Michael Connelly – Crime Beat

Crime Beat
A decade of covering cops and killers
Michael Connelly
Little, Brown and Company 2006
375 pages

Michael Connelly, author of the Harry Bosch mystery novels, The Poet, and Bloodwork (on which the excellent Clint Eastwood movie is based) once covered the crime beat in Florida and Los Angeles. Crime Beat, a decade of covering cops and killers, is a collection of various articles he wrote as a journalist for the South-Florida Sun-Sentinel and the Los Angeles Times between 1984 and 1992. Long-time and hard-core Michael Connelly fans will see Crime Beat as more than a curiosity, casual fans will want to stick to the many mysteries.

Crime Beat, a decade of covering cops and killers, is nevertheless an interesting read for fans of true crime books. There is no doubt Michael Connelly can write a good mystery but as this collection of newspaper clippings proves, he is or was also very good at covering a real mystery. This collection is divided in three parts: The Cops, The Killers, The Cases.

Each section of Crime Beat focuses on one aspect of crime journalism and includes articles that focus on one element of a mystery. Each chapter includes the series of articles Connelly wrote for a particular story. Eagle-eyed fans will notice the father of Harry Bosch is no stranger to the cut and past as often follow-up stories include verbatim sentences from a previous article.

There is a clear progression in each section of Connelly’s true crime collection. For example, The Cops evolves from following some homicide detectives over a 24-hour period as the get The Call, covering a couple of specific murder investigations in The Open Territory, focusing on going after the criminals once they’ve escaped to Mexico, to Cops Accused and Death Squad where the author, although reporting the facts, is not afraid of putting subtle hints as to his take on the events surrounding a couple of messy shootings by the LAPD, before closing with Killed By A Kid where the story balances between a rookie police officer killed by a teenage boy and the rather strange shooting of the same teenage boy by the LAPD. This section of Crime Beat will definitely please fans of the police procedural.

Murder mystery fans will enjoy the second section of next two sections of Crime Beat: The Killers and The Cases. In The Killers, Connelly the journalist follows, in a series of articles and the occasional italicized update, serial killer Christopher Bernard Wilder, a guy with two wives who killed his second wife when she confronted him about his being a bigamist, and a couple of other bad guys. This section closes with the story of Roland Comtois, a poster killer for the three strikes approach to justice.

The most interesting section of Crime Beat is The Cases. Here, Michael Connelly focuses on a series of whodunits that are sometimes unsolved. Billy The Burglar, a story from Connelly’s days at the South-Florida Sun-Sentinel focuses on a dope addict who managed to break and enter his way to a couple of million dollars worth of goodies that basically went up his veins and nose. He also covers a murder related to negotiations around the movie The Cotton Club, the Vic Weiss case (titled Trunk Music, a clear reference to Connelly Harry Bosch novel), and a couple more mystery unsolved stories.

Crime Beat by Michael Connelly is a very good read. It will best be enjoyed by the long-time Connelly fan. A casual fan will wait for the paperback version.

Crime Beat
A decade of covering cops and killers
Michael Connelly
Little, Brown and Company 2006
375 pages

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