Michael Connelly

Michael Connelly is doing what he has long wanted to do: writing crime novels. It was his aspiration as a college student, and, more than 40 books (not to mention movie and television adaptations) later, he has created some of the 21st century’s most iconic crime fighters, including Hieronymus (Harry) Bosch and the Lincoln Lawyer. It might never have happened without what Connelly calls a “genius idea” from his father.

Early days

Connelly was born in Philadelphia, the second of six children of Michael and Mary (McEvoy) Connelly. His father was a property developer, and the family moved to Florida when he was 12. His mother, who worked in the home caring for the family, was an avid reader of crime fiction. Connelly attended the University of Florida, initially intending to follow in his father’s footsteps, but he discovered the books of Raymond Chandler and was smitten with the idea of writing crime novels. That’s when a conversation with his dad changed his major and his life.

“When I told him I wanted to be a crime writer, he wanted me to get a journalism degree, said that would get me a press pass that would get me into police stations. It was his genius idea,” Connelly told Encyclopædia Britannica in April 2025. Connelly graduated with a major in journalism and a minor in creative writing and began covering crime for newspapers in Daytona Beach and Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Despite achieving appreciable success in journalism, including being nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing, Connelly had yet to achieve his goal of becoming a published novelist. Feeling he needed a change of scenery, he applied to newspapers in Chicago, Denver, and Los Angeles. In 1987 he was hired by the Los Angeles Times.

Los Angeles and the making of a novelist

The idea for what would become Connelly’s first published novel came from one of his first assignments for the Times: a 1987 Bank of America heist in which the robbers tunneled through a storm drain. This case served as the inspiration for The Black Echo (1992), in which a Los Angeles homicide detective by the name of Hieronymus (Harry) Bosch investigates a similar crime. The novel won critical praise and a Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award, but Connelly continued to work as a reporter and moonlight as a novelist until 1994.

“When I was a journalist, at the end of the day, driving home, I felt like I knew something no one else knew because the paper hadn’t landed on the doorstep yet. There was a very intoxicating feeling in that. But I had this ambition to write books. I wrote three and a half books while I was still a journalist,” he told Britannica. Even after quitting journalism to write fiction full-time, he wanted to retain what reporting had taught him about writing: “I wanted my books to tell the truth. Yeah, they’d be on the shelf as fiction, but I wanted them to be filled with the truth about government, bureaucracies, police. So I continued to be a journalist who folded it into fiction.”

Connelly’s first four books feature Bosch, who was inspired by a little-known Dutch painter with a largely unpronounceable name. Connelly had studied Hiëronymus Bosch’s works in a humanities class in college, and when he started to craft the character of his seemingly impenetrable detective, he thought about books he loved and why he loved them. “It all comes down to character, and it starts with a name,” he told Britannica. “In my first draft I was calling him Pierce because of a Raymond Chandler essay that said a detective has to pierce reality, but then something sparked the memory of my studies of Bosch. I thought it would be perfect because it was very dark and drew a meta connection between Los Angeles and [The] Garden of Earthly Delights, his most famous painting.”

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As prominent as the Bosch character is in Connelly’s work, so too is the city of Los Angeles, where most of his novels are set. That comes in part from his journalistic background, spending years covering crime and being “sent out to corners of the city that most people never get to see.…I was all over L.A., and I always had this appreciation for it.” But the city also embodies what the move to California meant for Connelly and his career:

I try to make Los Angeles a character as important as any of the human characters in my books. I had never set foot in Los Angeles until I was 30 years old. But I had felt for many years it was my destination.…The character of this place is that this is where people come to reinvent themselves. Because whatever they were doing, it wasn’t working out. That was true for me. I was working in Fort Lauderdale, trying to write novels, but it wasn’t right. So I thought maybe becoming a stranger in a strange land would spark what was missing. I came to L.A. to restart my hopes and ambitions, and it worked out.

