MichaelConnelly.com is the official website for the Author
Title
Official Web Site of Bestselling Author Michael Connelly
Description
Michael Connelly decided to become a writer after discovering the books of Raymond Chandler while attending the University of Florida. Once he decided on this direction he chose a major in journalism and a minor in creative writing — a curriculum in which one of his teachers was novelist Harry Crews.
After graduating in 1980, Connelly worked at newspapers in Daytona Beach and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, primarily specializing in the crime beat. In Fort Lauderdale he wrote about police and crime during the height of the murder and violence wave that rolled over South Florida during the so-called cocaine wars. In 1986, he and two other reporters spent several months interviewing survivors of a major airline crash. They wrote a magazine story on the crash and the survivors which was later short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. The magazine story also moved Connelly into the upper levels of journalism, landing him a job as a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times, one of the largest papers in the country, and bringing him to the city of which his literary hero, Chandler, had written.
After three years on the crime beat in L.A., Connelly began writing his first novel to feature LAPD Detective Hieronymus Bosch. The novel, The Black Echo, based in part on a true crime that had occurred in Los Angeles , was published in 1992 and won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel by the Mystery Writers of America. Connelly followed up with three more Bosch books, The Black Ice, The Concrete Blonde, and The Last Coyote, before publishing The Poet in 1996—a thriller with a newspaper reporter as a protagonist. In 1997, he went back to Bosch with Trunk Music, and in 1998 another non-series thriller, Blood Work, was published. It was inspired in part by a friend's receiving a heart transplant and the attendant "survivor's guilt" the friend experienced, knowing that someone died in order that he have the chance to live. Connelly had been interested and fascinated by those same feelings as expressed by the survivors of the plane crash he wrote about years before. The movie adaptation of Blood Work was released in 2002, directed by and starring Clint Eastwood.
==Additional Information==
Imagine my wondrous suprise on a dreary Sunday afternoon in Oregon when this 81 year old former Los Angeleno opened the Parade Section of the newspaper to find not only an article by my favorite author of the past few years, but the lovely prose was in reference to one of my long, long ,long time cherished public figures Vinn Scully whose mastery of the skill for indelibly etching his love of the Dodgers has thrilled me for many decades. (Could it be due to our sharing the same age?) The novels of Mr Connelly have transported me back numerous times to the Los Angeles I knew and adored starting in 1944 until my move to Beautiful Oregon in 1970. A part of my heart still lurks in secret places in long ago Los Angeles.I am about to indulge myself in reading "9 Dragons". Thank you for many thoroughly enjoyable hours of spellbound reading. dora mcguire
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