The Lineup: The World's Greatest Crime Writers Tell the Inside Story of Their Greatest Detectives

by Otto Penzler

  Most of the real detectives I knew were veterans of military service, about half of them Vietnam vets. A lot of them smoked, a symptom of the addictive personality I had come to believe was a necessary dimension of a good detective. I remember once sitting at a detective's desk while he smoked a cigarette, the No Smoking sign hanging on the wall right behind his head. Though I had never smoked myself, I made Pierce a smoker. Though I had escaped going to Vietnam, because the war ended as I turned eighteen, I made Pierce a Vietnam vet. I made him a tunnel rat who still dreamed of the tunnel and was always searching for that light at its end.

  The aspects of character continued to fall into place as I wrote the first draft of a novel that would feature Pierce investigating the murder of a man who had been a fellow tunnel rat and who might have been involved in the tunnel heist of a Los Angeles bank.

  The real tunnel heist I based the story on took place in 1987, the year I came to Los Angeles. The year is also notable because it was when the novel The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy was published. Although the book impressed me, I was more taken at the time with the author's history, which I'd read about in a profile in a local magazine. Ellroy's mother was murdered when he was a boy. He struggled to overcome that life-altering crime, and many other personal demons, enough to write The Black Dahlia and several other novels before it.

  I thought the psychology was intriguing. In my amateur analysis it looked to me that Ellroy was working out whatever damage had been visited upon him by his mother's murder by writing stories about detectives who avenge victims and solve murders--especially of women.

  I decided to apply the same psychology to Pierce. I gave him a history similar to Ellroy's. When Pierce is a boy, his mother is murdered. Since he doesn't know his father, the crime not only takes away his one loving parent, but also relegates the boy to the world of foster homes and state youth facilities. The boy survives his upbringing and becomes a man in Vietnam, where his job is to go into the tunnels to seek the enemy. From there he comes home to one more flawed institution: the police department. The soldier becomes a detective who repeatedly avenges his mother's death by solving murders--especially of women.

  It is the cornerstone of the character. The trauma of his youth becomes the driving force behind the detective. It is the aspect that will allow every case he takes on to become personal.

  I did not know Ellroy when I borrowed from his past for my fictional detective. Years later, though, when I prepared to write a novel in which my detective would investigate his mother's long-unsolved murder, I sent the author a letter. I explained my story idea to him. I knew that Ellroy had a plan to write a nonfiction account of his mother's unsolved murder. I asked if he thought my novel would be too much of an encroachment. His response came by way of a late-night phone call several weeks later. "Unfortunately, I don't have a franchise on murdered mothers," he said. "Good luck with your book."

  My plan for Pierce was simple. I wanted to acknowledge my mentors and use what they had taught me to mold something that was my own. Chandler, Macdonald, Wambaugh, also James Lee Burke, Lawrence Block, and Thomas Harris. I wanted to combine elements of the characters who were outsiders with the traits of those characters who were on the inside. Pierce would be an outsider with an insider's job. He'd face political and bureaucratic obstacles at every turn. He'd be good at his job but flawed in the way he carried it out. At times he'd be his own worst enemy. He'd feel as though he were always on a solitary mission--alone in the tunnel--even though he might have a partner and be part of an organization that was thousands strong. He'd be a seeker of true justice, not just closure on a case.

  Detective Pierce would be built to be as relentless as a bullet, a self-reliant loner who stood alone, who could not be gotten to. Nothing would come between him and his mission, and nothing short of death could stop him from getting the job done.

  My goal was to create a character whom readers would find impossible to love on all levels, who in fact was capable of doing things that the readers might find objectionable. But, at the end of the day, my guy would be the kind of detective whom readers would want on the case if it was ever them or a loved one lying on the stainless steel table in the morgue.

  I put none of this down on paper. I just carried it in the pockets of my imagination, and when I was ready I set to work on the story. From early on I titled it The Black Echo. Abstract and mysterious, the phrase also conjured up some of the fear I remembered from the fateful passage through the tunnel beneath Highland Avenue.

  I caught a lucky break while I was writing The Black Echo. I came across a book called The Tunnels of Cu Chi. Written by Tom Mangold and John Penycate, the book is a harrowing account of the real experiences of the tunnel rats of the Vietnam War. It was only after I read this book that Pierce's background as a tunnel rat and his recurring dreams fully took shape. That book stayed on my desk as I wrote The Black Echo. And, almost twenty years later, it is still within reach of where I write today. It is easily as scary and claustrophobia inducing as a Stephen King novel. But Cu Chi is true. It makes a ten-year-old's anxieties about crawling through a forty-foot drainage tunnel seem like, well, child's play.

  When I went to college at the University of Florida, my intention was to major in building-construction sciences. I wanted to be a builder, like my father. But I wasn't there long before I realized that I wanted to build stories instead of houses. While shifting to journalism and creative writing, I took a good number of art history and humanities classes as well. In one of those classes, the professor had the students examine the work of the fifteenth-century Flemish painter Hieronymus Bosch.