Origin of other characters

Although Bosch is the defining character of Connelly’s work, the author has introduced a number of others, including Mickey Haller (the Lincoln Lawyer), who turns out to be Bosch’s half brother; reporter Jack McEvoy; and retired FBI agent Terry McCaleb. How Connelly chooses which character is central to which book is part alchemy.

“Stories bubble and surface when you spend time with them,” he said, noting that many of his ideas for The Lincoln Lawyer books come from a former college roommate who went on to become a lawyer. “I spend tons of time with him, and he tells me about his cases, and maybe 1 out of 15 strikes a chord.”

Sometimes ideas spark not just new book subjects but also characters. His May 2025 novel, Nightshade, came about when he learned that the Catalina Island sheriff’s department had only one detective. Connelly said he knew immediately that it would be a good story, so he created a new character, Stilwell, to carry the story forward. On other occasions he knows certain topics are right for certain characters. “I have this character named Jack McEvoy, and he’s the guy I go to when I want to explore technology.” In earlier iterations McEvoy has explored Internet culture and DNA. Connelly revisits McEvoy in an upcoming book that tackles the world of artificial intelligence, a subject with which Connelly is intimately involved. In 2023 he and a group of other prominent authors filed suit against OpenAI for copyright infringement, saying that the company uses novels to train ChatGPT.

Film and TV adaptations

While Connelly’s books have sold almost 90 million copies worldwide, his characters have become known to a different audience on-screen. Bosch is featured in two Amazon Studios series, Bosch (2014–21) and Bosch: Legacy (2022–25), with Titus Welliver playing the lead role. Matthew McConaughey starred as Mickey Haller in the 2011 movie The Lincoln Lawyer, which has been reimagined as a Netflix series beginning in 2022. Connelly’s 1998 novel, Blood Work, became a 2002 film starring Clint Eastwood. Connelly is also the creator and host of the Murder Book podcast, which explores old crimes.

The fires

In January 2025, as Connelly’s adopted hometown was ravaged by wildfires, he was at work on a new novel, which he had taking place in the second week of January. He always has the events in his books occur during the year he is writing them, and he had written about 100 pages when the fires broke out. He considered backing up the timeline of the book to avoid incorporating the fires, “but that would have felt cowardly, so instead I retooled it. It’s not focused on the fires, but a significant character loses a house, and that allows me to follow the repercussions.” The book, entitled The Proving Ground, is scheduled to be published in October 2025.

All told, more than 16,000 buildings were destroyed in the wildfires. One of them was Connelly’s home in Malibu.

The books of Michael Connelly

Connelly has written more than 40 books, including fiction and nonfiction.

• The Black Echo (1992)
• The Black Ice (1993)
• The Concrete Blonde (1994)
• The Last Coyote (1995)
• The Poet (1996)
• Trunk Music (1997)
• Blood Work (1998)
• Angels Flight (1999)
• Void Moon (2000)
• A Darkness More Than Night (2001)
• City of Bones (2002)
• Chasing the Dime (2002)
• Lost Light (2003)
• The Narrows (2004; sequel to The Poet)
• The Closers (2005)
• The Lincoln Lawyer (2005)
• Echo Park (2006)
• The Overlook (2007)
• The Brass Verdict (2008)
• The Scarecrow (2009)
• Nine Dragons (2009)
• The Reversal (2010)
• The Fifth Witness (2011)
• The Drop (2011)
• The Black Box (2012)
• The Gods of Guilt (2013)
• The Burning Room (2014)
• The Crossing (2015)
• The Wrong Side of Goodbye (2016)
• The Late Show (2017)
• Two Kinds of Truth (2017)
• Dark Sacred Night (2018)
• The Night Fire (2019)
• Fair Warning (2020)
• The Law of Innocence (2020)
• The Dark Hours (2021)
• Desert Star (2022)
• Resurrection Walk (2023)
• The Waiting (2024)
• Nightshade (May 20, 2025)
• The Proving Ground (October 21, 2025)

• Crime Beat (2006)