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06 Sept 2025
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06 Sept 2025
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It was a bittersweet moment when bestselling crime writer Michael Connelly was told that the series featuring his signature detective Harry Bosch – the longest-running character on streaming television in the world – was being cancelled.
After seven series of Bosch, which began in 2014, and three of Bosch: Legacy on Prime Video, Connelly, who also created The Lincoln Lawyer, was told there wouldn’t be a fourth series for Bosch.
“I just wish we knew we were ending it when we were writing it and filming it, and I think we would have gone out in a slightly different way. There were a couple of loose ends and luckily the last episode was an introduction to (Renée) Ballard.”
And his creation The Lincoln Lawyer (in which lawyer Mickey Haller runs his office from his Lincoln car), which was adapted into a film starring Matthew McConaughey and later a Netflix series starring Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, has just been renewed for a fourth season.
The former journalist, who has had to cancel his latest US and England tour because of a medical procedure, is now considering how his 40th book might make the screen and says he’s already had some interest regarding adaptation.
Nightshade, a stand-alone thriller, introduces a new detective, County Sheriff Detective Stilwell, who has effectively been put out to pasture on the picturesque Catalina Island off California after a fall-out with a fellow detective on the Los Angeles mainland.
Connelly, 68, favours using less well-known actors, or those you can’t put a name to, to play his lead characters in the screen adaptations of his work.
“Sometimes it’s just somebody who can lead through example and Titus Welliver (who plays Harry Bosch in both TV series) has the gravitas of a guy who knows how to act well and is like automatic, not having to do a number of takes because he doesn’t know his lines.”
The author, who has lived in Los Angeles for nearly 40 years but also has a home in Florida, where he grew up, has been to Catalina Island many times and was aware that there was just one detective there assigned to handle everything except homicide, which is left to the LA County Sheriff’s Department.
“I talked to a guy who was an old hand who could tell me about the politics, the place and what it’s like to be the lone detective on the island. He actually retired and now lives in Texas. But I liked the idea of it almost being like a private detective story, a guy who doesn’t have a (police) partner and works cases by himself.”
His interest in crime was sparked when, at 16, he was driving home after his dishwashing shift at a Fort Lauderdale resort at night when witnessed a man running and hiding a gun in a hedge before fleeing.
After pulling over and finding the gun wrapped in a shirt, Connelly saw police cars arriving. It turned out the suspect had just shot somebody trying to steal their car. The young Connelly spent the night with detectives in a police station, and ended up looking at line-ups but was unable to identify the suspect, who was never caught.
Today, he doesn’t support the Trump administration’s take on gun rights.
“I don’t have a gun. I live in a community where there’s a lot of crime but I don’t feel the need to have a gun. It’s a root source of a lot of problems. A lot of the violence in this community is the easy access to weapons.
“I know there are tons of cops out here who are Trumpers, but they’re not the ones that help me with my books.”
“I’ve taken shots at Trump in my books and I’ll do a book signing and invariably somebody would say something,” he continues. “Many times people have said, ‘I used to love your books but I can’t read them anymore because you put your politics into them’. It doesn’t bother me. I never respond to anyone who says something like that.”
Unlike Connelly’s more famous detectives, his latest, Stilwell, has found a happy romantic relationship with his partner, assistant harbourmaster Tash Dano, on the island.
“This is the first main character I’ve ever written who has a reasonably healthy and stable relationship with a partner. If you look back across 39 books before, I didn’t have that. Harry Bosch, Renée Ballard, Mickey Haller, they all have fraught relationships and are all looking for something, which makes them easier to write.”
“I was thinking, isn’t it about time I wrote about someone who is more like me in that regard than these characters I’ve dwelled on for 30-plus years? It’s about the accommodations couples make, but at the end of the day, they know why they’re in the relationship together. I like that aspect of it.”
With the TV series cancelled for now, will he ever kill off his first hero, Bosch?
Nightshade by Michael Connelly is published on May 22 by Orion, priced £22
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