Blood Triangle

Blood Work, Michael Connelly (1998)

This is the cleverest and best-plotted crime novel I’ve ever read. That’s why it would be a bad place for newcomers to start reading Michael Connelly’s work. As good as some of his other novels are, none of them pack the punch of Blood Work and they’re all going to suffer by comparison. So the Connelly-curious should start with some of the early Harry Bosch adventures, then come to Blood Work later.

That’s what I did: started with the Bosch novels. So I was familiar with Connelly and knew he was an excellent writer, but nothing prepared me for the cleverness of the twist at the end of Blood Work. An FBI detective called Terry McCaleb has retired and gone back to civilian life after a heart-transplant. He needed a new heart because the stress of his job had wrecked his old one: he worked to catch serial-killers, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing. It was the failures that ate away at him and triggered the virus that attacked his heart. He almost died waiting for a transplant, because he has a rare blood-type and a suitable donor took a long time to arrive.

The donor, a young Latina called Gloria Torres, had to die to give him life, of course. In fact, she was murdered but the police can’t find her killer. She was just unlucky, a random victim brutally but casually shot in the head as a potential witness to the robbery of a convenience store in Los Angeles. The owner of the store was shot dead too and with no witnesses and just blurred CCTV footage from a single camera in the store, the hunt for the killer hasn’t gone anywhere. That’s why Gloria’s sister tracks McCaleb down after a story about him appears in the LA Times. She asks him to put his old FBI skills to work again and he can’t refuse: he and Gloria have the most intimate of connections and he owes her his life.

What he doesn’t realize is that he and she are two corners of what you might call a blood triangle. The third corner of the blood triangle is revealed when McCaleb finally works out who the killer is and visits his abandoned lair. A deadly message is waiting for him there on a live computer:

He clicked the mouse and the document quickly filled the screen. McCaleb began to read like a man reading his own obituary. The words filled him with dread, for he knew that they unalterably changed his life. They stripped his soul from him, took any meaning from his accomplishments and made a horrible mockery of them.

Yes, that’s when the twist is sprung and Blood Work may become for you what it is for me: the cleverest crime novel you’ve ever read. I had a distinct memory that the twist appeared on the last page of the book. And that once I’d recovered from it, I turned to the first page and read the whole book again straight through, marvelling at how everything was now cast in a new light. Well, I know I’m right about re-reading the book, but I’m wrong about the twist being revealed on the final page. The book has 47 chapters and the twist is revealed at the end of chapter 40. Maybe I re-read the earlier chapters before finally finishing the book or maybe I carried on to the end and re-read the whole book then. But I understand why my memory was at fault: the final chapters just aren’t memorable by comparison with the power of the twist. The loose ends are tied up but Blood Work would have been more powerful if they hadn’t been. That twist, that literally heart-wrenching twist, should have been the last page of the book.

That’s what my subconscious obviously thought after I’d finished Blood Work for the first time, which is why I had the false memory of reaching the last page, then immediately re-reading the book because of what I’d found there. Memory isn’t static but dynamic. It can’t be trusted. And in fact that’s another of the themes of Blood Work. What and who can we trust? McCaleb lives on a boat after his retirement and the sea is one of the characters in the book. And one of the sources of symbolism. The sea is salty like blood and sometimes surges and quickens like blood. And it can be treacherous and deadly like blood. All of those themes run through the book and help make it the best of a very good author’s many books.

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Grim Pickings

Desert Star, Michael Connelly (2022)

Let’s suppose that Michael Connelly’s books are jazz albums that he produces and engineers himself. Then you could say that he made Desert Star a much better listen than The Dark Hours (2021) by doing two simple things at the mixing-desk. He turned down the young female vocalist and turned up the old guy on tenor sax.

In other words, there’s less Renée Ballard in this one and more Harry Bosch. Renée Ballard is Connelly’s new-ish female detective of color-ish. Harry Bosch is Connelly’s old white detective who fought in Vietnam. And boy was Ballard irritating in The Dark Hours. And in The Night Fire (2019). And in all the other novels she’s appeared in. She’s a goodthinkful PC paragon and I suspect that Connelly doesn’t like her himself. I also suspect that he’d have preferred to make her Black. But he must have realized that, with a Black Ballard, he’d certainly have got in trouble for writing a WoC while being a WHAM (that’s “Woman of Color” and “White Heterosexual Able-Bodied Male”). So he made her part Hawaiian (possibly) and got away with it.

