All Interviews

Michael Connelly’s new book, The Scarecrow, hits bookstores this month, having garnered pre-release acclaim from every quarter. It is Connelly’s first novel to feature reporter Jack McEvoy since the runaway bestseller The Poet in 1996. Of all of the characters in Connelly books over the years, McEvoy has the trajectory that most closely resembles Connelly’s own: reporter for a small-town newspaper, a move to the Los Angeles Times, a successful book deal, fame and fortune; analogous events, albeit in a slightly different order.

I recently had the opportunity to interview Connelly via a crackly Tokyo-to-Florida cell phone connection. In addition to having read most of his books over the years, I did some research and learned that Connelly once lived in Raymond Chandler’s old apartment, a factoid I thought worth pursuing.

“Ah, you must have visited Wikipedia,” Connelly begins, with a knowing chuckle. “As so often happens with the Internet, they got the germ of the story right, but they missed out on the details.” Connelly says he was inspired to start writing mysteries after seeing Robert Altman’s film The Long Goodbye, in which Elliott Gould stars as the Chandler detective Philip Marlowe. “When I moved to L.A., I thought it would be cool to live in the apartment where Marlowe/Gould had lived in the movie,” he says. The apartment wasn’t available at the time, but years later it became vacant and Connelly moved in. “On the plus side, it had a great view overlooking L.A., and I could walk to the Hollywood Bowl to see the Rolling Stones. On, the minus side, it wasn’t air-conditioned, and it always smelled a bit like a gas leak,” Connelly recalls.

Connelly’s character, Jack McEvoy, lives in a Craftsman home south of Sunset, and does his writing from the pressroom of the Los Angeles Times. This is a room with which Connelly is intimately familiar from his years as a crime reporter, and one of his aims in writing The Scarecrow was to focus on the sad decline of newspapers like the Times. The real-life closing in February of the Rocky Mountain News, the site of McEvoy’s previous posting, forced the recall of The Scarecrow manuscript so Connelly could make last-minute changes to the book. As more newspapers around the country shut down, Connelly says, “I think what is lost is a community center, a place of news and ideas and debate. It will be splintered among websites and blogs. Perhaps more important is the loss of a watchdog. Who will keep an eye on the small stuff? Who will uncover the small corruptions that lead to the big ones? Will the bloggers do it? Will websites do it? I’m not sure.”

As The Scarecrow opens, McEvoy’s career is in flux: thanks to the double whammy of his large paycheck and the L.A. Times’ plummeting fortunes, he is about to be given the heave-ho. Asked to stay on for a brief period to train his replacement, Mc-Evoy faces a conundrum: on the one hand, he would love to leave his boss twisting in the wind, but he is working on an article that might well garner him the Pulitzer Prize, and he’d really like to stick around long enough to see it in print. His story focuses on Alonzo Winslow, a 16-year-old journeyman felon charged with rape and murder. It takes McEvoy next to no time to deduce that Winslow’s so-called confession is bogus, which begs the bigger question: if this fledgling thug isn’t the killer, then who is the Scarecrow? And how can one write about this stuff without giving real-life villains usable ideas?

“I think you always have to have some responsibility when you write up the bad guys,” Connelly says. “For example, I never give every step in a crime because I don’t want the books to be a primer for anybody. Most of the time, unfortunately, I am not plowing new ground. The bad guy in The Scarecrow may be unique, but the use of the Internet for nefarious deeds is nothing new. This so-called Craigslist Killer would be a case in point. The real thing is always much worse in reality than anything I put into fiction.”

A longtime cinema fan, Connelly has had only one of his books made into a movie thus far, the 2002 Clint Eastwood adaptation of Blood Work. It makes one wonder how Hollywood can pass over such intelligent and action-packed novels in favor of, say, a remake of Bewitched. “Hey, I liked Bewitched,” Connelly says with a laugh. “Seriously, though, I don’t think my books lend themselves to being made into movies, because so much of what happens in the book is in the head of the protagonist. You could do it with voice-overs, but Hollywood doesn’t like voice-overs.”

Asked if he has ever considered doing a Hitchcockian cameo role in a film of his work, Connelly says, “I visited the set of Blood Work a couple of times, but Clint Eastwood never offered me a role as an extra, and I never really thought much about it. Then Eastwood directed Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River, and toward the end of the movie, Dennis was in a great cameo in the parade scene, alongside the mayor, no less! Dennis is a friend of mine, and I have given him a good deal of grief about that.”

