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Bio
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Michael
Connelly decided to become a writer after discovering the books
of Raymond Chandler while attending the University of Florida. Once
he decided on this direction he chose a major in journalism and
a minor in creative writing—a curriculum in which one of his
teachers was novelist Harry Crews.
After
graduating in 1980, Connelly worked at newspapers in Daytona Beach
and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, primarily specializing in the crime
beat. In Fort Lauderdale he wrote about police and crime during
the height of the murder and violence wave that rolled over South
Florida during the so-called cocaine wars. In 1986 he and two other
reporters spent several months interviewing survivors of a major
airline crash. They wrote a magazine story on the crash and the
survivors that was later short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize for
feature writing. You can read this story at the Sun-Sentinel web
site. The magazine story also moved Connelly into the upper levels
of journalism, landing him a job as a crime reporter for the Los
Angeles Times, one of the largest papers in the country, and bringing
him to the city of which his literary hero, Chandler, had written.
After
three years on the crime beat, Connelly began writing his first
novel to feature LAPD Detective Hieronymus Bosch. The novel, "The
Black Echo", based in part on a true crime that had occurred
in Los Angeles, was published in 1992 and later won the Edgar Award
for best first novel by the Mystery Writers of America. Connelly
followed up with three more Bosch books, "The Black Ice"
, "The Concrete Blonde", and "The Last Coyote",
before publishing "The Poet", a thriller with a newspaper
reporter as a protagonist, in 1996. In 1997 he went back to Bosch
with "Trunk Music" and in 1998 another non-series thriller,
"Blood Work", was published. "Blood Work" was
inspired in part by a friend's receiving of a heart transplant and
the attendant "survivor's guilt" the friend experienced,
knowing that someone died in order that he have the chance to live.
Connelly has been interested and fascinated by those same feelings
as expressed by the survivors of the plane crash he wrote about
years before. "Angels Flight" was released in 1999 and
brought back the Harry Bosch series. "Void Moon", was
released in 2000, and introduced a new character, Cassie Black,
a high-stakes Las Vegas thief. His new book, "A Darkness More
Than Night," unites Harry Bosch with Terry McCaleb from "Blood
Work."
Michael
is also one of the creators, writers, and consulting producers of
"Level 9," a new TV show about a task force fighting cyber
crime. It airs on the UPN network Friday nights at 9:00pm (check
your local listings.)
Connelly's
books have won the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity, Nero, Maltese Falcon
(Japan), .38 Caliber (France) and Grand Prix (France) awards. He
lives in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter.
Visit
his website at http://www.michaelconnelly.com/
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