: But I'm not really in the groove. And is that
Speaker 1: stuff you right end up being usable? Or when you're hot,
Speaker 1: is this stuff better? Well? He goes back to your
Speaker 1: question about rewriting. Yeah, I rewrite. So I feel like
Speaker 1: even on a bad day, if I get you know,
Speaker 1: if I moved the story along, I'm going to have
Speaker 1: something I can, you know, rewrite and make better later
Speaker 1: on my next go round. Do you ever one day
Speaker 1: accomplished or nothing? Yeah, but you know before the virus,
Speaker 1: those were few and far between. I just have this
Speaker 1: weird drive. I mean, I had this teacher at University
Speaker 1: of Florida named Harry Cruz who was a great novelist,
Speaker 1: one of my heroes, and I don't remember anything he
Speaker 1: taught me. I had two classes with him other than
Speaker 1: he just one time said, if you're gonna be a writer,
Speaker 1: you got it write every day, even if it's only
Speaker 1: for fifteen minutes, because if you write for fifteen minutes,
Speaker 1: the story is gonna keep swirling in your head all
Speaker 1: through the day. And he was very right about that.
Speaker 1: And so I've I've practiced that where I write for
Speaker 1: at least fifteen minutes, even if I'm I got the
Speaker 1: flu or whatever, I try to power through. And I
Speaker 1: just had this conversation with my wife a couple of
Speaker 1: days ago that during the virus, the beginning of the virus,
Speaker 1: I was so creatively unmotivated that six weeks went by
Speaker 1: without me writing. And I think that was, um, the
Speaker 1: longest I've ever gone without writing in my life. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, since I was twenty, since I was working
Speaker 1: at newspapers. Um, it was like a long time not
Speaker 1: to be writing. And I was not a pleasant guy
Speaker 1: to be with and all that. But finally, and I
Speaker 1: can't explain why, my mojo came back, and I started
Speaker 1: writing about two weeks ago at a very high clip.
Speaker 1: I think I was making for the six weeks before, UM,
Speaker 1: and it was going very quickly. And and I think, well,
Speaker 1: I don't go back. I don't you know. I usually
Speaker 1: start my morning by reading what I wrote the day
Speaker 1: before and editing it, so I kind of have a
Speaker 1: build in edit, but I don't have the big picture.
Speaker 1: Um I won't. I won't see that till I finished
Speaker 1: this book and start over at the page one. So
Speaker 1: why do a series on Bosch and then why jump
Speaker 1: from Bosch to start a couple of news series? UM,
Speaker 1: I don't know. Just to stay fresh, to stay stay involved.
Speaker 1: I do think Bosch is, you know, what I'm about
Speaker 1: as a writer, but I think it's good to take
Speaker 1: breaks from him kind of let kind of my mind
Speaker 1: wonder what's he doing that kind of thing, or I
Speaker 1: can't or to build up this idea of I can't
Speaker 1: wait to write about him again. And you know there's
Speaker 1: other every everything I guess is you know that rights
Speaker 1: around the um, crime and justice and all that, but
Speaker 1: there's different angles on it. So I like this thing
Speaker 1: like having a defense lawyer's angle, having a journalists angle
Speaker 1: on it, and uh, I think it keeps it interesting
Speaker 1: to me in terms of being the writer. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think there's a bigger fan base for Harry Bosh,
Speaker 1: but I just don't feel I can write about him
Speaker 1: every time. Okay, so you're talking about writing screenplays. That's
Speaker 1: a different art, and it's generally speaking difficult to write dialogue.
Speaker 1: You know. You say there was essentially no learning curve
Speaker 1: for you. Yeah, the the learning curve for me was
Speaker 1: not dialogue. It was when I write a book. When
Speaker 1: I write a Harry Bosh book, for example, you're in
Speaker 1: his head. You know what he's thinking, you know what
Speaker 1: he's feeling, you know what hurts him, you know what
Speaker 1: aggravates him. All that is inside his head, and you
Speaker 1: and you you you, that's a third of it, you
Speaker 1: know third. One third is interior, one third is um
Speaker 1: action what he does, and one third is dialogue. And
Speaker 1: so when you go to script, you lose a huge component.
Speaker 1: You lose a third of what what you have when
Speaker 1: you're writing a book. And you know, there's people who
Speaker 1: come out of school and just write scripts and that's
Speaker 1: their lives, so they don't even know what they're missing.
