Can Any Writer Describe L.A. like Michael Connelly?
I’ve often thought a great coffee table book would be a volume of Michael Connelly’s finest descriptions of Los Angeles, accompanied by photos of what’s being described.
No, I’m not thinking of anything gory – no Angels Flight train with two dead bodies in it. What I’m thinking about are the beautiful vignettes in virtually every Connelly novel that shine a spotlight on some aspect of the City of Angels. He’s now written forty novels, and all but a handful (Void Moon, The Poet) are set in L.A. And when this transplanted Angeleno describes his adopted city, he does so with affection, vibrancy and a Dickensian eye for detail.
Growing up in Pennsylvania and Florida, Connelly moved to Los Angeles at 29. Starting with his first novel The Black Echo in 1992, he and his main character Harry Bosch manifested a profound love of the city.
“He loved the city most at night,” Connelly wrote in The Black Echo as Bosch surveyed the city from his cantilever home. “The night hid many of the sorrows. It silenced the city yet brought deep undercurrents to the surface.”
This passage is an example of Connelly displaying his feel for the city’s atmosphere, its glitz shrouded in smog, its touristy appeal that can barely hide its seedy noir. But every novelist writing about L.A. captures this atmosphere. What sets Connelly apart is his portrayal of the city itself – its landmarks, neighborhoods, and quirks.
Not all L.A. writers have. Raymond Chandler, for example, rarely described the city with which he’s so closely identified. He wrote frequently about Santa Monica but never mentioned it by name, referring to it as Bay City. By contrast, Connelly had Bosch follow killer Jason Jessup to the famous pier in The Reversal, detailing its rides and street culture. When Jessup prepared a lair for his victims in an old storage unit, the reader knows the layout as well as the history and character of the location.
My favorite of these passages is his depiction of The Bradbury in Angels Flight, possibly because it’s my favorite building in L.A. (It has been since I saw Blade Runner in the 1980s.) Connelly places the law offices of murdered civil rights attorney Howard Elias in The Bradbury, and tells us the architectural history of the building as well as describing it.
“The Bradbury was the dusty jewel of downtown,” writes Connelly. “Built more than a century before, its beauty was old but still brighter and more enduring than any of the glass and marble towers that now dwarfed it like a phalanx of brutish guards surrounding a beautiful child. Its ornate lines and glazed tile surfaces had withstood the betrayal of both man and nature.”
There’s the description of the magnificent Los Angeles Library in Lost Light:
“It was one of the oldest buildings in the whole city. . . . Inside it was a beauty, centered around a domed rotunda with 360-degree mosaics depicting the founding of the city by the padres. The place had been twice burned by arsonists and closed for years, then restored to its original beauty.”
Or Venice in City of Bones:
“Not all of the dreamers drawn to Los Angeles came to make movies. Venice was the century-old dream of a man named Abbot Kinney. Before Hollywood and the film industry barely had a pulse, Kinney came to the marshlands along the Pacific. He envisioned a place built on a network of canals with arched bridges and a town center of Italian architecture. It would be a place emphasizing cultural and artistic learning. And he would call it Venice of America.”
Connelly also excels at describing the city’s restaurants, from street food to haute cuisine. The L.A. Times has even run articles showcasing the restaurants where Harry Bosch eats. The only other L.A. wordsmith who’s familiarized me with the city’s eateries is Tom Waits (who’s had strange-looking patty melts at Norm’s and dangerous veal cutlets at The Copper Penny).
Connelly handles his gastronomic descriptions with a bit more panache, and I hope Du-Par’s stays open long enough that I can have some of their pancakes. I really love Connelly’s description in Trunk Music of Musso and Frank’s, which opened in 1924 on Hollywood Boulevard: “In its heyday it had been a popular destination for the Hollywood elite. Fitzgerald and Faulkner held forth. Fairbanks and Chaplin once raced each other down Hollywood Boulevard on horseback, the loser having to pick up the dinner tab. The restaurant now subsisted mostly on its past glory and faded charm. Its red leather padded booths filled every day for lunch and some of the waiters looked and moved as if they had been there long enough to have served Chaplin.”
My notes include Connelly capturing Laurel Canyon in The Concrete Blonde, Chateau Marmont (where John Belushi died) in The Drop and Dodger Stadium in several books including Echo Park, The Lincoln Lawyer and Trunk Music. His writing about the baseball park is especially poignant, and not just because baseball seems to be Connelly’s favorite sport. It’s also because Connelly notes the Latino families who were moved out of their neighborhoods to make way for the stadium and then were abandoned.
Though I’ve focused on Connelly’s prowess in writing about landmarks, he also captures the spirit and festivities of the city as well, delving into its many ethnic communities. A case in point: the “gunshot symphony” on New Year’s Eve in The Dark Hours: “For a solid five minutes, there was an unbroken onslaught as revelers of the new year fired their weapons into the sky following a Los Angeles tradition of decades. It didn’t matter that what goes up must come down.”
The problem with writing a blog like this is there are too many examples, and I can’t do any of the passages justice as I have to trim them. Suffice it to say that Michael Connelly is to Los Angeles what Ian Rankin is to Edinburgh and William Kent Krueger is to Minnesota: a crime-writer who beautifully maps out a place over the course of dozens of books.
I doubt he’s finished. He’ll return to Catalina Island in his next novel, Nightshade, due out next month. He’s never turned his attention to the Huntington Library, the Last Bookstore or the theme parks. Of course, we wouldn’t even need this column if someone would just get around to putting out that coffee table book.
* * *
Peter Moreira is the author of The Haight Mystery Series — retro mystery novels set in San Francisco in the late 1960s. Go to the home page of this website to sign up for a free prequel.