But there was still a problem. Ballard is nowhere as good a character as Bosch and I suspect that Connelly’s readers don’t like her either. For example, as of August 2023 no-one has written articles for any of her novels at Wikipedia. So Bosch had to be brought back in The Dark Hours to dilute Ballard. There was still too much of her, though, so there’s even more Bosch in Desert Star. And it works. The plot isn’t as good as it is in The Dark Hours, but the relief of less Ballard makes up for that.

And in one way the plot’s the same. Indeed, the same as ever. In Connelly novels, the villains are always white and almost always white men. The victims of miscarriages of justice, on the other hand, are always Black or Hispanic. There are two big villains in Desert Star and both are white men. There’s one victim of a miscarriage of justice and he’s a Hispanic man. His girlfriend gets raped and murdered, so the corrupt and cruel American justice system, which is designed to oppress Communities of Color, decides that hedunnit and sends him to jail. But he didn’t dunnit, of course. He’s a Person of Color and Persons of Color do not commit rape or murder in a Michael Connelly book. And they especially don’t commit rape and murder. Never. Nunca. No way, José.

Fortunately, although Bosch is a white male he’s on the side of truth and decency. So his clever detective work and intuition rescue the Hispanic victim of injustice and track down the real villain in that half of the plot, which is about a white man raping and murdering Women of Color. As white men so often do. Bosch’s clever detective work and intuition also track down the villain in the other half of the plot, which is about a white man murdering a whole family, including kids, and burying them in the desert. As white men so often do. But everything in the plot has appeared in a Connelly novel before. For example, there was an unjustly-imprisoned-for-rape-and-murder Hispanic man in The Lincoln Lawyer (2005). And a slaughtered family somewhere else. But what hasn’t appeared in a Connelly novel before is the saddest but most natural thing in the world finally and fully happening to Bosch.

It’s called old age. Bosch is old now and some of the nastier characters in Desert Star – the white male ones, that is – mock him for it. His life is nearly over and his body is starting to let him down. At one point, Ballard notices that he’s struggling to carry something up some stairs. She asks him if he wants help. He says no, of course, but it’s still a sad moment. Some readers will have lived with Bosch right from the beginning, in the string of excellent novels that introduced him to the world in the early 1990s. He was young and vigorous back then, but that was thirty years ago. Now the novels are no longer as good and Bosch isn’t young or vigorous any more. I didn’t start read the Bosch novels when they were first published, but I still feel as though I’ve travelled with Bosch through time. And I like him as a character and as a person, despite the political correctness that has always governed his plots. Connelly is a good and realistic writer who’s been able to make Bosch breathe and bleed on the page. Okay, after thirty-six previous novels, it’s not surprising that Desert Star isn’t a classic. But it still has its moments. This bit of dialogue was effective, for example:

“Let’s drop these at the pod, then you and I can go somewhere to talk,” Ballard said. “I want your take on a couple of things.”

“Roger that.”

“You gotta stop saying that. Everybody has to stop saying it.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“When influencers are saying it on TikTok, it’s jumped the shark.”

“I don’t know what a word of that means.”

“Which is a good thing.” – end of chapter 15

Bosch is still going his own way as the shadows thicken around him and the Grim Reaper gets ready to swing his scythe. He’s pre-internet, even if he’s not pre-PC, an old white man in a world of wokeness. And I’ll be sorry when he’s finally gone. It will feel as though a real person has left the world and the Bosch novels will feel different to read. They’ll no longer feel as though they’re about a living person, someone who has real memories of what the novels describe, someone who bears real scars on his body and on his heart.

Michael Connelly isn’t a giant of literature like Arthur Conan Doyle and the Harry Bosch novels don’t have the depth or cultural importance of the Sherlock Holmes stories. But Connelly is still a clever and compelling writer, and he’s brought Bosch to life in the minds of millions of readers. I won’t be alone in feeling sorry that there’s another way in which Bosch won’t be like Sherlock Holmes. When Bosch is gone, he won’t be coming back.

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Previously Pre-Posted on Papyrocentric Performativity…

• Pair’s Fair — review of Connelly’s The Dark Hours (2021)
• Marred Moon — review of Connelly’s Void Moon (2000)
• Double WHAMmy — review of Connelly’s The Reversal (2010)
• All Bosched Up — thoughts on Michael Connelly and his characters

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Pair’s Fair

The Dark Hours, Michael Connelly (2021)

When Michael Connelly is good, he’s very good. Blood Work (1998) may be the best and most ingenious crime novel I’ve ever read. But The Dark Hours isn’t up to that standard. Nowhere near. I don’t think it’s up to Connelly’s average either. It’s uninspired and one half of the plot is like the far better Connelly book The Scarecrow (2009). Renée Ballard, Connelly’s new-ish female detective-of-color-ish, is on the hunt for a pair of tag rapists nicknamed the Midnight Men. “Were they white, black, brown?” she asks a possible new victim, trying to learn if they’ve struck again.

