Why I won't be writing about the lockdown

… in the near future.

I have to add that caveat because you can never say ‘never’ in any aspect of life. Though for the moment I’m firm. This will be the main gist of today’s chat. In addition to that, however, I’ll update you on where we’re at with my forthcoming new novel, ONE EYE OPEN, and, in reflection of our current dark and silent streets – where in the minds of many, violent criminals are running amok – I offer a detailed review and discussion of a crime classic, Michael Connelly’s astonishing Harry Bosch debut, THE BLACK ECHO.

If you’re only here for the Harry Bosch chit-chat, that’s fine. As always, you’ll find it at the lower end of today’s blogpost. Feel free to pop down there straight away and have your say. However, if you’ve got a little more time to spare, here’s the latest on …

One Eye Open

Thus far, my new novel is still in the pipeline for an August release. I’m loving this cover, which for once actually encapsulates a scene from the novel, and I can now reveal the blurb that will appear on the back of the book. 

I won’t say too much more about it at present, except that it’s a free-standing crime thriller set in the leafy southeast of England, where far too many gangsters (both homegrown and otherwise) are getting comfy, and brings in a new set of hardbitten police characters who are determined to bring justice back to the neighbourhood.

But enough from me. Time to let my publishers, Orion, do the talking ...

If the lies don't kill you, the truth will

An electrifying, high-octane thrill ride; the new must-read standalone from a Sunday Times bestseller. You won’t be able to tear yourself away! Dark, gritty and always at the edge of your seat, this unforgettable new outing from master-craftsman, Paul Finch, will appeal to fans of Stuart MacBride, Mari Hannah and Alex Cross.

YOU CAN RUN

A high-speed crash leaves a man and woman clinging to life. Neither of them carries ID. Their car has fake number plates. In their luggage: a huge amount of cash.

Who are they? What are they hiding?

And what were they running from?

YOU CAN HIDE

DS Lynda Hagen, once a brilliant detective, gave it all up to raise her family.

But something about this case reignites a spark in her...

BUT YOU’LL ALWAYS SLEEP WITH...

What begins as an investigation soon becomes an obsession. And it will lead her to a secret so dangerous that soon there will be nowhere left to hide.

ONE EYE OPEN

***

And now, on a gloomier note …

Writing up the lockdown

I’ve recently been fascinated to hear that several editors and agents of my acquaintance have put it online that at present they aren’t interested in lockdown-based novels. Clearly, this suggests that they are being hit with a number of pitches set during this crisis.

On the face of it, this doesn’t surprise me at all. It’s certainly a strange new experience that we’ve all been plunged into, and I’m not just talking about the sight of animals suddenly feeling free to wander our city streets again (though that in itself is an eye-opener and surely worth a book of some sort).

Last Friday night, I took my daily exercise by walking down into Wigan town centre at around 9.30pm. 

To describe the place as a ‘ghost town’ would be under-selling it. Streets that would normally be throbbing with nightlife were silent and pitch-dark. Out here in the provinces we are used to seeing our shops boarded, our arcades permanently shuttered. But our pubs? Our restaurants? Our fast food vendors? At that time of the week, there’d normally be crowds of revellers on every street-corner. But on this occasion, quite literally, there was no one anywhere. And all the time I was out – all told, for about three hours – perhaps one or two cars passed me by. The eeriness of it was tangible.

But if I thought the streets of the town were strangely bereft, how different it was again whenever I veered through parks and finally headed into the woods near my own home. Now, these places wouldn’t be bouncing even on a normal Friday night, but I was still in Wigan, in the heart of Greater Manchester, and yet, with the ambient noise of distant traffic completely absent, I could have been in the New Forest or the Lake District or the Highlands of Scotland.

It was just me, alone amid acres of deep, shadow-filled thickets, over the top of which arched an early summer night-sky ablaze with constellations I hadn’t seen so clearly for many a long year, if ever. Again though, the blanketing silence was so oppressive that enjoyment remained elusive. The odd twinkle of lamplight from a suburban avenue or someone’s back window might penetrate the lattice of branches and leaves, but it added no comfort because there were no sounds of life to accompany it.

No, I’m not at all surprised that some thriller and horror writers are looking to utilise this strange and unearthly experience we’re all sharing – at least as a background, if not the main story.

One bane of our thriller writer lives in the modern age has been the advent of personal technology. You’re rarely alone (and therefore rarely in danger) these days because you don’t need to find a working payphone to call for help. In fact, most of us don’t just carry around the capability to contact others, but the capability to film crimes as they occur, to photograph suspects and even covertly record suspicious conversations. But it doesn’t feel like that at present. Because no one knows from one minute to the next how effectively the emergency services will be able to respond.

