My Nights with Harry Bosch

Husband Bill—Professor Emeritus of Eighteenth Century English Literature, American Literature, and Film Studies—loves detective stories. The author of What is Film Noir?* is a particular devotee of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler—Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe transcribe wonderfully to the screen.

Heck, my husband just plain loves books and film.

A month or so ago after slogging through a depressing spate of recently published books on the way the world is going, one evening in his cozy spot on the sofa (Bill calls it the couch because he grew up in Philadelphia), for no good reason the name Michael Connelly popped into his head. Bill asked me to search what Michael Connelly novels were there to listen to.**

Available was Michael Connelly’s first novel. The Black Echo introduced Hieronymus Bosch…not the glorious fifteenth century Dutch painter, rather the magnetic twentieth century Los Angeles Homicide Detective Harry Bosch. Published early in 1992, in 1993 The Black Echo won The Mystery Writers of America coveted Edgar Award for The Best Debut Novel of the year. Having read a couple of Connelly’s non-Bosch novels, Bill decided he would begin with Black Echo. We downloaded a handful of other Bosch novels into his laptop and our lives were altered…

Next morning I discovered there’d been a television series based on Connelly’s twenty-four Harry Bosch novels. Produced from 2014 to 2020, there were seven years of Bosch, sixty-eight episodes. Whoa. Was it still available to watch?

I cannot understand why over seven years—that is 2,555 days!–NO ONE MENTIONED “BOSCH” TO US! Very strange.  Almost as though Fate was keeping Bosch for us when we really needed him.

Now this is not interesting, just to mention that over the nearly-fifteen years of our marriage, most every night I’ve sat cozily in our lovely pine rocking chair watching a movie or television segment and knitting. I’ve lost count of the baby blankets—in fact my son Benjamin yesterday emailed from Israel with a picture of his new grandson David visiting, the infant wrapped in the crimson baby blanket I’d knitted for big sister Liora…forgot I’d made it. Presently I’m knitting a purply/blue/rosy blanket for master David’s cousin expected to join the family come October. When there’s no great-grandchild on the horizon, I have a monster project of a Fair Isle Christmas blanket that has been in the works one year and doubtless will take another year…

I’ve written about the comforts and beauty of knitting—may do it again. Very peaceable enterprise, and it gains you something for your effort…

Point is, at the end of my day (feeding Uschi, making breakfast, tending bonsais and the garden, off to the gym or appointments, running errands, writing letters, making calls, working on our novel or an essay for these pages, fielding household chores, trying to take my walk, feeding Uschi, making supper), mid-afternoon I sometimes feel myself frantic with anticipation to get to my rocking chair so I can sit quietly, breathe softly, knit.

Back to Bosch.

IMDB rates the sixty-eight episodes an 8.5…The Maltese Falcon only got 7.9.

Except for one or two series whose names I can’t remember (one was with my mother’s friend Kate Winslet), there has never been anything that absorbed me so thoroughly in its scene, helped me forget time, gave me a good old lift up and away.

Likely you don’t know this, but my Life B.B. (Before Bill) was in Televisionland. For thirty-four years my late husband Gene wrote scripts for every existing genre of television. Every night we watched one segment or another. So I am well versed in television drama.

I have no qualms about declaring Bosch outstanding drama. A Plus Plus.

For starters, actors in all roles are superb. Every night there is a moment or two when Titus Welliver**—Harry—reminds me of Humphrey Bogart…steel core beneath vulnerable exterior, throwaway charm from being ANTI-charming. Welliver is superb and not for one instant in all the hours of filming have I seen a flicker of an eyelash, a sidelong glance, a shrug of shoulders as an escape from the super-demanding role—you can catch it in second-tier actors all the time.

Every actor in these episodes—every single one—is flawless. No kidding. A real treat.

Directing is taut, realistic, occasionally too tough to watch but always first rate…God’s humanity rendered.

Cinematography is gorgeous—sweeping all-encompassing shots of Los Angeles—where I grew up—make me wistful, and I’ve never before been wistful watching the high lights and low lives of my city. Harry lives in a suspended house mostly of glass—magic.

Jesse Voccia’s haunting music won four ASCAP awards for top TV series.

I note an award I’ve never seen—within the Industry—six awards for Location Manager and Team…I’ll say. Los Angeles is superbly presented, every tree, bar, stucco’d bungalow, and beach…

And there’s an award for the credits, well deserved—pulsing, complex, impressive, fun to watch. There’s a button you can press to skip credits, but I always watch them, interested in the names of people who have worked hard to give me fifty remarkable minutes. Lots of interesting names flash by…lots of women…

While the sixty-eight episodes of the series take liberty with time and place—episodes can be a meld of incidents from more than one novel—the melding works.

Connelly is one of several Executive Producers on the series and has written eight segments so you know there’s quality control from the master.

I’m too tired to count how many other fine writers and how many spot-on directors brought these superior scripts to fruition. Lots.

Each episode is fifty minutes. I watch three a night. Occasionally four. I’ve realized that “streaming” is well named. Thanks to our cable provider, the machine remembers where I was in the series last night and the episode I want to watch next begins automatically. So thoughtful of someone to program that for us.

I am halfway through and will cry salt tears when I come to the end.

Happily there’s a follow-up season of three more years, Bosch: Legacy. It was produced from 2022 to this year. And presently this year there is the new series Ballard, based on Connelly character LAPD Detective Renée Ballard.

Hours of comforting knitting!

Bill can’t really distinguish what’s on our very large screen anymore so he sits next to me in his big cane chair listening through his earbuds to his current Michael Connelly novel***.

My professor suggested I might mention that like Anthony Trollope’s Palliser novels or Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County novels, Connelly’s thirty-eight novels taken together—those about Bosch and centering around seven other main characters as well (lawyer Mickey Haller, Bosch’s half-brother)—characters are related to one another and develop over time. The twenty-five Bosch novels become a biography of Harry Bosch.

Bill has been so taken with Michael Connelly’s work that last week he decided to give up retirement and teach another course at OLLI (Osher Lifelong Learning Institute) come spring: The Writing of Michael Connelly. I’ll let you know when you can sign up.

In the meantime, we are fortunate there’s such incomparable stuff for old chair-bound geezers…

The family that murders together…

* William Park, Bucknell University Press, 2013.

**It makes me laugh when I think of an actor named Titus Welliver being brought into the office of an old time movie titan the likes of Columbia Studios’ Harry Cohn.
Cohn: “Your name is what you say, son?”
“Titus, sir.”
Cohn: “Well you’re either gonna become—what’s that last name?”
“Welliver, sir.”
Cohn: “You’re in, kid, but from now on your name’s Tim Wells…”
In many ways you must admit it’s a heartbreaking time for civilization, but here and there civilization is making progress: look at the cast names on this show—Madison Lintz, Amy Aquino, DaJuan Johnson, Deji LaRay, Daya Vaidya, Jacqueline Obradors. Love it. Especially Titus Welliver (whose father was a distinguished landscape artist and Professor of Fine Art).

*** For passionate readers like Bill who have lost their ability to read print, thank heaven the world of Books to Listen to has sprung up. Blessings on and my profound thanks to the good people who produce them.

Photograph: © Sbukley, Dreamstime.com