Speaking of cameo appearances, the McEvoy character has made several, in books featuring longtime Connelly stalwarts Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller. “The idea was that all my books would be part of one big mosaic of time and place. So I consciously look for places to cross-pollinate,” Connelly says. “I needed to have a reporter in The Brass Verdict so I made him Jack McEvoy because I knew I would be writing about him next and it sort of set the table for the next book. I wish there was a device for tracking all of this. I could use one.”

Connelly is not one to rest on his laurels. Indeed, it seems he is not one to rest at all; his next book, 9 Dragons, featuring L.A. cop Harry Bosch, is due out in the fall.
 

Tony Hillerman wrote of C.J. Box's first novel: "Buy two copies of Open Season, and save one in mint condition to sell to first-edition collectors." In his well-crafted debut, Box decisively set himself apart from the crowd of freshman mystery writers. Deftly sidestepping the dreaded sophomore slump, he is back with a vengeance in Savage Run, the second book featuring Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett.

Box, a Wyoming native who has worked as a ranch hand, a surveyor and a fishing guide, focuses his latest book on the battle between conservationists and ranchers for control of the West's open range. The scales tip one way, then the other, in this ongoing struggle, with neither side seeming to gain lasting advantage. In Savage Run the stakes have been raised, as an organization of zealous environmentalists locks horns with the Stockman's Trust, a well-heeled clandestine association of ranchers who will stop at nothing in pursuit of their objectives. When several "tree huggers" meet with foul play in rapid succession, the investigation falls to Joe Pickett. It will prove to be the toughest assignment of his career.

"People seem to see environmental issues as black and white," says Box ("Chuck" to his friends) via telephone from his Wyoming office. "I hoped to present a fair look at both sides of the issue." The environment is certainly a running theme in both Open Season and Savage Run, but more compelling are the characters on either side of the fence: the ranchers who depend upon the use of government lands for grazing their cattle; the newcomers from out of state who hanker after a taste of the Old West; the environmentalists bent on conserving the dwindling natural resources of the region; and finally, the game wardens, who stir the simmering pot in an attempt to keep it from boiling over.

So, are the protagonist and the supporting characters drawn from people in Box's daily life? "Well, there are any number of game wardens who are absolutely sure that Joe Pickett is based on them, and their wives think so as well!" Box says, laughing. "But the truth is that he is a composite of several different people. A game warden has a unique and autonomous job, and that lifestyle attracts a certain type of individual, someone like Joe Pickett."

On a more personal note, Box reveals that his 15-year-old twin daughters are convinced that they are the models for Pickett's older daughter, Sheridan: "I guess there's more than a little resemblance between my youngest daughter and Lucy Pickett, as well," he says with a chuckle. "The girls take a bit of ribbing from their friends at school, because all their friends read the books to see if there is anything potentially embarrassing."

How does it feel to be an overnight success? "It's weird. Open Season sat on my shelf for three and a half years before anyone showed any interest in it. I went to a conference hosted by the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Association, and they had agents on hand to critique new writers' work. The deal was, you could sign up to meet with two agents, so I signed up with two as C.J. Box, two more as Chuck Box. I think I signed up for eight in all. That was in November of 1999, and by the following May I had a publishing deal." Now, two years down the road, Open Season has been optioned for a movie, and Savage Run has received rave advance reviews. "Originally, I was signed to do three books in the Joe Pickett series; we have just signed for an additional three, plus another book that is not part of the series."

Things are nothing if not hectic for Box these days. He has not given up his day job (organizing tours of the western U.S. for European travelers), but writing demands more and more of his time: "I try to devote two entire days a week to writing. The rest of the time, I go in to the office and work just like before." And has he at done something wonderful to celebrate his new success-a round-the-world cruise, a Mercedes? "No time," he says ruefully. "I did take my wife out to dinner, though. Does that count?"

Tops on his wish list: "I hope that someday I have the opportunity to meet Tony Hillerman and thank him personally for his great review!"

For almost 20 years Stephen L. Carter has been carrying a powerful character around in his imagination.

"He was a cold, distant person of enormously strong political views," Carter says during a call to his office at Yale University Law School, "the patriarch of his family, pretty conservative in the sense that a lot of old, traditional black families are conservative. A judge."