Speaker 1: But I, you know, I came to the show after
Speaker 1: almost twenty years twenty five years almost of writing novels,
Speaker 1: and so to me, it was a huge change to
Speaker 1: have to write a story without saying what someone is thinking.
Speaker 1: And that's where I um, it's you know, I think
Speaker 1: the scripts I wrote in the first couple of seasons
Speaker 1: needed needed, uh to be rewritten, and they were UM.
Speaker 1: And I think I've kind of overcome that um impediment
Speaker 1: uh that I felt in scriptwriting in the more recent years.
Speaker 1: But that was the tough part, not the dialogue, because
Speaker 1: dialogue has been important to me ever since I was
Speaker 1: a reporter, you know, and you had to um, you
Speaker 1: had little space to write. You know. Crime fiction was
Speaker 1: the whinted stepchild in newspapers, not crime fiction, crime reporting,
Speaker 1: and and so you were never given enough space to
Speaker 1: tell what you thought was a great story or an
Speaker 1: interesting story. So you learn to use dialogue to advance
Speaker 1: the information delivery. Um, you had get an ear for dialogue.
Speaker 1: Dialogue that advances the story. It doesn't just uh say
Speaker 1: what was already said. And so dialogue, you know. So
Speaker 1: I carried that into my books, and I carry that
Speaker 1: into my scripts. I just don't feel like dialogue is
Speaker 1: being a barrier to me. It's more like losing that
Speaker 1: interior thought that that's been tough to deal with. So
Speaker 1: tell us about the development of of Bosh the TV show. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well Blash had been down the tortuous road in Hollywood. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, initially what looked like great success. Um. By
Speaker 1: the time the second book was published, Hollywood came calling
Speaker 1: and they made a big deal to buy the first
Speaker 1: three books. UM. I got involved. They said you could
Speaker 1: write one of the screenplays, and so everything looked like
Speaker 1: it was going somewhere. Um. It was bought by Paramount,
Speaker 1: assigned to the producers who made the Tom Clancy movies
Speaker 1: with Harrison Ford, and we were tailoring scripts to Harrison Ford. UM,
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, they'll all look good, and then
Speaker 1: it didn't look good. He passed on them, and the
Speaker 1: stuff got on the shelf the way Holly Hollywood. Um
Speaker 1: deals are. Um, things stay on shelves for a long time.
Speaker 1: You need a lot of money to to leverage them out.
Speaker 1: And so the books kind of were basically gathering dust
Speaker 1: for almost two decades, and then I finally got the
Speaker 1: rights to them back. And it was really at a
Speaker 1: time when TV was really fantastic. There was a lot
Speaker 1: of serialized television going on, UM, a lot of good
Speaker 1: character studies. And so I just told my reps, my
Speaker 1: agent and so forth that I'm not interested in. And
Speaker 1: and also at this point I had several Harry Bosh
Speaker 1: books written. I said, you can't cover this guy in
Speaker 1: a two hour movie. Let's try to get a TV
Speaker 1: deal somewhere. And so that was the initial um start
Speaker 1: of it. And then also at the same time, Amazon
Speaker 1: was deciding to get into UM streaming television and so forth,
Speaker 1: and um, you know, we kind of went from there,
Speaker 1: and uh, it was weird. This goes back to the Yankees.
Speaker 1: I I had a friend I lived part of the
Speaker 1: year in Tampa, Florida, where now the Yankees do spring ball.
Speaker 1: So I had a friend who was a former publisher
Speaker 1: come down from New York to go to a spring
Speaker 1: training game with me. And he had left publishing to
Speaker 1: go to work at Amazon because they were also trying
Speaker 1: to get into publishing. So anyway, I was driving him
Speaker 1: to the airport and he said to me, you know,
Speaker 1: they're gonna start making TV shows UM to stream on Amazon.