Will our overstretched police force rush out to incidents they may consider to be of lesser importance – such as reports of prowlers, or weird noises in a back alley, or a distant scream that may not necessarily have been a vixen on heat – but which to the average citizen, especially alone at night, might be of serious concern? How quickly can we receive medical help if we need it? Will a doctor or nurse even be able to see you if you’re in a state of shock because you’ve had a bad fright?

All these questions, and others like them, have potentially made the lockdown a prime hunting ground for writers whose main job is to scare their readers.

But I have to say – and this is NOT A CRITICISM of those who are seriously considering this – I’m not among them.

There is no doubt that, however this thing ends, it’s been an event we will all remember for the rest of our lives, with varying degrees of pain and sadness. It’s certainly not something any of us will forget, even if we want to try.

The news media have had a field day of course. This is by far the largest story that any of them have ever covered and probably ever will, and they are determined to milk it for everything they can. All of a sudden, everyone on television is an expert. We’ve had anchor men and women making all kinds of apocalyptic statements like ‘this is the new normal’ or ‘we need to adapt to a new world’.

But you know … they might be correct. Even a broken watch is right twice a day.

And that’s one of the most frightening things to me. Are we seriously saying that for the rest of time, or at least the rest of our lives, close social interaction between human beings will not be viable? Frankly, it doesn’t bear thinking about. Will markets, nightclubs, cruise ships and public swimming pools really become things of the past? Do people of a certain age see no future at all where they aren’t confined in their own homes?

It’s certainly the case that there’ll be changes of some sort and that we won’t like them.

I can’t speak for other authors, and would never be so arrogant as to try, but for all these reasons I’m seeing little in the lockdown to get creatively excited about. Partly, it’s because I have to enjoy what I’m writing, even if the subject-matter is traumatic and terrible – in fact usually, the more traumatic and terrible it is, the better I like it. But I write fiction, so when something traumatic and terrible is happening in real life, it’s another matter entirely.

The other thing is that, as I’ve already intimated, we can’t second-guess what the world will be like when the lockdown is over. We’ve already mentioned that there may be significant changes (alternatively, there may be none at all, but at present we’ve no clue). I’m certainly not the only writer I know who is worried that his/her output of fiction thus far may have become irrelevant this last couple of months because it now refers to a different experience of life. Up to very recently, nearly all of us have been writing about a world that had barely heard about the Coronovirus, about societies that couldn’t imagine lockdowns or social distancing.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that we’ll never get back to normal. But even our health experts can’t predict things with any certainty. So, for this reason as well, I’m finding it very difficult dredging up any enthusiasm to write about this disaster.

Am I saying that, as a writer, I’ll never go there ever?

Most definitely not. If complete normality does return, this calamity might eventually be looked back on as nothing more than an ugly blip in the ongoing progress of all our lives. In that case, it may in due course become the perfect nail on which to hang some dark and dangerous stories. But until that time, as long as COVID-19 remains an ongoing tragedy, with thousands of more people dying each week than we are used to, medical staff worked to the bone, and so many of us trapped in our own homes, or facing unemployment or the collapse of the businesses we’ve worked so hard to build, it’ll remain a no-go area for me.

Again, though … this is NOT a criticism of those who are willing to give it a whirl. Everyone is their own person, we are all different, and as I mentioned, there are very understandable reasons why a few of us might be prepared to get stuck in straight away.

THRILLERS, CHILLERS, SHOCKERS AND KILLERS …

An ongoing series of reviews of dark fiction (crime, thriller, horror and sci-fi) – both old and new – that I have recently read and enjoyed. I’ll endeavour to keep the SPOILERS to a minimum; there will certainly be no given-away denouements or exposed twists-in-the-tail, but by the definition of the word ‘review’, I’m going to be talking about these books in more than just thumbnail detail, extolling the aspects that I particularly enjoyed (I’ll outline the plot first, and follow it with my opinions) … so I guess if you’d rather not know anything at all about these pieces of work in advance of reading them yourself, then these particular posts will not be your thing.

THE BLACK ECHO by Michael Connelly (1992)

Outline

Hieronymous ‘Harry’ Bosch is an astute, hard-working detective with a sharp eye and a mean-as-sin attitude, not just with the crims, but even with his fellow cops if they aren’t doing the job properly. On top of that he’s well known in his native Los Angeles, having closed some high profile cases and even seeing some of his exploits fictionalised in a pacy TV show (as a result of which he was able to acquire himself an enviable pad high in the Hollywood hills). He ought to be one of the stars of the LAPD’s elite Robbery-Homicide Division, but there are more than a few strikes against him.