While he struggled and experimented with ways to free this character to tell his story, while bits and pieces of novels accumulated in a trunk in his basement, Carter pursued his career as a professor of law and a public intellectual. He wrote such widely praised nonfiction books as The Culture of Disbelief and Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby. He appeared frequently as an expert commentator on Nightline and Face the Nation. He wrote often in the popular press and legal journals. He was named William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale.

Finally, about five years ago, Carter, who has known since childhood that he wanted to write novels, discovered the fictional vehicle that would allow the judge—and all the other characters associated with this powerful, controversial personality—to come alive. Well, almost alive. Because one of the intriguing things about The Emperor of Ocean Park is that the dominant personality of the novel—Judge Oliver Garland—dies at home in his study in Washington, D.C., at the beginning of the story.

When Carter finally completed his first novel, its mix of character and action so thrilled those in the publishing world that they clamored to buy the whopping doorstop of a book. Knopf outbid 11 other publishers with a $4 million, two-book deal, and movie makers fell in line soon thereafter, offering a hefty sum for the film rights. The competition garnered newspaper headlines and predictions that the book would be one of the biggest hits of the summer. Adding to the hoopla is Knopf’s decision to launch The Emperor of Ocean Park with a staggering 500,000 first printing.

It’s a hefty gamble on a first-time fiction author, but the publisher is confident readers will flock to this complex literary thriller. Carter deftly weaves together several strands, from the relationships of fathers and sons and husbands and wives to the politics of the Nixon and Reagan eras.

At the center of it all is the recently deceased Judge Garland, who had been nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court, then forced to withdraw because of his association with a shadowy figure named Jack Ziegler.

Embittered by his treatment by liberals in the Senate, Judge Garland became a darling of the Republican Right and grew increasingly distant from his three surviving children. One of the three, Mariah, does not believe the judge has died of natural causes. She inveigles her brother Talcott, a law professor at a fictional Ivy League law school in an equally fictional town called Elm Harbor, Connecticut, to join her in an investigation of her father’s death. Talcott—Misha to his friends—is the narrator of The Emperor of Ocean Park.

And Talcott has problems of his own. He struggles to hold together his marriage with his disloyal wife, Kimmer, an ambitious attorney on the president’s short-list for the federal bench. As he tries to unravel the clues his father left him in the form of chess problems, he grows increasingly alienated from his colleagues at the law school. His relationship with his young son worsens. He is pursued by a maddening array of people who demand to know about his father’s "arrangements." And, finally, he must contend with the awesome task of discovering who his father really was.

One of the most interesting threads of the book is Carter’s portrayal of the black upper class and black professionals.

"I didn’t grow up around that kind of wealth in the black community, but many people do," Carter says. "Many of these professional families, with their big houses, imported cars and vacation homes, have had money for generations. That is something we don’t hear about very much, and I wanted to talk about that experience a little bit. Another thing I wanted to talk about are some of the day-to-day perceptions of black professionals who work in predominately white places."

Carter says that much of the novel is about perceptions. And he cautions, "It’s not a book of opinion. These things emerged as I began to let my characters tell their stories. In fact, there are things in the book that I don’t agree with. The point was not to persuade the reader but to provoke the reader, to put in these asides, these subtleties, these themes that people don’t think about so much. The different ways in which people very often see the same event is important. What fascinates me in relationships between people is how so much of life is misunderstanding."

Asked about the surface similarities between his character Talcott, a professor of law at an Ivy League school, and himself, Carter is quick to remind his reader that this is a work of fiction, of imagination.

"Talcott is a deeply obsessive person who is constantly interrogating the world," Carter says. "I have a much more laid-back view of the world. And I think I have a greater acceptance of human frailty than Talcott does. It’s very important for me to portray people in ways that they are not a captive of their weaknesses. What is of real interest to me about life— and therefore was of interest to me in writing this novel—is the notion that people succeed not because they undergo fundamental changes of character, but because they transcend their weaknesses."

Continuing in that vein, Carter says, "I’m interested in constancy. I’m interested in how people stay the same. Indeed, I’m interested in the virtue of staying the same sometimes when the world is changing around you. That’s why so much of the book is about love and loyalty," he says. "Talcott’s attitude about love in the book is an old notion in Christianity and Judaism and a lot of traditional societies. It’s the idea that love is an activity, an act of will, rather than a feeling or desire. Talcott and other characters . . . cling to decisions to be loyal or loving, as opposed to simply being moved by what they happen to be feeling. Love is something you decide to do."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, Caifornia.