Speaker 1: Would that be something you'd be interested in. I said, yeah, sure,
Speaker 1: because I've thought of the nexus of book sales and
Speaker 1: TV and so forth. And so that was my entree
Speaker 1: into Amazon. So it was very much unlike a normal
Speaker 1: process in Hollywood where you pitch your show and they
Speaker 1: develop and all that stuff. Amazon just basically I probably
Speaker 1: punched up a couple of numbers to see how what
Speaker 1: my book sales were and said let's do it. So
Speaker 1: that's where it came from. How long after that conversation,
Speaker 1: it's bring training until they say yes, no. I mean
Speaker 1: what happened was what what this was all new to
Speaker 1: Amazon as it was to me, and uh so they
Speaker 1: were very accommodating. And they also this is like when
Speaker 1: I go in to have a meeting, there'll be two
Speaker 1: people there. Now when I go into a meeting, they
Speaker 1: have a long board room, uh you know, and there's
Speaker 1: like fifteen or sixteen people. So Amazon was learning as
Speaker 1: they were going and that gave us great freedom. And
Speaker 1: as far as you know, I'm not really involved in
Speaker 1: the money, but as far as I know, we told
Speaker 1: them what we would need to make the show the
Speaker 1: way the way I wanted to make it, the way
Speaker 1: my partners wanted to make it, and they gave us
Speaker 1: that money. Um, one of the key things to me,
Speaker 1: and I actually got this in a contract with my partner.
Speaker 1: So before I went to Amazon, I should say when
Speaker 1: I told my agent, let's look at TV. He hooked
Speaker 1: me up with a production company. Amazon is not the
Speaker 1: production company, Amazon is the delivery system. So I made
Speaker 1: a deal with a producer of television and I got
Speaker 1: him to sign an agreement and put it in a contract,
Speaker 1: which is almost unheard of in Hollywood, that every scene
Speaker 1: of Vosh would be filmed in Los Angeles, even interiors,
Speaker 1: because I felt we had to have to act really
Speaker 1: reflect with in the books where and where in the
Speaker 1: books Los Angeles as a character. We had to do
Speaker 1: that on the TV show. So so my partner, my
Speaker 1: producing partner, readily agreed. He was very familiar with the books.
Speaker 1: He came He actually sought me out. I didn't seek
Speaker 1: him out. He readily agreed, and then he had to
Speaker 1: live with that, and he had to sell that to
Speaker 1: Amazon because that did add a big expense to it.
Speaker 1: But Amazon um agreed to it and also saw the
Speaker 1: light that that if you're going to try to adapt
Speaker 1: these books, then adapt the books. Don't go to Canada
Speaker 1: to do that. And so it worked out well. And
Speaker 1: I think that in the show, the the city is
Speaker 1: a character that there's a tone to the visuals of
Speaker 1: the show, uh that I love and that I think
Speaker 1: are accurate to the books. And so it's been a
Speaker 1: very happy, um, you know agreement. Tell us about the casting,
Speaker 1: the I mean, everything comes down to who's Harry Bosh?
Speaker 1: And you know the I remember, so we have a showrunner.
Speaker 1: The head creative person on the show is called the showrunner,
Speaker 1: and his name is Eric Overmeyer. And I happen to
Speaker 1: have previously known him, not that well, but I had
Speaker 1: dinner with him a couple of times because of some
Speaker 1: mutual friends in New York City. And um, he said,
Speaker 1: our biggest Um, there's two things that are our biggest challenges.
Speaker 1: One finding the right Harry Bosh and two your books
Speaker 1: are very interior. You're you're writing inside Harry Bosch's head,
Speaker 1: and we can't do that in the script. And so
Speaker 1: not only do we have to find a way of
Speaker 1: of of showing his feelings of how what he says,
Speaker 1: what he does, and so forth, but we also have
Speaker 1: to break the storytelling out to other characters. Um. In
Speaker 1: the Bosh books, you're usually only with Bosh in every scene,
Speaker 1: and you can't do that in a TV show. But anyway,
Speaker 1: going back to the casting, that was that was obviously
Speaker 1: a key thing, and Amazon had a schedule for when
Speaker 1: we would shoot the pilot, and we basically had about
Speaker 1: seven weeks to find our Harry Bosh and I went
Speaker 1: into the first meeting, and we had really good casting agents.
Speaker 1: They were at that time casting Madman UM. They were,
Speaker 1: you know, they had cast that show and we're continuing
Speaker 1: to cast it UM year after years. So they were
Speaker 1: very good UM casting people. And they had a list
Speaker 1: of like four pages of names of different actors and
Speaker 1: so forth in UM. You know, I'm Mr. Bookwriter. I
Speaker 1: don't really know a lot about Hollywood, but I had
Speaker 1: seen Titus Welver playing as a guest star on a
Speaker 1: TV show just recently, just recent to this meeting, where
Speaker 1: he played a ex soldier with PTSD, and he was
Speaker 1: clearly able to convey that this guy had inner demons.
