Is The Poet Connelly’s Masterpiece?

When Stephen King wrote a three-page introduction for The Poet, he said the novel was “the best work” Michael Connelly had produced at the time of its publication in 1996.

Connelly had published his first four Harry Bosch novels in four years before The Poet came out, and had really hit his stride with the previous two novels, The Concrete Blonde and The Last Coyote. But now he was ready for a departure. With his fifth novel, he not only set aside his hero Bosch for the first time, he also forsook the LAPD, and for the most part Los Angeles itself.

In fact, his new hero wasn’t a law enforcement officer at all, but a crime reporter for Denver’s Rocky Mountain News called Jack McEvoy. Serving as the novel’s narrator and protagonist, McEvoy sets the tone for the book with his first four words: “Death is my beat.”

Though McEvoy has made a career reporting on death and murder, he is shaken to the quick when his twin brother dies, apparently by suicide. Sean McEvoy was a homicide detective who had been depressed about an especially grisly case that he couldn’t solve, and his body is found in his car with a pistol shot to the head.

Jack McEvoy decides the best therapy for his grief would be to write a feature about police suicides, and his research reveals a shocking fact. Several American homicide detectives in recent years have shot themselves and left supposed suicide notes containing mysterious quotes from the late poet Edgar Allan Poe. McEvoy finds himself on the trail of a serial killer, and before long he’s pushed his way into a federal investigation that spans the country.

The story that unfolds is unique in the Connelly canon. First, it’s the longest of Connelly’s novels, listed on Amazon as 656 pages. Second, almost all Connelly novels are rooted firmly in one place, usually Los Angeles. This book is set in places, plural, and what it lacks in gorgeous descriptions of L.A. it gains in geographic breadth. McEvoy starts in Denver, then travels to Chicago, Washington, Baltimore, Quantico, and Phoenix before ending up in Los Angeles.

With its excerpts of Poe’s poetry, there’s more literary sensibility in this book than in any of Connelly’s other works. It stands out among his other works because he’s an author who likes to display his research and expertise in only one thing: the criminal justice system. The only other times he shows any interest in the arts at all is in describing the work of (the other) Hieronymus Bosch in A Darkness More than Night and any time he writes about Bosch’s love of jazz.

The Poet is the only Connelly book in which the lead law official is an FBI agent, the profiler Rachel Walling. In most Connelly books, the FBI’s role is usually to “bigfoot” Bosch (take his case from him) or investigate his alleged misdeeds (though he does grow close to agents Eleanor Wish and Roy Lindell). In this book, the g-men are good guys for the most part, and it’s easy to see that the book was heavily influenced by a movie that was all the rage at the time.

In 1991, the Jonathan Demme movie Silence of the Lambs, adapted from Thomas Harris’ 1988 novel of the same name, had been released to rave reviews and colossal box office success. At the Academy Awards a year later, Silence became only the third movie ever to claim all five top awards, including best picture.

The film was best known for the serial killer Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter, played with eerie brilliance by Anthony Hopkins, but he couldn’t outshine his co-star Jodie Foster, who played the FBI agent Clarice Starling. The story of a female FBI agent pursuing a serial killer (or two) across America was in people’s minds when Connelly was writing this novel in the mid-1990s. Even Connelly’s former paper, the Fort Lauderdale News and Sun Sentinel, noted the link when it said The Poet ranked with Silence of the Lambs on the “fright level”.

Speaking of newspapers, one of the striking features of The Poet is that it introduces us to Jack McEvoy, who is closer to being Connelly’s alter-ego than any of his other heroes because both are newspaper reporters. Connelly had placed reporters in his stories before this (even had one murder a few people), but McEvoy was the first in a lead role.

Like Bosch and Mickey Haller, McEvoy is dogged, competent, and a bit of a jerk at times.  He was nasty to his brother, just because Sean wouldn’t leak details of a heinous murder he was investigating. He fills the prime role of Sleuth-in-Chief, but he also serves as a messenger who transmits Connelly’s views on the culture and practice of journalism. Connelly touches on this in other books when he describes the Los Angeles Times police reporter Keisha Russell, but it really comes out when McEvoy is leading a novel.

Written just after he left the LA Times to pursue a career as a novelist, Connelly serves up his insights on the fourth estate in the days before the Internet changed the media. He describes TV reporters as “sourceless and senseless” and shows the good-days-bad-days interplay between McEvoy and his editor. In Washington, a former reporter named Michael Warren tells McEvoy his memories of being present when Ronald Reagan was shot and describes it as the highlight of his career.  They looked at each other and laughed.

“Only in a reporter’s world would it be a highlight,” says Connelly/McEvoy. “We both knew that probably the only thing better than witnessing a presidential assassination attempt as a reporter was witnessing a successful assassination.”

For its breadth, its depth and the complexity of its plot, The Poet ranks as one of Connelly’s greatest novels. I think the title of “Connelly’s Best Novel” would have to go to one of the Bosch novels, probably Trunk Music. But The Poet is certainly THE best outside of the Bosch and Haller series. The guy who summarized its excellence the best was probably Stephen King, who summed up his introduction by writing: “I do not use the word classic lightly, but I believe The Poet may prove to be one.”

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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.