First of all, he speaks his mind, even to the brass. Secondly, he likes to go it alone, taking chances and following leads even if the rest of the team aren’t up to speed, his personal safety a secondary consideration. Thirdly, and most recently, he uncharacteristically used excessive force in his pursuit of ‘the Dollmaker’, a serial killer whose grotesque, crypto-artistic depredations had the whole city terrified. Having shot the guy dead while he was unarmed, Bosch was bound to come under the microscope, but in the highly politicised world of the LAPD’s higher ranks – where the unashamed jockeying for position is an embarrassing art-form all of its own – it was the perfect opportunity to divest the department of a loose cannon, hence Harry was busted down to Hollywood Homicide, where he would be safely out of the public eye.

Bosch is a professional, though, and gets on with the job, and when sent to check out a body found in a drainage pipe near the Mulholland Dam, he doesn’t share everyone else’s casual assumption that this is just another junkie who’s OD’d, even though the body is that of Billy Meadows, a known heroin addict who has died with a hypo in his arm. Harry doesn’t merely call on his basic detective skills to deduce that Meadows was murdered, he also recognises the victim personally.

A Vietnam vet, Bosch was once part of an infantry unit whose speciality was underground infiltration, pursuing the Viet Cong through their limitless networks of tunnels. Meadows was part of the same outfit, which, given that his corpse was dumped in a tunnel, is surely no coincidence.

This is not a comfortable time for Bosch, evoking memories of the Vietnam War, which he’s never really been able to bury deep enough, but more worrying still, the so-called ‘Black Echo’. This was the coronary-inducing terror the ‘tunnel rats’ used to suffer when crawling on all fours in pursuit of their foes through the midnight labyrinth of the jungle underworld. Its return to the forefront of his memory makes everything a lot harder, not just for Bosch, but for all those in his company.

Inevitably though, he elicits little sympathy from the top floor, Lieutenant Harvey ‘Ninety-Eight’ Pounds supportive but only to a superficial degree, Deputy-Chief Irvin Irving uninterested in anything that doesn’t make him look good and particularly untrusting of a non-team-player like Bosch. The net-result is that two ambitious but highly prejudiced IA officers, Detectives Lewis and Clarke, are put on Bosche’s tail, and even when his enquiry leads him to a 10-month-old bank heist pulled off by a team who tunnelled into the vault, which sees him hooking up with a specialist anti-robbery FBI unit, these bloodhounds won’t give him a minute’s rest.

Even the FBI alliance proves problematic. LA Bureau boss, John Rourke, is okay man-to-man but irritatingly by-the-book where Harry is concerned, while Special Agent Eleanor Wish, whom he’s partnered with, while initially antagonistic to him for his solitary attitude (and habitual chain-smoking!), eventually comes to like him, but remains an enigma (and a beautiful one to boot!), and it doesn’t at all help that Bosch finds himself irresistibly attracted to her.

Needless to say, nothing about this investigation is going to be anything like as straightforward, routine or danger-free as was initially imagined …

Review

It may seem vaguely ridiculous to be reviewing The Black Echo now, when, over the 28 years since its first publication, it’s grown exponentially into a world-famous 21-book series. But in case you were wondering where the whole Harry Bosch saga started, this might be of interest.

To begin with, Bosch is in so many ways the quintessential loner cop, though he wasn’t the first. Even back in 1992, Dirty Harry predated him by over 20 years. But the most interesting thing about the Harry Bosch story is that it’s all set within a convincing LAPD environment. He doesn’t go around remorselessly shooting people anyway, so there was never a chance he’d come to match Harry Callahan’s scorecard, but even if he was inclined to, in this carefully structured, very authentic world he wouldn’t be allowed to get anywhere close to it.

The one or two shootings he is responsible for see all kinds of departmental and disciplinary fallout, and even though one of the victims is a proven serial killer, it complicates Bosch’s life and career no end.

Former Los Angeles Times crime reporter, Michael Connelly is quite determined from the outset that his hardboiled hero is going to wend his ‘lone wolf’ path through as realistic a law enforcement world as possible, with all the attendant difficulties that will create. Near enough every unit in the Los Angeles police is thus brought to our attention. Reconstructed in intricate detail, not just in terms of its function, personnel and position in the pyramid of power, but also in terms of how it feels and looks. The stresses and strains between these departments are made crystal clear, while all protocols and procedures are outlined in depth and there is a whole load of cop lingo, including an exhaustive range of abbreviations, which not every reader has appreciated, though again I personally feel that it adds to the novel’s credibility.