You have no guesses what the victim replied. Sex-criminals in a Michael Connelly book are always the same color. And quite right too. But the depraved crimes of the Midnight Men are even worse than they first appear, as Ballard and her unofficial partner Harry Bosch will learn before the end of the book. At the same time, they’re solving the murder of a hard-working Hispanic mechanic which, like the rapes, is even worse than it first appears. That half of the plot is like the far better Connelly book Trunk Music (1997). And I’d rather have read Trunk Music for the fourth or fifth time than read The Dark Hours for the first.

But how was I to know before I’d read it? Fortunately, Connelly doesn’t make Renée Ballard come to life in the way he often managed with Harry Bosch when Bosch was on his own and battling both crime and the LAPD. It’s a relief that Connelly fails like that. If he’d managed to bring Ballard fully to life, she would be even more irritating. She’s a goodthinker and never deviates from the politically correct line on any subject, whether it’s female empowerment, racism or the “homeless community”. Connelly likes to keep his books as up-to-date as he can, so The Dark Hours is set during the dark days of the Covid epidemic and the vicious attempted insurrection at the US Capitol of January 6, 2021. Obviously, then, Ballard is thoroughly Covid-compliant and even drags a reluctant Bosch off to be vaccinated. Plus, she watches the attempted insurrection with “stunned surprise”.

And quite right too. But I wonder whether Connelly himself is subconsciously irritated by his character’s PC behavior, because he gives her mild concussion half-way through the book. She tries to stop a fleeing man, a Thai-American crime-victim who’s scared of a dangerous gang called the ABZ or Asian Boyz and doesn’t want to talk to the police. She can’t stop him and gets knocked over, hitting her head on concrete and injuring herself. That means she meets the paramedic who’s her love-interest in the rest of the book.

But could Connelly not have found a less painful way for that to happen? Of course he could. So I don’t think he really likes his new character. I know I don’t. Bosch is better, but Bosch’s presence in this book can’t rescue it from mediocrity.

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Marred Moon

Void Moon, Michael Connelly (2000)

This novel has two of Connelly’s greatest virtues: clever plotting and compulsive readability. But it’s marred by perhaps his biggest vice: his failure to remember that more is often less. Like The Black Echo (1992), it grabs you at the start with the small story of a failed criminal. The Black Echo has a dead Vietnam vet called William Meadows; Void Moon has a living parolee called Cassie Black. She’s just done years in jail for burglary and is trying to start her life again as a saleswoman at a luxury car-dealer in Los Angeles.

Why was she caught? What happened to her male accomplice? Connelly cleverly leaves things unexplained and draws you in. Cassie is a sympathetic character and you start worrying as you realize that she’s planning to go back to burglary. She’s risking a quick return to jail, because Thelma Kibble, her probation officer, is an “obese black female” and therefore very good at her job. She’s becoming suspicious of Cassie, who likes her all the same. Kibble “wasn’t easy but she was fair.” Connelly’s political correctness can’t really be called a vice, because it’s so common nowadays and isn’t in fact very annoying in this book.

There are even two good white men to offset all the evil white men. And the chief villain is one of Connelly’s best. He’s a psychopathic magician called Jack Karch. That’s magic as in card-tricks and rabbits-from-hats: Karch’s father once performed in Las Vegas on the same bill as Frank Sinatra. Like money and greed, legerdemain and misdirection are important parts of the plot. Las Vegas is where Cassie was caught, trying to rob a high-roller at a casino, and where she returns for another attempt at another high-roller. That’s why Karch, who’s working as a casino detective, gets on her trail and that’s when the book begins to lose its realism. There are too many dead bodies in the second half and too much of the action might have come from a James Bond movie. Like The Black Echo, the plot starts small, believable and compelling. Like The Black Echo again, it becomes big, unbelievable and no longer compelling.

But the plot is undeniably clever, with plenty of twists and surprises, and Connelly skilfully uses the characters and setting to explore themes like loyalty, deception and ego. Another part of his literary skill is apparent only when you read more of his books. His chief character is the LAPD murder-detective Harry Bosch and although Bosch doesn’t appear in Void Moon, it’s set in the same world. All his characters are linked in some way and Cassie turns up in a Bosch book. She’s a minor character there, a major one here.