Speaker 1: And that's what I wanted, um in Bosh, That's what
Speaker 1: Eric Overmeyer wanted, That's what Henrik Baston, our producing partner wanted,
Speaker 1: and so I. But his name wasn't on these four pages,
Speaker 1: and so I was very kind of intimidated to even
Speaker 1: bring him up because I'm the I'm the guy in
Speaker 1: the room hasn't had no experience really with TA Television
Speaker 1: that much. So anyway, I brought him up and they
Speaker 1: said we'd love him and he'd be great for the part,
Speaker 1: except he's making a movie in Hong Kong and during
Speaker 1: our six seven weeks where we can casts, he's not
Speaker 1: going to be in l A. So that kind of
Speaker 1: went out the window. And then we proceeded down over
Speaker 1: the next days and weeks UH with the list that
Speaker 1: they had, and we kept talking to different people and
Speaker 1: we would um people would come in and try out
Speaker 1: and so forth, and nobody really connected with the group
Speaker 1: as being Harry Bosh. And then we were actually at
Speaker 1: the point where we were gonna have to call Amazon
Speaker 1: on him. It was like Thursday or Friday, and we
Speaker 1: had the we're gonna call Amazon on Monday and say
Speaker 1: we have to push um shooting the pilot because we
Speaker 1: don't want to do it with someone we're not convinced
Speaker 1: as Harry Bosh. And then that same day we got
Speaker 1: word that Titus was flying home for the weekend to
Speaker 1: see his kids, and so we kind of cajoled this
Speaker 1: idea that he would come and see see us for
Speaker 1: like an hour just so we could talk to him,
Speaker 1: and and instead he worked up this the audition scene
Speaker 1: for Bosch on the plane ride back and came in
Speaker 1: all jet lagged and auditioned and even in his jet
Speaker 1: lagged capacity, we all knew this. We just had this instinct,
Speaker 1: the instinctual thing that this is the guy, this is
Speaker 1: this is Harry Bosh. So he basically got the job
Speaker 1: right there. Now, you say the Bosch on TV is
Speaker 1: different from the Bosch in the book. So are you
Speaker 1: writing for the character Titus has established? How do you
Speaker 1: do that? Yeah, you definitely feed off of what you've
Speaker 1: got so far on the TV show, And um, we
Speaker 1: are you know, all the writers know Titus very well.
Speaker 1: Titus is a contributor, collaborator, comes to the writing room,
Speaker 1: talks about things that he'd like to see Bosch do
Speaker 1: and things like that, and so it's it's all under
Speaker 1: the umbrella of the book for sure. Um, and you know,
Speaker 1: there's other aspects of adapting it. Many of the books
Speaker 1: we've adapted are from the nineties and we're you know,
Speaker 1: twenty l a. It's it's a different city twenty years later,
Speaker 1: twenty five years later, So we have to make changes anyway.
Speaker 1: And so you know, Bosch Bosch has become tight as
Speaker 1: tightest has become Bosh. I mean, I think he has
Speaker 1: a sense of that character as as strong as mine.
Speaker 1: UM and I think, uh and I trust him with
Speaker 1: that character. So when he says I want to do
Speaker 1: this or I want to say that, um, I I
Speaker 1: really listened to him because I think he comes from
Speaker 1: a place of of character knowledge that UM I have
Speaker 1: to certainly respect. So you're on amas on and when
Speaker 1: you launch five years ago, uh, amazons that people think
Speaker 1: of streaming is still relatively new when it's on Netflix.
Speaker 1: What is the reception? What is the experience after the
Speaker 1: series is up on your end? Oh? Yeah, yeah, So
Speaker 1: we know we have a good show. Um, I'm very
Speaker 1: proud of it. It's very reflective of the books, and
Speaker 1: it's very reflective of the accuracy, um of of that job.
Speaker 1: I mean, we have to um. Actually in the first
Speaker 1: season we had three active LAPD homicide detectives being our consultants.