It’s pretty much the same with the way Connelly, a native Philadelphian, treats Los Angeles, running us around the city a lot, using real streets and neighbourhoods, and completely catching the mood and atmosphere of this sun-soaked but schizophrenic metropolis. In this regard alone, there is much superb descriptive writing on show, scenic LA sunsets over streets buzzing with disorderly nightlife, high, heat-hazed views of Universal Studios alternating with claustrophobic journeys through a maze-like underworld where junkies sleep amid spent needles and the city’s shit flows in rivers.

So, okay. We’ve thus far got a warts-and-all police guidebook and a picturesque LA travelogue. But does it work as a thriller?

Well, don’t worry. No one’s going to mistake The Black Echo for anything else, or for not being a genuine classic of its kind.

In addition to the realistic backdrop, there is all sorts here that you’d expect to find in any and every fictionalised account of American crime-fighting. For example, no maverick cop would be complete if he didn’t have a terrible family background (orphanned in Bosch’s case, after his prostitute mother was murdered!), if he didn’t give lip to his supervisors, if the top brass didn’t mistrust him and subsequently if there wasn’t a posse of incompetent IA guys constantly trying to find ways to bring him down. We’ve got all that, as well as the high-falutin ambitions of the LAPD upper echelons, who are constantly seeking to outwit each other in their quest to be Mayor. The Feds, meanwhile, as is also often the case, are portrayed as well-resourced but unwelcome interlopers who are never really rated by real cops because they haven’t worked the streets.

It could be argued, and indeed has been, that this is a whole clutch of modern-day cop thriller cliches, which, no matter how well it all hangs together, hits us with nothing new. But none of this spoiled it for me. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that if it did spoil it for you, what else were you expecting?

So bureaucratic is the real-world law enforcement machine in the West, especially with prosecutors (the DA’s Office in Bosch, another group of slick individuals who’ve rarely, if ever, been close to the action) now so deeply embedded in it that you can’t imagine there’d be much to get excited about day-to-day. Everything’s a team effort and by the book, the whole thing cloaked in health and safety considerations and politically correct minutiae.

Seriously, guys, where’s the fun in that when you’re looking at fiction?

Bosch himself is a more intriguing character than usual. Yes, he’s the hero, but he’s also pretty spiky. And he really doesn’t suffer fools lightly, not even allowing for junior cops’ inexperience. At times, he’s not even remotely likeable, even aggravating the reader (especially when he cuts so much slack to his partner, Jerry Edgar, who, double-hatting as a real estate man, is mostly more interested in selling houses than in making cases against villains). But again, for me this is a hint of the real. Nobody’s perfect, Bosch least of all.

His background as a Vietnam ‘tunnel rat’, though you know it’s going to play into the story, certainly adds to his character, giving him a grim and fatalistic air, but also a dogged attitude to work, which only complements his street-knowledge and well-honed analytical skills. Detective is one of the most difficult and demanding roles in police-work, but Harry Bosch feels like he was made-to-measure for the part; an outsider, yes, but just the kind of humourless and sharply observant guy you’d want investigating when complex and dangerous scenarios like this one come along. 

All in all, Harry Bosch was, and still is, one of the most compelling characters in police fiction. Yes, he may in some ways be an archetype – hardbitten to the core, deeply misunderstood and completely unconcerned by it – but he’s still one of the best realised and makes for an excellent morally upstanding hero.

It’s difficult to advise this now, the Harry Bosch series being as old and well-established as it is. But if you’re about to start on it, go back first to the pre-high tech world of The Black Echo. It combines action, intelligence and frank, hardcore cop stuff, and though tightly and tautly written, is readable to the nth degree. It’s easily one of the best of its kind. 

There’ll be no amateur casting session for an imaginary movie version this week, as Prime’s Bosch TV series has been running since 2014, cutting and rewriting many narratives to suit a new era, but maintaining the Neo-noir tone and atmosphere all the way through, its star, Titus Welliver (pictured right), inhabiting the lead’s hoary old mantle like a second skin.

(Today’s images come to us as follows: Empty Westminster is courtesy of award-winning photographer, Robert Tinothy, the gloomy cobbled street is from Sai Krishan's blog, The Resplendent Life, the dark wood is by Rosie Fraser,  the abandoned swimming pool by Freistellen).