That’s like life and so was the opening of Void Moon. When the bodies start piling up, the credibility is gone. I wouldn’t have minded so much if Thelma Kibble, the obese and highly competent probation officer, had been one of Karch’s long list of murderees. She isn’t, but she has more than a waddle-on part in the book and I’m not sure that Connelly was entirely sincere in making her such a stereotype of Black female virtue. If Void Moon had ended as it began, mindful that less is more, it would have been a much better book. But it’s still good and if you like hard-boiled crime fiction, Michael Connelly is definitely someone to try.

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Double WHAMmy

The Reversal, Michael Connelly (2010)

As you’d expect from Michael Connelly, the chronicler of Californian crime who now lives in Florida, this book is another detailed examination of the importance of the White Heterosexual Able-Bodied Male, or WHAM. But this time you get a double-dose – in fact, a doubled double-dose. There are pairs of WHAMs on the side of both Good and Evil. The two righteous righters-of-wrong are Harry Bosch, Connelly’s LAPD murder-detective, and his half-brother, the defense attorney Micky Haller, who’s accepted an offer to appear for the prosecution in the re-trial of a child-murderer called Jason Jessup. The murderer doesn’t sound melanin-enriched, does he? But you don’t need his name to know that he isn’t: his crime is enough to ensure he can’t be anything other than a white male, in the Connelly cosmos. And it’s apparent long before the end of the book that he is guilty, although he’s been released on bail and wants to sue the state of California for a false conviction. He was found guilty in the 1980s partly on DNA evidence, when a trace of semen was discovered on the victim’s dress and shown to belong to his blood-group. But it’s turned out that it wasn’t in fact his. Twenty-first-century technology has proved the depraved deposit belonged to someone else – but still a white male, of course.

The girl’s stepfather, in fact. But he hadn’t actually been abusing the girl: she had borrowed the dress from the actual victim of abuse, her slightly older sister. Then she got snatched off the street by Jessup and strangled. Is there no limit to WHAM evil? Not in the Connelly cosmos. But the book raises a related question: Is there no limit to non-WHAM saintliness? If I didn’t know better, I’d almost start to suspect Connelly was taking the piss in one part of The Reversal, when the discoverer of the victim’s corpse testifies at the new trial. The Bosch sections of the book are written in the third person, the Haller sections in the first. Haller describes the witness being brought to the stand:

As I had gone to the lectern Bosch had left the courtroom to retrieve [William] Johnson from a witness waiting-room. He now returned with the man in tow. Johnson was small and thin with a dark mahogany complexion. He was fifty-nine but his pure white hair made him look older. Bosch walked him through the gate and then pointed him in the direction of the witness stand. (pg. 220)

The “dark mahogany complexion” and “pure white hair” are the first stages in the character’s canonization. Here are some more, as the witness identifies himself to the court and describes what he does for a living:

“…I am head of operations for the El Rey theater on Wilshire Boulevard… I make sure everything works right and runs – from the stage lights to the toilets, it’s all part of my job.”

He spoke with a slight Caribbean accent but his words were clear and understandable. (pg. 221)

So he’s Caribbean and highly competent. The saintliness is solidifying, but Connelly isn’t done. The murdered girl was callously dumped in a rubbish-bin by her WHAM killer. Haller projects a police photograph of the scene onto a screen and asks the competent Caribbean to clearly confirm that it is accurate:

“Okay, and is this what you saw when you raised the top [of the bin] and looked inside?”

Johnson didn’t answer my question at first. He just stared like everyone else in the courtroom. Then, unexpectedly, a tear rolled down his dark cheek. It was perfect. If I had been at the defense table I would have viewed it with cynicism. But I knew Johnson’s response was heartfelt and it was why I had made him my first witness.

“That’s her,” he finally said. “That’s what I saw.”

I nodded as Johnson blessed himself. (pg. 220-4)

I, on the other hand, retched. I think writing like that counts as emotional pornography, but this example has an interesting feature: the black saint who is offered for liberal self-gratification isn’t an American black but a foreign one. Is Connelly suggesting that a Caribbean is credible when weeping over the death of a white child, but a native black wouldn’t be? I don’t know, but I do know that the book, like many of Connelly’s previous books, is meant to be titillating in other ways. The details of Jessup’s known and suspected murders – he proves to have floated like a butterfly and stung like a WASP – remind me of something George Orwell said in his essay “Raffles and Miss Blandish” (1944):