Speaker 1: So so we're very confident in the show. And Amazon
Speaker 1: is kind of like in its nascent stages of coming
Speaker 1: out with UM with streaming product. I think they had
Speaker 1: one two other shows that were comedies to come out
Speaker 1: before UM Bosh. So we have the show that we
Speaker 1: think is good, and it becomes a matter of how
Speaker 1: do we get how do we draw people to it?
Speaker 1: And so you know, Amazon did a lot, you know,
Speaker 1: billboard all over to place all kinds of social media
Speaker 1: times Square. Um, it seemed like it was everywhere, and
Speaker 1: I think that got us off to a good start. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, I have obviously have my social media, and
Speaker 1: I think the core audience was was the the readers
Speaker 1: of the books, but television demands a much bigger audience
Speaker 1: than that, so we had to expand it well beyond
Speaker 1: the book readers who who loved the series. Well from
Speaker 1: my viewpoint, just as ah and I was not a
Speaker 1: Bosh reader at the time. Um, I didn't get into
Speaker 1: it until season three. At what point did you feel
Speaker 1: the show was really picking up with the public. I
Speaker 1: think around then. I mean I think definitely the first season. Um,
Speaker 1: we were getting to know everybody on the show. I
Speaker 1: mean we basically have um, you know, the cast is
Speaker 1: the cast, but our crew we've probably because we suit
Speaker 1: in l A and everyone wants to work on l
Speaker 1: A show, so they want to travel. We've had probably
Speaker 1: like nine return rate of our crew and so all
Speaker 1: that kind of comes together in making a show. It's
Speaker 1: all very important, and um, you know, it's a learning experience.
Speaker 1: You get better the more you do something. And I
Speaker 1: think we refine. We made some changes in the writing room,
Speaker 1: We made some changes in um, the look of the
Speaker 1: show and so forth, the cameras and so forth. And
Speaker 1: I think, um, we really came into our own, um
Speaker 1: late in the second season into three. And uh, you know,
Speaker 1: it's not that we made any bad seasons or anything,
Speaker 1: but I just think we got better. I think it's
Speaker 1: a rare show that season. The season it gets better.
Speaker 1: I completely agree, and I certainly tell people that. Speaking
Speaker 1: of which, uh, supposedly next year's your last season? What's
Speaker 1: up with that? Um? Exosedly? Yeah, I think everything it changes,
Speaker 1: you know, because of the virus. I think, um, the
Speaker 1: every every, every provider of content, cable network, streaming is
Speaker 1: gonna face content issues because of the shutdown, um of
Speaker 1: everything in life and but but in in in the
Speaker 1: entertainment industry as well. So I'll never say never. Maybe
Speaker 1: it will be our last, maybe not, but as of now,
Speaker 1: it's scheduled to be our last, And um, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm not on the level of making those decisions. Or
Speaker 1: why they make those decisions. I mean, I think Bosch
Speaker 1: is going to live on their platform for for many
Speaker 1: years to come, maybe decades to come, and I think
Speaker 1: at some point they they make decisions based on you know,
Speaker 1: this show costs this x amount of money a year
Speaker 1: to make, and we already have that audience in our
Speaker 1: back pocket, so why don't we try to connect them
Speaker 1: to something new and different? You know, I think those
Speaker 1: are kind of the creative situations that go into it.
Speaker 1: I do know that we that these discussions were happening
Speaker 1: all the time that we were making the sixth season,
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, to Amazon's credit, the creative people
Speaker 1: at the top of that, you know, we sat down
Speaker 1: with them and they said, you know, we want to
Speaker 1: we want you to write to an ending next year
Speaker 1: so that we have a show that has that is complete,
Speaker 1: you know that it starts from the beginning and has
Speaker 1: an ending, and that we want you to know the
Speaker 1: whole season you'll be writing towards an ending. And that
Speaker 1: was from a creative standpoint, that was really good to have.
Speaker 1: And we're doing that now. You know, the sixth season
Speaker 1: just came out, but we're well into writing the seventh season.
Speaker 1: And writing two towards an ending. The one thing that's
Speaker 1: kind of odd is that the books are not ending.
