Bosch and Me
I first got to know the fictional detective Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch through the Amazon TV show that bears his last name. I then moved on to the series of novels upon which the show is based. Michael Connelly, Bosch’s creator, is a gifted police procedural writer whose books now line a good part of my shelves.
I’ve never known anyone remotely like Harry. My experience with the police has been limited to a friend or two from church, some traffic stops, and a minor arrest when I was still in my teens. As a rule, I avoid police people like the plague. While it’s true that I (along with a lot of my friends) had my own FBI agent back in my student radical days, I never actually met him. My husband is a veteran of the Vietnam conflict, but he was in the Navy and not always armed or in combat. So the business of guns and badges and billy clubs is not something close to my heart, and it’s fair to say that for me, getting to know Harry has been a learning experience.
For someone who is clearly very popular, Bosch is not even a very nice guy. He has a herd of demons with whom he wrestles from time to time, and he’s capable of serious rage and a disturbing lust for revenge. All that said, he’s still relentlessly good at what he does. And, best of all, he lives high on a hillside overlooking most of Los Angeles.
I was born in Pasadena, part of Los Angeles County, and lived in the San Gabriel Valley as a youngster. My dad worked in downtown L.A., the site of many of Harry’s escapades. When we were little we’d go downtown to Chinatown and Chavez Ravine and the Grand Central Market and Angel’s Flight and Griffith Park, all of which have had roles in Bosch’s stories. We also went to Hollywood to see my Mom’s Aunt Ada, who lived in a large white-columned home just off of Sunset, passing Schwab’s Drug Store and the famous Farmer’s Market. The Bosch TV episodes are beautifully filmed, with carefully plotted camera angles that highlight LA’s golden, sun-drenched days and neon-lit nights.
L.A.’s reputation, like the fictional Bosch’s, is full of contradictions: the indescribable high of becoming famous overnight vs. the unimaginable low of not “making it;” the stunning beach-front and desert vistas full of palm trees and bougainvillea vs. the endless concrete streetscapes; the lilting ocean breezes vs. the incessant inland heat. And, like New York or Chicago, there’s the most fundamental of all facts about L.A.: If you have money, it is almost always fabulous, but when you don’t, it can be a soul-sucking nightmare.
Having moved back to California a few years ago after about 40 years in New York’s Hudson Valley, you could say I had my trepidations. Since my husband is a California native who never gave up surfing, even when we lived in New York, the move, for him, was easy. Not so pour moi. I don’t much like the heat and bright lights can give me a migraine, so I stocked up on hats and sunscreen and sandals and spent a lot of the first August here indoors with the A/C running. Little by little I ventured out. And I also discovered Harry.
Harry helped me to get a feel for L.A.’s history, which is shockingly short compared to, say, Rome. But the history is there if you go looking for it, in the Spanish Catholic missions that dot the state, the tribal stories and lands of California’s First Peoples, and at the La Brea Tar Pits and museum, where pre-historic creatures met their ends and were preserved in the terrifying, black sucking ooze that even makes its way out on to streets in Santa Monica from time to time. Even out in the desert you can still go sifting for shark’s teeth and other fossils. On top of all this, L.A. has the vast and mysterious Pacific Ocean.
Author Connelly’s gift to us is that he clearly loves this place and all of its quirkiness, past and present. I will be ever grateful that he helped restore my sense of home here in the sunshine.