It is important to note that by modern standards Raffles’s crimes are very petty ones. Four hundred pounds’ worth of jewellery seems to him an excellent haul. And though the stories are convincing in their physical detail, they contain very little sensationalism – very few corpses, hardly any blood, no sex crimes, no sadism, no perversions of any kind. It seems to be the case that the crime story, at any rate on its higher levels, has greatly increased in blood-thirstiness during the past twenty years. Some of the early detective stories do not even contain a murder. The Sherlock Holmes stories, for instance, are not all murders, and some of them do not even deal with an indictable crime. So also with the John Thorndyke stories, while of the Max Carrados stories only a minority are murders. Since 1918, however, a detective story not containing a murder has been a great rarity, and the most disgusting details of dismemberment and exhumation are commonly exploited. Some of the Peter Wimsey stories, for instance, display an extremely morbid interest in corpses.

That was written at the end of the Second World War. Plus ça change, eh? But something that has definitely changed in detective fiction is the attitude to the societies built by whites in Europe, America, and other parts of the world. Liberal writers like Connelly now attack them constantly: they’re racist, they’re oppressive, they’re evil. The Reversal re-treads a constant Connellyean theme. In several of his previous books, evil WHAMs have committed sex-crimes and hapless non-WHAMs have been unjustly accused instead. In The Reversal, an evil WHAM has committed a sex-crime and a saintly non-WHAM is weeping over the victim. That’s how it works, in the world of Bosch and Haller. But they’re WHAMs too and they’re examples of how, in liberalism, only WHAMs have free will to choose between good and evil. Bosch and Haller choose good and side with the saintly oppressed; Jessup and the stepfather choose evil and commit the oppression against the saints. But the WHAM Connelly and his WHAM fans may soon start to see that their collusion with their critics will not lead to a better world. They may even realize that sex-crimes are not always and everywhere committed by white males. But I suppose that’s what makes Connelly an imaginative writer and The Reversal a work of fiction.

Pre-previously posted (please peruse):

All Bosched-Up

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All Bosched Up

Readers’ advisory: Contains plot-spoilers and a Nietzsche quote.

Crude, clichéd, but compelling. That’s how I’d describe Michael Connelly’s crime novels. And they’re sometimes clever too. His chief character is a Hiero for our times: jazz-loving Vietnam-vet loner Harry Bosch, a maverick murder detective fighting the flood of evil and horror in Los Angeles. The Bosch books are L.A.P.D. noir – very noir, as Bosch’s full name suggests: Hieronymus Bosch. His unmarried prostitute mother, who was raped and murdered while he was still a boy, named him after the proto-surreal Dutch apocalypticist. The books are also L.A.P.D. P.C. – very P.C. But not very original in their P.C. A sure way to spot a bad lad in a Bosch book is that he uses racist language or expresses racist ideas. This is Bosch’s senior officer, Lieutenant Pounds, visiting a crime scene in South Central L.A.:

There was still a lot of debris in the building’s shell. Charred ceiling beams and timber, broken concrete block and other rubble. Pounds caught up with Bosch and they began carefully stepping through to the gathering beneath the tarp.

“They’ll bulldoze this and make another parking lot,” Pounds said. “That’s all the riots gave the city. About a thousand new parking lots. You want to park in South Central these days, no problem. You want a bottle of soda or to put gas in your car, then you got a problem. They burned every place down. You drive through the South Side before Christmas? They got Christmas tree lots every block, all the open space down there. I still don’t understand why those people burned their own neighborhoods.”

Bosch knew that the fact people like Pounds didn’t understand why “those people” did what they did was one reason they did it, and would have to do it again someday. Bosch looked at it as a cycle. Every twenty-five years or so the city had its soul torched by the fires of reality. But then it drove on. Quickly, without looking back. Like a hit-and-run. (The Concrete Blonde, 1994, ch. 2)

Are you surprised to hear that Pounds meets a bad end? A writer is like a god, creating and controlling a world of his own, and he can ensure that blasphemers like Pounds are punished as they deserve to be. And all too often aren’t in real life, alas: blacks are still groaning under racist oppression not just in Los Angeles but in the U.S. as a whole. Sooner or later, as Bosch sadly but wisely foresees, they “will have” to burn “their own neighborhoods” again.

Which will make their problems worse. But what choice do they have? Blacks aren’t fully human and don’t have free will, intelligence, or reason like whites. That, at least, is what racists think. Racists like Pounds? No, racists like Harry Bosch and his creator Michael Connelly. Think about what is really going on in the passage I quote above. Pounds is puzzled by the arson because it was stupid, irrational, and malign. In other words, his premise is that blacks are intelligent, rational and benign people. The arson of the L.A. riots appears to contradict that premise, so Pounds is puzzled.

