Michael Connelly on his new paperback The Overlook

http://youtube.com/v/oBtugbOIxZc

Michael Connelly escribe….

«…Creo en la teoría de la bala única. Puedes enamorarte y hacer el amor muchas veces, pero sólo hay una bala con tu nombre grabado en el costado. Y si tienes suerte suficiente de que te alcancen con esa bala, la herida no se cura nunca»

Michael connelly, Luz Perdida

Michael Connelly en la red

Algunos links interesantes que encontré sobre Michael conelly

Por ejemplo El Rincon de Michael Conelly, donde se encontrarán unas breves reseñas para orientar a los nuevos lectores en la obra de Conelly, a través de un repaso por sus novelas.

La página oficial de Michael Conelly nos trae una breve biografía, enlaces a videos, extractos de novelas y mucha información para los lectores más devotos.

Una reseña sobre ciudad de los huesos aparecida en January Magazine, una de las novelas que más disfrute de la serie Bosch.

Y finalmente una interesante entrevista aparecida en Powells.com, titulada en: Michael Connelly’s Shades of Black

Michael Connellly: "Cuentame la historia, cuentame la verdad"

Michael Conelly siempre ha tenido una manera muy particular de enfrentar sus historias, cuantos apasionados de la saga de Harry Bosch se habràn preguntado alguna vez ¿Còmo se le ocurren tantas cosas?

En el artìculo que hoy posteo, creo que se encontrara màs de una respuesta, es un breve atisbo a su vida antes de ser el escritor que hoy conocemos, esta referido a sus màs de diez años como reportero de la secciòn criminal del Sun – Sentinel, de las casi mas de 1000 historias que sobre asesinatos escribiò en su època de reportero, a como su primer dìa le regalò ya un motivo para que hoy pudiera fabular, y creo que en especial su reflexiòn final sobre la manera en que la ficciòn se entrecruza con la realidad.

Tell the story, tell the truth

Michael Connelly
May 28, 2006

When I was a journalist, I used to say that death was my beat. I was a crime beat reporter and in the hierarchy of newspaper priorities murder was at the top of the list. To borrow a motto from the police homicide squad, my day began when your day ended. All told in more than a decade of covering crime I probably wrote at least a thousand murder stories. It was my specialty. It was what I liked to do.

Along the way I was very lucky. I only wrote one murder story about someone I actually knew. And when I look back on that story now I regret how I handled it. I kept the pose of the impersonal reporter when I now know I should have honored the dead. I should have told the truth.

I met Anita Spearman on my first day on the job at the Sun-Sentinel in 1981. The newspaper was mounting a circulation push to the north and the plan was to include West Palm Beach in its coverage. My job as a municipal reporter was to work out on the edge of the new circulation zone the frontier, we used to call it.

The plan was to lay the groundwork for a circulation push by first creating a voice in West Palm Beach. And for a while I was that voice. That was what brought me into contact with Spearman on the day I reported for duty.

Anita was the assistant city manager of West Palm Beach. One of her duties was to act as media liaison. On that first day, when I entered the administration offices at City Hall, I was sent to her. Anita could have received me in all kinds of ways. You work for who? You came from where? You want to do what? But the way she did receive me I will never forget. She said welcome, let me show you around.

I was less than a year removed from college. I was barely a professional journalist. But we had lunch that day and so began the relationship between a reporter and a source. And during the next several months Spearman never once gave me short shrift. It didn’t matter that the number of West Palm Beach readers who read my reports in the Sun-Sentinel was negligible; she never considered that. She knew I had a job to do and she helped me do it. She became more than a source. She became a friendly face and voice I saw or heard every day that I came to work.

The West Palm Beach beat was only a start for me. I had a secret goal at the time. I wanted to write crime novels some day, and to do that I knew I had to know the turf. This meant I had to get onto the crime beat. Soon the opportunity arose, and I left the city beat for the crime beat, first in Palm Beach County and then in the home office in Fort Lauderdale. I have to admit I lost touch with Anita as I moved geographically and journalistically away from her.

