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The Drop left me with questions
Book Review
By Derryll White
Connelly, Michael (2011). The Drop.
Michael Connelly was a student of Raymond Chandler, a prominent mystery writer of the 1940s and ‘50s who was the creator of the Los Angeles detective character Philip Marlowe. In the early 1980s Connelly covered the crime beat for a series of Florida newspapers before moving to the Los Angeles Times.
Connelly is now a veteran of the mystery genre; what the press and publishers now call ‘police procedurals’ in a blatant acceptance of European terminology dating back to the works of Swedish writers Sjöwall & Wahlöö in the mid-1960s.
Connelly is one of the very best of the Americans writing in this genre, and his character Detective Harry Bosch is one of the strongest and most conflicted players. I have always loved Harry’s penchant to rail against bureaucracy and ignore the procedural directives that impeded his work. Now he is in the Open-Unsolved Unit for the Los Angeles Police Department – what TV calls the ‘Cold Cases’.
The story is loosely hinged on a political context – bad L.A. councilman, crooked tendering of city contracts. Michael Connelly never really goes to the heart of the political or social reality however, choosing instead to focus on how the L.A. Police Department functions and the intimacies of Detective Harry Bosch’s life. Connelly does dwell on the political realities affecting the chief of police, and how that feeds down the chain of command – “high jingo” he calls it, large political influence.
Although I like Connelly’s work I was left wanting more with this novel. There is no attempt to look at the matrix that allows large capital to control decisions or place people in positions of power. Harry Bosch as a character continues to be appealing and Michael Connelly continues to develop him and look at the issues affecting his life, such as the pension issue that the novel takes its title from. The overall book falls short of my expectations and, while the story was engaging, the writing was not that exciting. I will take a look at ‘The Black Box’ which is the next novel in the Bosch series, but I do want more from Connelly’s work.
In the end ‘The Drop’ made me feel that I should go back and explore some of Connelly’s earlier work, re-examining the feeling that I really respected this writer. This work left me questioning why I liked Michael Connelly’s writing.
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Excerpts from the novel:
LOS ANGELES – It was a city where not enough people cared about making it a better and safer place to live.
PREDATORS – It was a gruesome story and Bosch knew that a version of it was shared by many of the denizens of the streets and the prisons, the traumas and depravities of childhood manifesting themselves in adulthood, often in repetitive behavior.Arry BHarry
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