Bosch, on the other hand, looks “at it as a cycle”, a natural rhythm of black behaviour. They’re oppressed, so they react by making things worse for themselves. Bosch and his creator are actually white male supremacists, but then that’s because they’re liberals. If you listen to what liberals say, you’ll think that they believe in human equality: that we’re all the same under the skin, regardless of race, sex, sexuality, disability, or any other irrelevant externality-issue factor. If you watch what liberals do, however, you’ll realize that they don’t believe in human equality at all. Liberalism secretly operates on the principle that only one group is fully human. Which group is it? White heterosexual able-bodied males, or WHAMs.

In liberalism, only WHAMs have free will and only WHAMs can be blamed for bad behaviour. They oppress everyone else; everyone else is oppressed by them. That’s why it’s so important to criticize WHAMs, take power off them, and punish them for their sins. They could choose good; instead, they choose evil. But when blacks commit arson, loot, and murder large numbers of people, as they did in the L.A. riots, no blame attaches to them. It’s a cycle, a natural rhythm, as mindless and irrational as an earthquake or hurricane. When blacks misbehave, they’re not to blame. The real immorality is committed by WHAMs like Pounds, who don’t “understand why ‘those people’ did what they did”. But this dichotomy contradicts the official liberal line on human nature: that we’re all the same under the skin and any group is capable of doing anything done by any other group.

For example, the Jewish-American scientist Jared Diamond argues in Guns, Germs and Steel (1997) that European and Asian achievements are entirely owed to geography, not at all to genetics. Blacks in Africa were just as capable of building cathedrals, inventing gunpowder, or landing on the moon, but they weren’t living in the right environment. Note where Diamond’s reasoning also leads: it means that blacks were just as capable of conquering and oppressing whites as vice versa. It’s just an accident of history that whites had black slaves and are still preventing blacks from realizing their gigantic potential. We’re all the same under the skin, so if the geographic dice had rolled differently, the tables would have been turned: blacks would have enslaved whites and would now be preventing whites from realizing their potential. Harry Bosch could have been black, named after a black artistic genius, and L.A. could have been full of poor, downtrodden whites oppressed by a non-white elite. The same goes for all other forms of oppression and bigotry. WHAMs have used their power to oppress non-WHAMs, but non-WHAMs are just as capable of being oppressors, when they get the chance. That is the clear logic of liberal dogma on human nature.

How often do you hear liberals point that logic out? I’ve never heard them point it out at all, because they don’t really believe it. Their aim is not to end injustice against non-WHAMs but to induce guilt in WHAMs, whether it’s deserved or not. But even if it is deserved, it can’t be culpable, if we follow the logic of “We’re All the Same under the Skin”. If liberal ideology is correct, it’s absurd for liberals to be self-righteous and indignant about racism, sexism, homophobia, and other evil WHAM prejudices. We’re all essentially the same, so we’re all potential oppressors and it’s merely chance that group W is oppressing groups X, Y, and Z. But have you ever heard liberals say that? No, they always blame wilful evil by group W, and seem to think that X, Y, and Z, by virtue of being oppressed, have some special saintly status. They can’t have, if liberal dogma is correct. It isn’t, but liberals don’t believe in it anyway: dogma is for preaching, not for practising. The truth is that liberalism, like the overt religions it so often criticizes, isn’t really out to achieve its loudly proclaimed goals. It isn’t really about ending oppression and injustice: it’s about gaining power and money by inducing guilt and censoring dissent. Those who complain most loudly about injustice are often those who are most eager to practice it:

If the suffering and oppressed lost the faith that they have the right to despise the will to power, they would enter the phase of hopeless despair. This would be the case if this trait were essential to life and it could be shown that even in this will to morality this very “will to power” is hidden, and even this hatred and contempt were still a will to power. The oppressed would come to see that they were on the same plain as the oppressors, without prerogative, without higher rank. (The Will to Power, Book One: European Nihilism, #55, translated by Walter Kaufmann)

Also sprach – thus spoke – Friedrich Nietzsche, a WHAM from the nineteenth century who remains one of the best and most acute critics of the self-contradictions, absurdities, and evils of liberalism, of whatever variety: the genuine variety, as preached by benevolent men like John Stuart Mill in the 19^th century, or the crypto-Marxist variety, as preached by malevolent women like Hillary Clinton in the 21^st.