  Bosch's work was unfamiliar to me until I saw it in that class. Simply put, it is the stuff of nightmares, an exploration of the wages of sin and of a world gone wrong. The paintings, full of dark, hellish landscapes of torture and debauchery, are about chaos and its consequences. Fires burn out of control in a dark underworld. Birdlike monsters torture and maim the sinners of society. Horned owls sit and judge from the mouths of damp tunnels. Man is depicted again and again as embracing evil, as being the instigator of his own downfall.

  Bosch's masterpiece triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights, shows Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden in the first panel. In the second is the chaos that ensues from their choosing corporeal temptation over spiritual life. And in the third panel are the tortures of a wildly punishing hell.

  Anyone who has taken the time to study the Bosch paintings comes away with an indelible imprint of the work on his or her mind. The mark of a true artist, I believe, is to create something that lives on in another's imagination. Hieronymus Bosch certainly accomplished this. His work has lived in my imagination from the moment I saw it. After all, I could clearly see a kinship between some of Bosch's monsters and the behemoth of my own dream.

  It was while working on the second draft of The Black Echo that I was reminded of the painter I had studied in college fifteen years before. I can't remember today what prompted the connection. But some reference to the painter made me remember the class and the paintings. And I was struck by another revelation. After all, what was a murder scene but a world gone wrong? What was a homicide investigation about but chaos and its consequences? In a moment I knew I must change the name of my detective. Whether readers were familiar with the painter Hieronymus Bosch did not matter to me. I was writing about a man who every day ventured into the human abyss, whose job took him across landscapes of chaos and its consequences. I was writing the story of a man who confronted horrific evil among men and who all the while wrestled with his own dark currents. From that day on he became Detective Hieronymus Bosch.

  The name Hieronymus is the Latin source of the name Jerome. By that measure, Detective Hieronymus Bosch should perhaps go by Jerry for short. But I went with Harry instead, choosing it as a nod to Dirty Harry Callahan and Harry Caul, two detectives from films that were important to me in my evolution as a storyteller. My hope is that Harry Bosch shares a kinship with
those two Harrys, as well as with the characters created by the hugely influential writers listed as inspirations earlier.

  With a name, a history, and a mission, Harry Bosch seemed to lack only a code. Every detective, private or public, in the annals of crime fiction has a personal code by which he or she makes a stand. Raymond Chandler wrote an essay about it: "Down these mean streets a man must go..."

  I decided to keep it short. I wanted Bosch to have a code that would be telling of his status as someone who for much of his life was on the outside looking in. I wanted him to have a code that would not let him forget his origins and that would plant him firmly on the side of the underdog. I wanted Bosch to operate with a code of conduct and fairness that would not allow him to suffer fools lightly or leave him beholden to the powerful and rich. He would operate fairly and never use his position to his personal advantage. He would understand that he must give his best effort on each case no matter who the victim may be or where the clues may lead.

  Everybody counts or nobody counts.

  This would be his code.

  The creative fulfillment that comes from writing a series of novels with a returning character is that the biography of that character continually evolves. The series moves forward at the same time it moves backward. New cases, new missions, carry the reader forward. But strewn throughout the stories are the glittering nuggets of history that take the reader into the past.

  So, too, Harry Bosch evolves. The man built to be relentless and bulletproof now shows he is vulnerable. In recent years he has discovered a daughter, a piece of history that in many ways turns all that came before it upside down. Through her, Harry can be gotten to. It changes things, especially him.

  Through fifteen novels I would say that Harry Bosch has mellowed. He is still an outsider with an insider's job. He still won't suffer fools lightly or accept bureaucracy when it gets between him and the completion of the mission. But he has a greater sense of himself and more knowledge of human nature. His mission has made him a man who is both hopeful and cynical. He knows what true justice is and has more insight into redemption. He has a better understanding of the frailties that lead to the many different kinds of human corruption.

  In Angels Flight, the sixth book in the series, Harry opens a pack of matches and finds a fortune printed on the inside flap. It reads: Happy is the man who finds refuge in himself. For Bosch it is a hint of what is to come. Harry pursues his mission at the same time he seeks refuge and continues to find it in himself. That makes his a biography still in progress.

  The house my father built on Highland Avenue may still be standing, but the tunnel is long gone. The day I escaped from the book tour and drove out there, it was the first thing I noticed. The sloping property had been resculpted in the years since my family left. The drainage gulley had been filled and the front lawn leveled. The woods that were across the street were gone as well, replaced by a well-manicured subdivision.

  Maybe it's true that you can't go home again. But not finding the tunnel that day didn't bother me. I was thankful for what it had given me. An early test of character and a memory that would live on in my imagination. If I am lucky, the character who came out of that tunnel will live just as long.

  JOHN CONNOLLY

  Born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1968, John Connolly received a BA in English from Trinity College in Dublin, then an MA in journalism from Dublin City University, taking a job as a freelance journalist for the Irish Times, which he did for five years; he continues to contribute articles from time to time. He has also worked as a bartender, a waiter, a government official, and at London's famous Harrod's department store.

