The Black Echo

A decade or so ago, I read Michael Connelly's "Blood Work", the start of a series about an ex-FBI agent, didn't think much of it and never went back for more.

I now know that I should have started with Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch books. I decided to try them out because I keep hearing them referenced by other writers as something their own characters read, to set them in a particular milieu. I felt as if I was missing out on something.
I always have to start a series from the beginning. In this case, the beginning was twenty four years ago. When I saw that "The Black Echo" was published in 1992, I was doubtful about how well a story about an LAPD detective would stand up after all that time.

I found that "The Black Echo" stands up very show more well indeed, mainly because the plot is much more complex and much more original that it at first seems and the story is told with a momentum that never lets up.

It took me a while to go back to the nineties, when cops wore pagers and had to find pay-phones to make calls; when smoking was seen a normal or perhaps even inevitable and complaining about it was a character flaw; and when serving police officers were still likely to veterans of the Vietnam War. The way Connelly writes, building Bosch's world one detail at a time with no details wasted, the nineties paraphernalia came across as authentic period detail rather than sounding dated or tired.

Even after only one book, I can see Harry Bosch's potential as a strong, long-running character. His strengths: persistence, a need to know, a logical mind, a certain ruthlessness and his flaws: an inability to become part of the institutional family, a smart mouth when faced with incompetent authority, war-memory induced insomnia, and a chronic inability to have fun, provide a fascinating potential for success and self-destruction.

I listened to Dick Hill narrate "The Black Echo". Perhaps it's because I'm more used to hearing him read the Jack Reacher novels, but I found myself comparing Harry Bosch and Jack Reacher. At first the two seemed to be cut from the same cloth but by the end of "Black Echo" I realised that Connelly's plot was more complex and more realistic than most of Child's novels and that, unlike the increasingly psychopathic Reacher, Bosch is actually trying to solve things within the law. He's also capable of a great deal more introspection than Reacher.

So now I'm a Harry Bosch fan albeit more than twenty years after everyone else. Still, it's good to know that there's still new stuff to find out there, show less

Meet Harry Bosch - an LAPD detective, recently transferred to the Hollywood Division after being part of a very messy and public case that stopped the LAPD from kicking him out from the force. He is not very happy with that - but he is doing the best he can. And one day he is called at the scene of a murder - and recognize the dead man as one of the people that were in the tunnels of Vietnam with him.

The novel is written at the time when the war in Vietnam was the last war for the USA and the survivors (one way or another) of that war are a big part of the story. The murder leads to an older crime, one connected to Vietnam in more that one way. And Harry needs to solve it - because of the connection he feels and because it is his job. show more

More people die, some diamonds make an appearance, FBI muscles in on the investigation and somewhere along the line, betrayals happen - both old and new. Just when Harry believes he finally got to the bottom of it, something happens and all needs to be reevaluated.

So many twists and turns should sound gimmicky. But Connelly has a style that somehow works - and this ends up one of the better thrillers that I had read lately. It drags occasionally - some of the scenes could have been a lot shorter - and I could have lived without the two IA detectives but despite that, it is still a pretty good book.

Highly recommended. show less

This is the first book in the Harry Bosch series and it provides the information that all the rest of the series will depend on…so even if you read out of order…READ THIS ONE FIRST. It tells the tale of a protracted and difficult investigation into a daring year-old bank heist. As the investigation unfolds, complications steadily arise. Harry is doggedly pursued by two thuggish, idiot detectives from Internal Affairs and he meets Eleanor Wish. The biggest problem I had with the book… and what lost it a half star…was that the chapters are "mammoth". Otherwise …I have read every word this author has ever written since 1991, and have to say that the Harry Bosch series is simply... in a word…outstanding. This one may well be the show more standard by which everything else Michael Connelly will ever write can, and will, be judged. show less

Until about fifteen years ago I used to devour American crime novels, rushing through one after another with a fairly voracious appetite. But then something happened. I don't know what - I wish I did - but suddenly I found it very difficult ever to complete one.