I call Hillary “malevolent” because I’m an evil anti-liberal WHAM, of course. As a liberal WHAM, Michael Connelly does not believe in wilful female malevolence. Female misbehaviour, like black misbehaviour, is really the fault of WHAMs. At least, that was the line he plugged for many years. A wilfully malevolent female has finally turned up in one of his books, but you won’t need to told what race she is. She is certainly not a “sister”, literal or otherwise, of Kizmin “Kiz” Rider, the black lesbian detective who partners Bosch in Trunk Music (1997) and Angels Flight (1999). Rider has “grown up in south L.A.” and, because she combines three richly vibrant strands of non-WHAM-ness, she doesn’t stay long in the murder squad. She’s head-hunted by the Chief’s office, though she continues to help Bosch in his struggle against WHAM evil.

But Rider does offer strong hints that Connelly isn’t a fully orthodox liberal. For example, she gets herself shot and wounded by a serial killer in Angels Flight and she’s become too tied to the L.A.P.D. bureaucracy in The Drop (2011). Bosch is disappointed in her, though he does recognize that she’s been corrupted by a white system. And the serial killer who shot her is white, of course: Connelly is fully orthodox in never admitting that WHAMs are actually under-represented in serial killing, not the reverse. However, hints of his heterodoxy are apparent again in Jerry Edgar, another of Bosch’s black partners. In The Black Echo (1992), the first book in the Bosch series, Edgar is more attached to his part-time estate-agency work than he is to solving murders. Unlike Bosch, he doesn’t have “a wire in the blood” that drags him to devote his life to fighting the WHAM evil that ravages the world. He doesn’t think that “everybody counts or nobody counts” and, unlike Bosch, who’s driven on by memories of his mother’s death, he won’t devote as much effort to the murder of a homeless drug-addict as to the murder of a high-powered lawyer or city-councillor. He even ends up betraying Bosch and passing information about one of their cases to a journalist on the L.A. Times.

After those two black partners, both of whom fall short of their mentor’s standards, Bosch has a Hispanic-American partner, Ignacio “Iggy” Ferras, in The Overlook (2007), The Brass Verdict (2008), and 9 Dragons (2009). He has a Chinese-American partner, David Chu, in 9 Dragons and The Drop. But Kiz Rider re-appears in The Drop to be told something decidedly heterodox about the Rodney King beating, the appalling act of WHAM evil that caused the L.A. riots. Although Rider is black, she’s also a policewoman, so Bosch feels able to take a pro-police line on the beating. The L.A.P.D., he points out, had previously relied on choke-holds to subdue violent suspects quickly and effectively. But choke-holds were killing too many blacks, liberals said, and they were complaining more and more loudly about police racism. Bosch describes the consequences of their compassion and concern:

“…the department then told the officers to rely more on their batons… Added to that, Tasers were coming into use just as the choke hold went out. And what did we get? Rodney King. A video that changed the world. A video of a guy being tased and whaled on with batons when a proper choke hold would’ve just put him to sleep.”

“Huh,” Rider said. “I never looked at it that way.” (Op. cit., pp. 173-4)

Many liberal readers of the Bosch books will never have looked at it that way either. But those hints of heterodoxy are rare: in the main, Connelly and his characters are fully orthodox. In the chaotic world of Harry Bosch, few things are certain. Death is one. WHAM evil is another. A third is: ethnic minorities never ever ever commit sex-crimes, let alone sex-crimes of a particularly violent and unpleasant kind. If a black or Hispanic is charged with a rape-murder in a Connelly book, you can be certain that a horrendous miscarriage of justice is under way and that Bosch or Micky Haller, Bosch’s lawyer half-brother and star of his own series, will be riding to the rescue.

But by following that liberal line on sex-crime and miscarriages of justice, Connelly is again being a white male supremacist. The active, interesting roles – those of sex-slayer and injustice-overturner – are taken by WHAMs. The passive, accidental role – the poor shmuck whom the racist WHAM system found in the wrong place at the wrong time – is taken by a non-WHAM. Black ’bangas and Hispanic homies are minor characters in a drama that centres on Bosch or Haller. Non-WHAMs suffer from evil, but they don’t create it or fight it the way WHAMs do. Nor do black lesbians like Kiz Rider. Although she lets Bosch down by getting too close to the L.A.P.D. bureaucracy, she isn’t responsible for its machinations. No, WHAMs like Irvine Irving are. He’s the Machiavellian Deputy Chief of Police Bosch clashes with repeatedly until Irving is hoist on his own petard and forced to retire at the end of The Closers (2005). He then becomes a city-councillor and in The Drop he’s putting his Machiavellian skills to work against the L.A.P.D. rather than for it. I suspect that Connelly is orchestrating the Bosch series towards what will be, for Bosch, a shattering revelation: that Irving, who knew Bosch’s prostitute-mother as a beat-officer, is his real father, not the famous attorney whom Bosch has recognized as such till now.

