Anyone that knows me well, would know that I read alot of books! Not just technical or non-fiction ones, but a heap of fiction as well. One of the genres I love is high quality crime fiction, typified by Ian Rankin, Michael Connelly, Peter Robinson and to a lesser extent James Lee Burke. Michael Connelly’s portrayal of detective Harry Bosch is nothing short of brilliant.
I’ve read every Michael Connelly book so far; the last was ‘The Lincoln Lawyer” (not a Bosch novel, but the next is!) I haven’t read anything in the genre that can compare from the point of view of the story content and the quality of the writing.
It would be fair to say I’m very much a Michael Connelly fan. So it was a Huge disappointment to read ‘Crime Beat: True Stories of Cops and Killers’. Michael Connelly started out his career as a Police Reporter for the Los Angeles Times and this book is a collection of stories that inspired many of the plots (or sub-plots) in his work. The introduction is great; it has that special quality that all of Michael Connely’s books have. But the rest! It just seems to be re-prints of newspaper stories written long before Connelly honed and perfected his art. I was barely able to finish most of the ‘stories’. This seems to be a shameless attempt by the publisher to profit on Michael Connelly’s writing reputation by way of rehashing old, poorly-edited material.