I was, then, pleasantly surprised by 'The Black Echo', the first novel to feature Harry 'Hieronymous' Bosch, jaded homicide detective and Vietnam War veteran. Called to the site of a mysterious death, Bosch recognises the corpse as someone with whom he served in Vietnam, some twenty years previously. The body had been found in a reservoir overflow pipe near the Mulholland Dam, and the initial diagnosis suggests that this is merely another instance of a dysfunctional Vietnam show more veteran meeting their death through drug addiction.

Bosch could so easily have been a disastrously clichéd character himself. Having been discharged form the army he had entered LAPD and gradually risen to the Homicide Team. As the novel opens, though, we start to learn that his career has had as many downs as ups. He had been instrumental in capturing a serial killer, which had led to a local TV station paying him a fee to use his name for a sensationalist series, but his fatal shooting of a criminal in another incident had led to him being investigated at length by Internal Affairs. All this sounds rather familiar - just another disgruntled, unorthodox detective. Connelly does, however, succeed in retaining Bosch's credibility.

This novel also strays across different genres - while Bosch's unconventional thought processes drives the investigation forward, the book also falls soundly into police procedural territory. Yet Connelly also offers a frightening insight into the work of many of the American troops in Vietnam who literally fought underground. The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army used hundreds of miles of tunnels through the combat zones, and teams of American troops would be sent down to try to destroy them, often finding themselves in horrific combat beneath the ground. Connelly marshalls all of this with great dexterity, all the more remarkable as this was his first novel.

I shall definitely be looking forward to reading more about Hieronymous Bosch. show less

First impressions can be so deceptive. Well, actually, first, second and third impressions, but who's judging? Me. Totally me.*

Still on the search for a new mystery series, and Michael Connelly's name keeps coming up, mainly because I always misspell John Connolly. John's writing is frequently lyrical and equally brutal, so there's only so much I can take. Perhaps the American Michael will be less demanding? Why, yes, he is. How much less demanding? Well, take this little sample from early on in Harry Bosch's murder investigation:

"He became restless. He looked down into the green glass ashtray and saw that all the butts were unfiltered Camels. Was that Meadow's brand or his killer's? He got up and walked around the room. The faint smell show more of urine hit him again. He walked back into the bedroom. He opened the drawers of the bureau and stared at their contents once more. Nothing turned in his mind. He went to the window and looked out at the back end of another apartment building across an alley. There was a man with a supermarket cart in the alley. He was poking through a Dumpster with a stick. The car was half full of aluminum cans. Bosch walked away and sat down on the bed and put his head back against the wall where the headboard should have been and the white paint was a dingy gray. The wall felt cool against his back."

Speechless. Mrs. Meunch, my ninth grade Advanced English teacher, would have emptied her pen of red ink had I turned in that paragraph. Dull, repetitive, uninteresting construction and description, as well as virtually meaningless in plot advancement. But here's where first impressions mislead: given that Connelly worked as a journalist, I didn't think his writing skills were that limited on purpose, and a sample chapter at the end of this book for his series starring a lawyer provided proof of a more sophisticated style. I suspect he was trying to echo both the staccato noir voice, as well as the neutral, progressive statements one might find in a police or medical report, that are supposed to be how things 'are' instead of with interpretation. It probably doesn't hurt that the style might also appeal to the mass market in digestibility.

That said, it ended up being an entertaining read. Connelly can't help himself, and as the investigation heats up, the language becomes more complex to handle the demands of perception and action. It ended up pulling me through the dusty Dr. Seuss language into a complex web of conflict between Harry Bosch, his current supervisor, Internal Affairs, the FBI and a hidden killer. Although I felt sure some of the situations introduced were red herrings--and boy, was Bosch downright stupid a couple of times--I wasn't sure of where it would end up. I liked that there was some unpredictability, as so few mass-market books actually surprise me.