And then journalistically we crossed paths again. Late in 1985 a story broke in Palm Beach County. Anita Spearman, the 48-year-old assistant city manager, had been murdered. At home recovering from a mastectomy, she was brutally beaten to death in her own bed by an intruder.

It was a big story but it wasn’t mine. I worked the crime beat in the next county down and there were others in place to run with the story. But I followed the case closely because I had known her. I had forever been touched by Anita’s kindness to me.

Five months after Anita’s murder, Palm Beach County sheriff’s detectives cracked the case, arresting her husband, Robert Spearman, in a murder-for-hire scheme. The detectives had linked Spearman to a cadre of guns for hire who operated out of a strip bar in Knoxville and advertised their services in Soldier of Fortune magazine. The killers were linked to murders and attempted murders across the country and even an attempt to detonate a bomb on a commercial airliner while in flight. The group’s ineptitude was what brought them down. They tripped themselves up with poor planning and bragged too often about their evil deeds. While some of their errors were comical, there had been nothing comical about what happened to Anita Spearman.

Finally, I got my shot at the story. In my last year as a journalist in Florida I worked for Sunshine, the now-long-gone Sunday magazine published by the Sun-Sentinel. I was still on the crime beat in a way. I wrote stories about the homicide squad and profiled a house burglar. If it involved a crime the assignment usually went to me. So I wrote a story about the gang that seemingly couldn’t shoot straight but that had worked with deadly precision when it had come to killing Anita Spearman.

The story is contained in Crime Beat, the recently published collection of my journalism. But truth be told, it is probably the story in the collection I am least proud of. When I look at the story now I feel that I let Anita Spearman down when I wrote it. It was my one shot at honoring a woman who had been so kind and important to me, and I refused to step away from the pose of the objective journalist. The story is «just the facts, ma’am» reporting. It doesn’t contain any heart. The story did not reveal my connection to Anita or what I owed her. It didn’t reveal my own sadness over her death or my guilt over having lost contact with her until it was too late.

I regret how I wrote that story but am grateful for the lesson it taught me. I am happy that in what I do now I don’t have to worry about being the objective observer and chronicler. I don’t have to sit on the sideline and watch.

When I write now I am free to reveal my compassion, my passion, my hopes and regrets. In a way I am free to tell the truth about myself in my novels, whereas when I was writing the stories in newspapers I had to hold things back.

It’s an irony not lost on me. They say the truth is stranger than fiction, and they may be right. But I also think the truth is no stranger to fiction. It’s in there if you look. Thanks in part to Anita Spearman, I now make stories up, but I always tell the truth.

Tomado de: http://www.sun-sentinel.com/features/lifestyle/sfl-connelly-essaymay28,0,7145058.story?coll=sfla-features-headlines

Nuevas entradas en La Voz golpeando el Infinito

Hace días que no decidia que colocar, así que hoy me he dado algún tiempo, y para quienes siguen a nuestro spin off, les contare que hay una serie de videos que estoy seguro podrán disfrutra todos aquellos que gustan de la literatura y que podrán ver en La voz golpeando el infinito.

Encontrarán una entrevista a houellebecq en la que habla de posibilidad de una isla, una de sus novelas más polemicas (y una de las que más disfrute) también una entrevista a Quim Monzó, una lectura pública de Nick Hornby; Paco Ignacio Taibo II entrevistado por Arestegui, Michael Connelly mostrandonos su ciudad en un video ya clásico; un reportaje de la CNN sobre James Ellroy; Hunter S. Thompson entrevistado haciendo gala de sus malas pulgas, y Borges, Rulfo y Onetti, espero que lo disfruten.

Michael Connelly, un extracto de Lost Ligth

here is no end of things in the heart.

