Tea at Trianon: Michael Connelly Explains His New Crime Novel Hero

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, December 20, 2022

Michael Connelly Explains His New Crime Novel Hero

I actually really like the Renée Ballard character. From Los Angeles Magazine:

Connelly’s 37th novel, Desert Star, set in the L.A. underworld, features a character who’s been with the 66-year-old author from the very start—former homicide detective turned private eye Harry Bosch—as well as a relative newcomer: Renée Ballard, a hotheaded, tough-as-nails young LAPD detective who began popping up in Connelly’s fiction about four years ago. Put in charge of the newly revived Open-Unsolved Unit, which deals with apparently hopeless cases, she enlists Bosch’s help in solving the murder of 16-year-old Sarah Pearlman, sister of the city council member who helped resuscitate the cold-case unit.
Meanwhile, Bosch procures Ballard’s help in his continuing hunt for his own pet cold case, the slaying of an entire family by a murderer who remains at large.
Bosch is somewhat unique as a crime novel hero in that he grows older from book to book. When he first appeared, in 1992’s Edgar Award-winning novel The Black Echo, he was just 42 years old. In this latest, he’s 72.
Though Bosch has reached retirement age, Connelly hasn’t been ready to put the character out to pasture. This is why Ballard—based on real-life L.A. detective Mitzi Roberts, who’s been advising Connelly on his books for years—started appearing in his storylines.
“I needed to pair Bosch with someone who understands he still has skills and that he can go on,” says Connelly. “Ballard became a way of getting to that.” Connelly adds that he’s in constant contact with Roberts whenever he writes about the character. “I didn’t want to get into the situation where I imagine what it’s like to be a woman in a male-dominated bureaucracy,” he says. (Connelly began his career as a newspaper reporter in Florida, where he was short-listed for a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the 1985 crash of Delta Flight 191, and, later, worked at the Los Angeles Times.) (Read more.)