Crime Beat: A Decade of Covering Cops and Killers

Before he became a novelist, Michael Connelly was a crime reporter, covering the detectives who worked the homicide beat. In these vivid, hard-hitting articles, Connelly leads the reader past the yellow police tape as he follows the investigators, the victims, their families and friends—and, of course, the killers—to tell the real stories of murder and its aftermath.
Connelly’s firsthand observations would lend inspiration to his novels. His first book, The Black Echo, was drawn from a real-life bank heist, while Trunk Music was based on an unsolved case of a man found in the trunk of his Rolls-Royce. And the vital details of Connelly’s best-known characters, both heroes and villains, would get their realism from the cops and killers he reported on: from loner detective Harry Bosch to the manipulative serial killer the Poet.
Crime Beat presents stories as fascinating as they are chilling, from the serial killer of young models who cuts a swath across the country to elude police, to the man who leads a bizarre double life on two coasts before his elaborate hoax breaks down. Here, too, we can see Connelly’s razor sharp eye for telling details: a worn-down earpiece on a cop’s eyeglasses, the revealing high school yearbook quotes of an alleged cold-blooded murderer, the checkered career of a bumbling gang of killers who publicly advertise their services.
Stranger than fiction and every bit as gripping, these pieces show once again that Michael Connelly is not only a master of his craft but also one of the great American writers in any form. Crime Beat confirms why the Washington Post distinguishes Connelly as “the real thing, taking us into the parts of the real America that most of us never visit because they don’t even know where, or what, they are.”