Speaker 1: I'm still writing about Harry Bosh. I'm writing a book
Speaker 1: right now that he's in and so forth. So whereas
Speaker 1: I have not written a book on on the book track,
Speaker 1: I have not written to an ending. We're gonna be
Speaker 1: doing that with the TV show. And to what degree
Speaker 1: has the TV show impacted the sales of your books? Um,
Speaker 1: it's it's anecdotal. I know it's impacted it. Um you know,
Speaker 1: I know, you know, Amazon is the biggest seller of
Speaker 1: books in the world, so or you know, one screen
Speaker 1: away you can go from uh watching the bos show
Speaker 1: to reading the Bosh books, and so I know it's
Speaker 1: had an impact, but it's not something I can measure.
Speaker 1: I know, you know, I sold more books than but
Speaker 1: my profile has always been growing since each book has
Speaker 1: sold more than the one before, And that's what's going
Speaker 1: on now. And I have to attribute a big chunk
Speaker 1: of that to the show, But you know I can't.
Speaker 1: There's no science about it that says exactly what the
Speaker 1: impact has been. Let's just say hypothetically, you know, shooting
Speaker 1: begins soon. You're right, to an ending, there's no obvious renewal. Uh.
Speaker 1: To what degree are you going to be depressed? I
Speaker 1: don't think I'll be depressed at all, because, um, I've
Speaker 1: always been a bookwriter first, UM, and and being in
Speaker 1: that room by myself and writing and pleasing myself for
Speaker 1: feeling satisfaction of something I've done has never been something
Speaker 1: that's gone away. This the TV show has been great.
Speaker 1: I've I've kind of gone from being the introvert of
Speaker 1: being in the uh, part of a crew of like
Speaker 1: two people. Um, and that's been a really fun part
Speaker 1: of my life for the last seven years. And so
Speaker 1: I'll definitely miss that. I don't know if I'll go
Speaker 1: into depression. Um. And then you know, you know, you
Speaker 1: can always live for the day that Amazon says, well,
Speaker 1: let's do a movie, let's chick in on Harry Bosh.
Speaker 1: So I don't I don't really think it will be
Speaker 1: the end of Harry Bosh in terms of video. Since
Speaker 1: you have other characters, written books about other people, are
Speaker 1: you developing now that you know theoretically there's an end
Speaker 1: to Bosh? Are you developing shows based on these other characters?
Speaker 1: And well, yeah, I have a whole slew of characters
Speaker 1: out there, and I hope to UM, you know, take
Speaker 1: another shot at UM Hollywood in that way. So yeah,
Speaker 1: they're in different various stages of development. I almost had
Speaker 1: a Lincoln Lawyer show on CBS, but the virus kind
Speaker 1: of killed that, UM and so we'll start over on
Speaker 1: that and see what happens. Okay, So what do you
Speaker 1: do with your money? What I do with my money? UM,
Speaker 1: I give a lot of it away. My wife and
Speaker 1: I have a foundation that we UM support a lot
Speaker 1: of causes. I'm really UM. One of my main focuses
Speaker 1: is journalism and UM supporting journalism schools, supporting investigative news
Speaker 1: sites on the Internet. I think because of the downsizing
Speaker 1: of the newspaper business, a lot of good stuff is
Speaker 1: going out into the Internet and it's hard to be
Speaker 1: profitable or or to even pay the bills, and so
Speaker 1: there's a lot of nonprofit UM news sites with with
Speaker 1: particular focuses. My next book is actually called fair Warning,
Speaker 1: and it's and it has Jack McAvoy, the reporter from
Speaker 1: The Poet, working for a new site called fair Warning,
Speaker 1: which is consumer oriented investigative reporting. UM. And I mean
Speaker 1: I've been involved in supporting that I'm on the board
Speaker 1: and so forth, and so that it filtered into my
Speaker 1: creative process, where you know, I've written about this reporter
Speaker 1: on and off for I don't know, twenty five years,
Speaker 1: and so it was kind of obvious to me that
Speaker 1: while I check in on Jack McAvoy now and have
Speaker 1: them working at one of these news sites, and so
Speaker 1: it's a kind of a blending of of of reality,
Speaker 1: um with fiction. And what about your personal viewpoint on
Speaker 1: the future of journalism, Well, I'm concerned about it, and
Speaker 1: I've voiced that concern I think through Jack, especially in
Speaker 1: this book. But but you know, the last book I
Speaker 1: wrote about him, The Scarecrow, was right in the middle
Speaker 1: the newspaper crunch, and um, I reflected on that. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, in my day, and I'm not one of
Speaker 1: these guys that goes it was always better when nic
Speaker 1: really you know, the old days, in my days, But
Speaker 1: I am from a time in journalism where the newspaper
Speaker 1: was a tent pole in a community for discussions about everything, culture, politics, crime, everything,
Speaker 1: and and that central point of debate and discussion is
Speaker 1: pretty much gone in almost every city except for a few.