Whether or not that proves true, the way Connelly develops his characters is one of the things I admire about his books: despite the occasionally clumsy prose, Bosch seems to inhabit a real world with real people in it, including him. The Bosch who began the series in 1992 is not the same as the Bosch who continues it in 2012. He’s older, greyer, more scarred, and with more unhappy romantic history behind him. He also had a history when he began the series in The Black Echo: losing his mother as a boy, he went from a series of children’s homes and foster-families into the army, which sent him to fight in Vietnam as one of the “tunnel rats”, the soldiers who went into the tunnel-network dug by the Viet Cong. Connelly acknowledges two more compelling authors at the beginning of The Black Echo: “Tom Mangold and John Pennycate, whose book The Tunnels of Cu Chi tells the real story of the tunnel rats of the Vietnam war.” Fighting underground like that took a special kind of personality and a special kind of physique. Bosch is slight but strong and wiry, not big and muscle-bound, and he has balls of steel. He puts his wiry strength to work occasionally in the books, but only against other WHAMs. He puts his balls to work too, but only with WHAFs. One of the WHAFs bears him a daughter, but he doesn’t learn about this till a later book.

By then, Bosch fans will already know that Connelly has an interest in both pornography and paedophilia. He wouldn’t be writing about those things so often otherwise. Indeed, he occasionally combines the two interests and writes about kiddie porn. The murder-victim in The Concrete Blonde is a porn-actress called Magna Cum Loudly and Bosch has to enter the seedy and sleazy world of L.A.’s adult porn industry to track down her WHAM killer. Kiddie porn turns up in both City of Bones (2002) and Angels Flight (1999). In the latter, circumstantial evidence implicates a black petty criminal in a paedophile sex-murder, but he didn’t do it, of course. The victim turns out to be have been pimped out on-line by her WHAM father.

Is there no end to WHAM evil? Not in the Bosch books, but I do sometimes have to wonder about what is going on in the depths of Connelly’s mind. Bosch discovers he has a beautiful young daughter in Lost Light (2003), but in 9 Dragons she’s living an ocean away in Hong Kong with her mother, the ex-FBI agent Eleanor Wish. However, Wish is killed off before the end of that book and Bosch is living alone with his daughter in The Drop. Can you say Lolita? If you can, I wonder if Connelly’s subconscious is saying it too. Lolita (1955) was another study of WHAM evil and I found myself unable to re-read it when I tried it again recently. It got too yucky. I’ve found the same with some of Connelly’s books, both ones with Bosch and ones without him. Or ones that don’t centre on him, because his characters wander in and out of each other’s series. It’s an interesting way for Connelly to shift perspective and compare and contrast his own creations. Bosch is big in his own series, but sometimes peripheral elsewhere. One of the best Connelly books may be in the shortest series: the two books devoted to the crime-reporter Jack McEvoy, The Poet (1996) and The Scarecrow (2009). The latter was one of the books I couldn’t finish when I tried it again. A dumb black ’banga is charged with a gruesome sex-murder, but surprise, surprise: the murder was really committed by a WHAM serial killer with a leg-iron fetish and a very high IQ. The Poet I could finish when I tried it again. It’s gruesome too, but I liked its clever plot and its use of Edgar Allan Poe.

I also liked the clever plot of Blood Work (1998), a non-Bosch which is the only book I’ve ever felt compelled to re-read immediately I had finished it. The twist at the end of the book cast everything that happened before it into a new light, so I was almost experiencing a different book when I read it again. That is good writing and Connelly deserves his huge success, though I don’t think he would have been allowed to have it if he hadn’t toed the liberal line from the very beginning. I don’t like the fact that Connelly is a liberal, but I do think there’s hope for him. And I definitely admire his ability to produce interesting books at a rate of more than one a year since 1992. When The Black Box is published later this month (November 2012), it will be the seventeenth Bosch book and the twenty-sixth of Connelly’s crime-novels altogether. They’re sometimes crude, sometimes contrived, but usually compelling and often clever too. He’s wrong to slam so relentlessly on WHAMs, but coming events will show him the error of his ways. And slamming WHAMs is a tribute to their importance: whether he knows it or not, Connelly has always been a white male supremacist. Harry Bosch, like the painter he was named after, is an example of why WHAMs matter, why they’re so envied and hated, and why liberalism, with the help of many WHAMs, is so desperate to do them down.

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