Impact

by Rick Blechta

My wife and I have been enjoying the Bosch series on Amazon. I’ve read pretty well all Michael Connelly’s Bosch novels over the years and enjoyed most of them immensely. Being a former LA Times crime reporter, his prose has real immediacy. Or would it be better to use the word “impact” to describe Michael’s prose style?

If you haven’t read any Connelly, his prose is rather sparse. With only bare bones description — just enough to set a scene — a lot is left to the reader’s “mind’s eye” to flesh things out but because he’s writing about Los Angeles and the surrounding area most of the time and we’re all familiar with that from a myriad of TV shows set in that city, this is no great handicap.

His dialogue is crisp and again pretty sparse. He’s certainly got the cop lingo down, even in his earlier books. I would guess this is a result from being a crime reporter. I also never get the feeling he’s showing off how much he knows. All those “cop details” come out in asides or they’re organically woven into the plot. I know for a fact how tough that is to do!

Anyway, getting back to the Amazon series, I’m finding it really quite superb. The cast is well-chosen — especially Titus Welliver as the title character — and more than get the job done. Production design is excellent and the writing uniformly terrific.

What’s interesting about that is numerous screenwriters have been employed — Connelly among them. You’d expect a dog’s breakfast of styles and colliding interpretations of characterization. None of that happens which is really quite surprising. If I hadn’t noticed the screenwriting credits, I never would have suspected that most of the episodes have different writers.

But the real takeaway from watching these episodes — we’re halfway through the second season — is the fact that I find myself constantly thinking about what I’ve seen. I’m not talking about mentally rehashing the most recently watched episode, either. Before sitting down to write this post, a couple of things that happened back in series one was going through my feeble brain.

To me, that’s the gold standard of impact. We’ve all read books or seen movies or plays that have stuck with us for a long time. What is it about those that causes them to stick with us? Why do these have such an impact?

The really interesting thing is that Bosch is having the same effect on my wife, so it’s not just me and my likes and dislikes that is causing a reaction. To be fair, she also enjoys reading Connelly, but I think something else is at work past that.

One last thing, Bosch is not retellings of the Bosch novels. Yes, they freely use characters and  situations but combine several books in each series to create something wholly new. I don’t believe I’ve seen that done to such an extent before.

But at the end of the day I’m left with this: How the heck can I accomplish this in my own writing?

Okay, Type M readers, if you’ve watched Bosch, what did you think of it? Am I correct about its impact?