Speaker 1: And and that to me, you know, so I think
Speaker 1: that society's loss and like I said, alive it has
Speaker 1: filtered out onto the Internet. But it's almost like, go
Speaker 1: see your question of how do you find how do
Speaker 1: people find Bosh in his early years? It's hard to
Speaker 1: find this stuff, the incredible stuff, the stuff that is
Speaker 1: not um politically biased and so forth, out on the Internet.
Speaker 1: And that's where we are right now, having that issue
Speaker 1: of of trust and media that I think is um,
Speaker 1: you know, a very uh telling issue. Okay, let's just
Speaker 1: say hypothetically, I can snap my fingers. You own the
Speaker 1: l A Times. What would you do differently? Oh man,
Speaker 1: I think I Well, I mean they still I'll probably
Speaker 1: get help for this because they've they've out of pride
Speaker 1: and so forth. They've maintained many of their postings around
Speaker 1: the world and they've cut them back immensely, but they
Speaker 1: still maintain them. And I just think the way to
Speaker 1: survive now as a newspaper, unless you're The New York
Speaker 1: Times in Washington Post, is to really double down on
Speaker 1: local reporting and local investigative reporting, and you know, maybe
Speaker 1: not worried so much about having an office in Beijing,
Speaker 1: but instead have um a reporter who just watches the
Speaker 1: money in the county budget, you know, things like that,
Speaker 1: and I think that would would connect the paper to
Speaker 1: it's populous better. And it can also, um you know,
Speaker 1: serve that function that is I think is being lost
Speaker 1: in terms of being, um a watchdog. And to be
Speaker 1: a watchdog, you gotta start with your own community before
Speaker 1: you start worrying about the world. And I think that's
Speaker 1: where I think the future of newspapers surviving for the
Speaker 1: most part is in that local attention to the local scene.
Speaker 1: And you know what what you said, You write so
Speaker 1: much about l A and you live about live in
Speaker 1: l A. What's your viewpoint on Los Angeles. I'm still
Speaker 1: very enthusiastic about l A, and I think by Harry
Speaker 1: Bosh would be too. To me. It goes back to
Speaker 1: back when I told you about when I was a
Speaker 1: young reporter and I felt like I was a prince
Speaker 1: of the city because I knew things that were going
Speaker 1: on that people didn't know. Yet I feel that way
Speaker 1: about l A. I still feel like it's on the
Speaker 1: front line of change and and trends and culture and
Speaker 1: and there's there's a pride in that that I take
Speaker 1: in as as a writer of this place, as a
Speaker 1: resident of this place, as just someone who loves this place.
Speaker 1: And so I still so I think l A is
Speaker 1: going to be okay no matter, no matter what happens,
Speaker 1: you know, post post Corona. Well, I guess, thinking back,
Speaker 1: the reason I got into Bosh is I knew someone
Speaker 1: who worked at Amazon and they said to watch Goliath.
Speaker 1: And I wrote about Goliah saying how had the l
Speaker 1: A look? And someone wrote to me said, well, if
Speaker 1: you're into the l A look, you gotta watch Bosh.
Speaker 1: Now you really get the richness and the color, the visibility.
Speaker 1: You know, you do this better than any series. To
Speaker 1: what degree is that conscious? And to what degree did
Speaker 1: you try to nail it and get a specific just
Speaker 1: you know, with the DP, etcetera. Well, it started with
Speaker 1: the books, and then it was really surrounding the books
Speaker 1: with people in this industry, the television industry, who wanted
Speaker 1: to get it right, you know. So you know, I
Speaker 1: pretty much consciously when I had choices of going to
Speaker 1: people and eventually it becomes so big that I have
Speaker 1: no no saying a lot of different things, but I
Speaker 1: went to people that knew the books and loved the books.