  His first novel, Every Dead Thing (1999), introduced Charlie Parker, the dark ex-cop who has starred in most of his subsequent work. It achieved the virtually inconceivable double honor of winning a Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America and being nominated for the Bram Stoker Award by the Horror Writers Association. Crossing genres in the same work of fiction has been historically both risky and difficult, but Connolly has managed it with a rare ability to plot brilliantly while writing original and distinguished prose.

  In addition to the Charlie Parker books, Connolly has produced the stand-alone suspense novel Bad Men (2003); a collection of horror tales, Nocturnes (2004); and a noncrime novel, The Book of Lost Things (2006). One of the stories in Nocturnes, "The New Daughter," serves as the partial basis for a forthcoming film with that title starring Kevin Costner and Ivana Baquero. His most recent books are The Gates, "a strange book for strange young people," and The Lovers, a Charlie Parker novel.

  John Connolly lives in Dublin and, sometimes, in Maine.

  CHARLIE PARKER

  BY JOHN CONNOLLY

  I

  I never met Belinda Pereira. By the time I heard her name spoken for the first time, she was already dead. But on the night that she was killed, I stood outside her apartment in the rain, and I listened as a detective described the circumstances of her death. She was twenty-six years old. Were it not for her, I don't think I would be writing the books I write. In a way, they are an attempt to make sense of her murder, and for that reason they all fail.

  Because there was no sense to her murder.

  Dublin is a peculiar city. It closes down for the Christmas season and doesn't really find its stride again until early in the New Year. When I worked as a journalist, Christmas was a period during which most staff journalists preferred not to work. It wasn't simply that they wanted to spend time with their families, as most people do at that time of year, or to leave the grim winter weather behind and head for somewhere warmer; it was because nothing much really happened in Ireland at Christmas. During the Troubles, even the terrorists would call a brief cease-fire beginning about December 24, so they could stay at home and pretend to be ordinary men and women without blood on their hands.

  But I was a freelance journalist, and I worked whatever hours I was offered because I was afraid that if I turned them down, I would never be given work again. By 1996, I had essentially been a full-time freelancer for the Irish Times newspaper in Dublin for three years, and had graduated from education and assorted features to regular shifts in the newsroom, which was how I came to be working on December 28, when Belinda died.

  One of the tasks newsroom journalists are required to do is to call the police or the fire department and ask if anything newsworthy has happened. These calls are usually made every hour because, personal sources apart, it is not the place of the police and the fire department to take the initiative in informing journalists of interesting events. In fact, the office of the Irish Times could have been on fire, and the fire department wouldn't have called us to let us know. That was just the way things were.

  So, on the night of December 28, I made my final call to the press office of the Garda Siochana, as the Irish police are called. I was about to go home, and I was expecting nothing different from what I'd been told a number of times already that day: all is quiet.

  But that was not what I was told. Instead, the officer informed me that a young woman's body had been found in an apartment at Mellor Court, on the north side of the city not far from the newspaper's offices on D'Olier Street. She had been badly beaten, so the gardai were treating it as a suspicious death. And, since there was nobody else in the sparsely staffed newsroom who was free, and as I had made the call, the story was mine.

  This was something of a mixed blessing. On any ordinary news day, the crime correspondent or a more senior reporter would have been assigned to the story, but as it was Christmas, I was as good as it was going to get for the newspaper. It would be a front-page story, and an above-the-fold byline, which all journalists love. On the other hand, I had already been working for nine or ten hours, and it was raining outside. It would be a long night.

  I walked down to Mellor Court, and there I did all of the things that give journalists a bad name: I stopped people going into the apartment building to ask if they knew anything of what had oc
curred; I talked to the security guard who was manning the door of a nearby convenience store; and then, when my efforts had come to nothing, I simply waited in the rain for someone from the gardai to emerge and tell me what was happening.

  When the detective in charge did eventually come out, he looked pale and shaken. No formal identification of the body had been made, he said. A passport had been found in the apartment, and a preliminary identification had been made from that, but the victim had been so badly beaten that there was no way as yet of being sure she was the girl in the passport photo. All he could say for now was that she was not an Irish national, and she was dead.

  I went back to the newspaper office and wrote up the story. Later that night, the girl's identity was revealed: her name was Belinda Pereira, a child of Sri Lankan parents living in London.

  Dublin, at that time, was not a very violent city. In fact, Ireland still has one of the lowest homicide rates in Europe, although gangland killings have inflated that figure in recent years, and we have become increasingly inured to casual homicide. But in 1996, Belinda Pereira's death was shocking to the Irish public. Here was a young woman, far from home, who had been brutally murdered, and at Christmas too, a season of peace. It was felt that the person or persons responsible for her death should be found and punished. Her murder was headline news in every Irish newspaper.

  Then, a few days after her death, it emerged that Belinda Pereira had come to Dublin to work as a prostitute. It wasn't the first time that she had done so, and she had also worked as a call girl in England. A convent-educated schoolgirl, she was studying to be a beautician in London. Prostitution appeared to be a way to supplement her income. In addition, there were reports that her parents had decided to separate, and her mother wanted to return to Sri Lanka. A week's work in Dublin would have allowed Belinda to earn the money to help her mother get home.