The book shows it's age, particularly the lack of cell phones, with the time period reliance on pagers and pay phones. Harry was always trying to get someone to run something on a computer for him (!) and everyone was bitching about typewritten reports, and the proportion of typewriters to detectives. However, that may be an appeal for some readers. I'm thinking it'd be worth giving to my dad, former cop and Vietnam vet, who still hasn't used a cell phone and only adopted an answering machine with technological support from friends.

Overall, while Harry Bosch is no Matt Scudder, I'd say it's not a bad series to break up my fantasy and sci-fi reads. We'll see if it follows the Spencer pattern of going downhill once Connelly achieves mass-market success.

* This book also meets the Mom Seal of Approval: "it's hard to put down."

Three and a half stars. show less

Until about fifteen years ago I used to devour American crime novels, rushing through one after another with a fairly voracious appetite. But then something happened. I don't know what - I wish I did - but suddenly I found it very difficult ever to complete one.

I was, then, pleasantly surprised by 'The Black Echo', the first novel to feature Harry 'Hieronymous' Bosch, jaded homicide detective and Vietnam War veteran. Called to the site of a mysterious death, Bosch recognises the corpse as someone with whom he served in Vietnam, some twenty years previously. The body had been found in a reservoir overflow pipe near the Mulholland Dam, and the initial diagnosis suggests that this is merely another instance of a dysfunctional Vietnam show more veteran meeting their death through drug addiction.

Bosch could so easily have been a disastrously clichéd character himself. Having been discharged form the army he had entered LAPD and gradually risen to the Homicide Team. As the novel opens, though, we start to learn that his career has had as many downs as ups. He had been instrumental in capturing a serial killer, which had led to a local TV station paying him a fee to use his name for a sensationalist series, but his fatal shooting of a criminal in another incident had led to him being investigated at length by Internal Affairs. All this sounds rather familiar - just another disgruntled, unorthodox detective. Connelly does, however, succeed in retaining Bosch's credibility.

This novel also strays across different genres - while Bosch's unconventional thought processes drives the investigation forward, the book also falls soundly into police procedural territory. Yet Connelly also offers a frightening insight into the work of many of the American troops in Vietnam who literally fought underground. The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army used hundreds of miles of tunnels through the combat zones, and teams of American troops would be sent down to try to destroy them, often finding themselves in horrific combat beneath the ground. Connelly marshalls all of this with great dexterity, all the more remarkable as this was his first novel.

I shall definitely be looking forward to reading more about Hieronymous Bosch. show less

There is nowhere better for me to try to understand the mindset of Harry Bosch or indeed his creator Michael Connelly by starting again where it all began book one in the series.

Harry is best described as "a detective who would do the right thing no matter what the cost. A man with a sharp worn code of conduct. A classic outsider.".... In The Black Echo we learn about Harry's activities as a tunnel rat during the Vietnam war and how the horrors of this underground hell helped shape him as a detective with the will to survive and a loner's code of justice. When the body of a fellow "rat" Billy Meadows is discovered in a drain outlet, Harry is determined to find the perpetrator responsible and bring justice to his onetime comrade in arms. show more In this endeavour he is joined by FBI agent Eleanor Wish, a relationship develops that becomes personal and leaves Harry wondering if her intentions are honourable or does she harbor an underlying agenda.

The weakness of the story is the plot; dirty money profits from Saigon laundered as diamonds/precious stones and kept secret in a bank vault in downtown LA. The only way to retrieve the hidden stash is to tunnel deep into the innards of the bank. In contrast the strength of the story is the superb charactization of the main players. Bosch, Eleanor Wish and Deputy Chief Irvin Irving who appears to be on a one man crusade against what he views as underhand tactics by a maverick lone detective.

As always Michael Connnelly is razor sharp in his acute observations of the human spirit....."Sunsets did that here. Made you forget it was the smog that made their colors so brilliant, and that behind every pretty picture there could be an ugly story."....."He was a worn-out old man whose eyes had quit caring about anything but the odds on three year olds"..."I believe that shit happens. I believe that the best you can do in this job is come out even"....... show less