Speaker 1: So our line producer, which is a usually important nuts
Speaker 1: and bolts producer. Um was a guy who read the
Speaker 1: books and the guy who produced the movie Heat back
Speaker 1: in the nineties, which influenced me as a writer. So,
Speaker 1: you know, you start start with this, you start with
Speaker 1: people who love l A and they want to make
Speaker 1: something that is realistic, but at the same time it's
Speaker 1: also kind of a love letter to l A. And
Speaker 1: then you keep adding to that circle of people of
Speaker 1: the same kind of sentiment and a view of this place. Um.
Speaker 1: And you know, it's a rare thing, I think. Um,
Speaker 1: I don't know if it works every time on every shows.
Speaker 1: I don't I don't have those experiences to to know.
Speaker 1: But but we just have a bunch of people who
Speaker 1: wanted who went to to l A to be a
Speaker 1: character in this show. You know, you mentioned about the
Speaker 1: look of the show. You know, our director of photography,
Speaker 1: Patrick Katie, he works on that so much. You know,
Speaker 1: he's always out there shooting, trying to get the tone right,
Speaker 1: trying to get the tone that we're looking for, that
Speaker 1: he's looking for. And we just have a lot of
Speaker 1: individuals that give their all to the show and it's
Speaker 1: it's amazing to be a part of that. What about
Speaker 1: the house facing l A as opposed to the valley.
Speaker 1: It's funny I mentioned the guy who was the line
Speaker 1: producer of Heat. That house was in Heat and um
Speaker 1: and he you know, I don't know if anyone has
Speaker 1: Roll Indexes anymore, but he's kept every contact he's ever
Speaker 1: made in Hollywood. And so we end up running that
Speaker 1: house because we had a connection to that house through
Speaker 1: this uh producer we have. Um. I think that to
Speaker 1: get back to your question though, I think that's a
Speaker 1: good way of looking at the difference between writing a
Speaker 1: book and making a television show. The visual needs of
Speaker 1: the television show. Harry Bosh and the books has a
Speaker 1: pretty decent view of part of the city and the
Speaker 1: freeway and things that are you know, part parcel of
Speaker 1: the city. But when it came to the TV show,
Speaker 1: we wanted the bright lights and and you know, then
Speaker 1: that sets up a whole question of whether he could
Speaker 1: even afford a place like that, and you know, which
Speaker 1: we I think have taken care of a few times
Speaker 1: in the storytelling. But um, yeah, I think in the
Speaker 1: TV show we have more of guardian of the city
Speaker 1: feel to Bosh, and we wanted a place where he
Speaker 1: would look out on the city that he protects and serves.
Speaker 1: He's a big jazz fan and he plays Vinyl in
Speaker 1: the book. He's playing CDs, So hey, are you a
Speaker 1: big jazz fan? And b was her conscious choice to
Speaker 1: have him play vine, Yeah, that was part of the
Speaker 1: playing in the Vinyl was, you know, part of the
Speaker 1: visual setup. Um, I personally have gone to Vinyl myself.
Speaker 1: I but I'm I'm a newspaper reporter. So I decided
Speaker 1: way back when I was first writing Bosch, I wanted
Speaker 1: him to listen to jazz. It was not because of
Speaker 1: my knowledge or or love of jazz. It was more
Speaker 1: like a creative decision, a character decision. Jazz fit this
Speaker 1: guy who was a loner detective. So being a reporter though,
Speaker 1: I know how to ask questions and I know how
Speaker 1: to find good stuff, and so the jazza Harry listens
Speaker 1: to comes out of my reporting a little bit. It
Speaker 1: comes out of my father's is my father's music. But um,
Speaker 1: it was mostly me finding people that would support the
Speaker 1: character of Harry Bosh as a loner out there in
Speaker 1: the world who has to fight to make his way,
Speaker 1: just as the musicians that he listens to had to
Speaker 1: do Um, So there's a correlation there. Some people who
Speaker 1: read the books get it, some who some don't, but
Speaker 1: but they get the aspect of what the music means
Speaker 1: to him. Well, you know, as I say, the show
Speaker 1: and carry himself certainly in body l A. Especially in
Speaker 1: an era where everyone's attacking California. It certainly makes Los
Speaker 1: Angeles look like a unique police and good In any event, Michael,
Speaker 1: thanks so much for doing this. Hey, thank you for
Speaker 1: having me. I'm sorry for the technical interruptions, but if
Speaker 1: we ever do it again, I'll get it right. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's part of the coronavirus era. Until next time, it's
Speaker 1: Bob left Sex eight