Bestselling Author Michael Connelly on Taking Harry Bosch from Books to TV

Reading Raymond Chandler murder mysteries inspired author Michael Connelly to pick up a pen and begin writing crime fiction — and it is evident that the inspiration took hold if you read Connelly’s best-selling novels, featuring LAPD Det. Harry Bosch, but also if you watch his Amazon series Bosch, premiering its second season on March 11. 

Starring Titus Welliver in the title role, Season 2 of Bosch is based predominantly on the novel Trunk Music, in which Bosch is back to work after an involuntary leave of absence and his first case begins when a dead body found in the trunk of a car on Mulholland Drive appears to have a mob connection and leads Bosch and his investigation to Las Vegas. As the case becomes more complex, and intensely personal, Bosch follows a dangerous trail of corruption and collusion, one that uncovers the dark side of the police department and threatens Bosch’s relentless pursuit of truth.

Parade.com had the opportunity to go one-on-one with Connelly at a press event for the Amazon series, and following is his take on transitioning the book to a TV series, why Welliver was the right actor for the job, making Los Angeles a character in the series instead of a background, and more.

So Trunk Music is the book that Season 2 was adapted from, but I know for Season 1, you used more than one book, so are there other books that you pulled from for this as well? 

Trunk Music is the spine that goes 1-10, but we also use a big part of The Drop. That almost goes 1-10, too, and then The Last Coyote is another book that’s in there. We build the season with little hints throughout, and then it all comes together at the end.

One of the best parts of Bosch is that you shoot in real locations, and you cover the East side of Los Angeles, instead of the West side that we normally see, and it gives it a gritty, real feel to it. Can you talk about making Los Angeles another character as opposed to just a location? 

When [executive producer] Henrik Bastin and I met in December, 2011 — almost 5 years ago — on that first meeting, it was like, “If we’re going to go forward with this, I have to have assurances that every shot will be in L.A., because L.A. is a character in the books, and that’s what our goal should be.” It was a no-brainer for him. He agreed, and I remember in the early stages, we were saying, “Can we possibly shoot this without ever going west of La Cienega?” That was a goal, but we didn’t make it.

We shot in Venice in the first season, but we rarely go west of Hollywood. The books are more set in that area, and Harry’s from that area, so we want Harry to stay close to where he was born and raised, and the parts of L.A. that he loves.

We find it very receptive when we go into these neighborhoods, like in Echo Park, because they’re not that often trod by filmmakers, and you get more character that way.  When you start going west, everything’s new, and it’s interchangeable with almost any city. If you stay close to downtown and along the Sunset Blvd. line, you really get to see the character in the city.

You worked at the L.A. Times covering the crime beat, is Bosch based on a cop that you knew? A compilation of cops? How did you come to him? 

In the beginning, he was definitely a compilation. I was talking to probably 100 detectives a week, trying to find out what was going on and covering stories. I took little bits and pieces from countless cops. A lot of it came when I was covering trials and I would see them testify. I think that reveals some of their character, but I was always throwing stuff into the big net for use when I would write books.

Then over time, it got more refined and I got a small cadre of detectives that helped me a lot, and I brought them to the show. So there’s three of them that are advisors to the show, and I would say in the last 10-12 Harry Bosch books, I’ve just used them. But they’re the type of people if I have a specific question they’ll say, “I don’t know, but I’ll get a guy,” and, through them, I’ll talk to someone who will be more specific on what I need.

Two of your previous books – Blood Work and the Lincoln Lawyer — were made into movies.  When you decided that this could be a series, did you want to be more involved in it?  Are you actually in the writers’ room and have you written any of the scripts? 

Yeah, that was a thinking process. I had very little to do with the two movies, and they were characters that were important to me, but no one’s as important as Harry Bosch. My whole reputation and creative thought as a novelist is really wrapped around Harry Bosch, so he’s near and dear. I did initially in the ’90s try to get a movie made, and it was tied up in rights and contractual hell. By the time I got him back, it was different.

They weren’t really making cop movies, but they were making some really good serialized television, so that’s the direction I wanted to go, and the caveats were — we already talked about it — it had to be filmed in L.A. and I had to be there. I had to be part of it, so, yeah, I’m in the writer’s room. I came from the writing room today, and I’ve written my name on, I think, five of the 20 scripts so far.

One of the things you do in the book is you don’t really describe Bosch, so why was Titus right to play him?

Well, this is weird, because this is really playing with what’s sacred about reading. I don’t put a lot of description in the books because I write books the way I like to read them, and that is I like to build images and be a creative reader, and so I write that way. There’s very little description of Harry through the 18 or 19 books that he’s in.

So it was really a feeling, not really a look, we were going for when we were casting this. We were looking for somebody who could project the inner world and the demons that he’s carrying, because Harry carries a lot of them, and that’s why Titus got the part.  In my own imagination, he doesn’t really look like Harry Bosch on the outside. He looks just like him on the inside, because he has baggage and he carries it and he has a way of, as an actor, projecting that, and that’s really what we were looking for. That was the most important aspect. Not whether he had a mustache, or things like that.

Is there somebody that does look like Bosch? 

I created him in my head. I totally created Harry Bosch in my head, and I had written five or six books when the OJ Simpson case went to trial, and the deputy DA they brought down from Alameda County to do the DNA  — his name was Rockne Harmon — and the DA goes and asks questions of the DNA expert, and I was going, like, “Wow!  That’s Harry Bosch! He looks just like the guy who’s in my head.” It’s weird. Look him up. He’s retired now. [Google him], and you can get a visual on him. It’s always freaked me out how close he was to the thing I made up in my head.

Bosch’s house is built on stilts, and I’m wondering if the fact that he lives on stilts says something about who he is, because California is earthquake country.

That’s the kind of house he has in the books, and it’s always been the idea of someone just holding on by their fingernails to what’s going on in their life, and it’s symbolized by his house.

How much did you modernize the series, because in the books Harry was a tunnel rat in Vietnam, which would make him retired.

The proving ground for Harry, or the cauldron where he was fired, was in the tunnels of Vietnam, so you’re right, it doesn’t work, so we jumped the history up to the Gulf War. The Second Gulf War, where Harry, as a police detective — like what happened with many people in the LAPD — he was allowed to leave and fight that war. We actually have him in both Gulf Wars. He was in the first Gulf War, then he became a cop, then he got a leave to go back. I’m told they didn’t call them “tunnel rats,” but there’s lots of tunnels in Afghanistan and under Baghdad and so forth, so he’s had that same kind of scarring experience of having to go into the dark by yourself, not with a troop of soldiers, and it’s a very scary part of war that he’s experienced in both the book and the show, just in different wars.

Don’t you think there’s a built in audience for Bosch? People who are fans of the books? Don’t you think they want to see it come to life? 

That was our springboard. We knew if we do this right, we’ll definitely get the book readers, but, of course, we want to expand that universe. The book world is so much smaller in comparison to the movie or TV world, so we needed to build something that would satisfy the people who know the books, know the character already going into it, and we really wanted to hook and wow the people who have never heard of Harry Bosch.

Bosch also stars Jamie Hector as Jerry Edgar, Amy Aquino as Lt. Grace Billets, Sarah Clarke as Eleanor Wish, Madison Lintz as Maddie Bosch, Jeri Ryan as Veronica Allen and Lance Reddick as Deputy Chief Irvin Irving.

Bosch begins streaming all 10 episodes of Season 2 on Amazon on Friday, March 11.