Somebody once told me that. She said it came from a poem she believed in. She understood it to mean that if you took something to heart, really brought it inside those red velvet folds, then it would always be there for you. No matter what happened, it would be there waiting. She said this could mean a person, a place, a dream. A mission. Anything sacred. She told me that it is all connected in those secret folds. Always. It is all part of the same and will always be there, carrying the same beat as your heart.

I am fifty-two-years old and I believe it. At night when I try to sleep but can’t, that is when I know it. It is when all the pathways seem to connect and I see the people I have loved and hated and helped and hurt. I see the hands that reach for me. I hear the beat and see and understand what I must do. I know my mission and I know there is no turning away or turning back. And it is in those moments that I know there is no end of things in the heart. (…)

Michael Connelly escribe…

Michael Connelly viene construyendo una saga policial, de aquellas que parecían no ser posibles en estos tiempos de absoluta velocidad. Ha creado a un detective descreido e individualista, Harry Bosch, que concentra la mayoría de los tópicos del pulp clásico, es un justiciero con una historia particular detrás, que va revelándose de novela a novela.

Conelly ha construido su personaje teniendo fija la mirada en Phillip Marlowe y quizás ese esfuerzo por darle un mayor dimensión a sus novelas, hacen en estas la diferencia frente a tantos saqueadores del género.

Las tres primeras son quizás las más recomendables: El eco negro, el hielo negro y la rubia de hormigón…

«…Eso es justicia -dijo señlando hacia la estatua-. No le escucha. No le ve. No puede sentirle ni hablarle. La justicia (…) es sólo una rubia de hormigón…»

«…Puede que los letrados hagan declaraciones rimbombantes, pero sólo porque ellos lo digan no significa que sea cierto. Al fin y al cabo, son abogados…»

Michael Connelly, La Rubia de Hormigon

Michael Connelly, escribe…

«.En los Angeles había incendios e inundaciones, temblores y desprendimientos de tierra. Había locos que disparaban a los viandantes y ladrones colocados de crack. Conductores borrachos y carreteras llenas de curvas. Policías asesinos y asesinos de policías. Estaba la mujer con la que te acostabas. Y su marido. En cualquier momento cada noche había personas que estaban siendo violadas, agredidas o mutiladas. Asesinadas y amadas. Siempre había un bebé en el pecho de su madre. Y, algunas veces un bebé en el contenedor. En algún lugar de la ciudad.»

Michael CONNELY, Hielo Negro

Michael Connelly, otra vez Hooper y los homenajes

Hace unas semanas escribí sobre quizás la más conocida obra de Edward Hooper: Nighthawks. Le preguntaba a los lectores de este blog por dos escritores catalanes que hacían referencia a su obra.

Hoy de viaje al sur de Lima, he descubierto un nuevo homenaje liteario, esta vez ofrecido por Harry Bosch, el personaje de la saga policial de Michael Conelly, quien en su novela El Eco Negro, compara su situación de solitario con la de los personajes del famoso cuadro (ver en especial el final de la novela).

Pero Connelly no se limita a la novela, en su página web agrega un extracto de la novela, justo uno de los que usa para aludir a Hooper:

Excerpt From The Black Echo:

He made another one of those psychic connections with Eleanor Wish when he turned around and looked at the wall above the couch. Framed in black wood was a print of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. Bosch didn’t have the print at home but he was familiar with the painting and from time to time even thought about it when he was deep on a case or on a surveillance. He had seen the original in Chicago once and had stood in front of it studying it for nearly an hour. A quiet, shadowy man sits alone at the counter of a street-front diner. He looks across at another customer much like himself, but only the second man is with a woman. Somehow, Bosch identified with it, with that first man. I am the loner, he thought. I am the nighthawk. The print, with its stark dark hues and shadows, did not fit in this apartment, Bosch realized. Its darkness clashed with the pastels. Why did Eleanor have it? What did she see there?