3 of Today’s Best Suspense Novelists Are MSM Journalists
Michael Connelly was a prize-winning police reporter — first in Miami, then for the Los Angeles Time – before becoming the best writer of police procedurals (and assorted other crime novels) of his generation. Like a war correspondent embedded with a combat unit, Connelly became immersed in the blue culture and writes with an authentic voice that comes up just short of the great Joseph Wambaugh.
Connelly is far more subtle than Hunter in refuting the dominant media narrative, but Angel’s Flight — Connelly’s post-Rodney King LAPD novel featuring his signature protagonist, Detective Harry Bosch — stood in stark contrast to the media and pop culture piling-on that followed the riot, while dealing honestly with issues of race and police work.
In his latest book, The Drop (Little, Brown, $27.99), Connelly has Bosch put the lie to the media myth that the choke hold was just Daryl Gates’ way to have white cops kill black people.
The statistics matched up across racial and geographic lines. Sure, there were more choke hold deaths in the south end. Far more African Americans died than other races. But the ratios were even. There were far more incidents involving use of force in the south end. The more confrontations, scuffles, fights, resisting arrests you get, the more uses of the choke hold. The more you use the choke hold, the more deaths you will have. It was simple math. But nothing is simple when racial politics are involved. …
The task force recommended that the bar hold be dropped from the use-of-force progression and it was. Funny thing is, the department then told officers to rely more on their batons—in fact, you could be disciplined if you got out of a patrol car without carrying your baton in your hand or on your belt. Added to that, Tasers were coming into use just as the choke hold went out. And what did we get? Rodney King. A video that changed the world. A video of a guy being Tased and whaled on with batons when a proper choke hold would’ve just put him to sleep.
The politics that play out in The Drop are more of the inside LAPD variety as Harry contemplates being forced into retirement while investigating the death of the son of his long-time nemesis, who is now a city councilman.
The Drop is exactly what we have come to expect from Connelly — excellence so consistent that it’s almost a matter of routine. Fifty years from now, readers will regard Michael Connelly the way we now view Raymond Chandler.
See: Democratic Party platform as a faith-based religion. They’ve never seen their God – in my opinion it doesn’t exist. Unless you’ve seen Mayan Indians and Somalis having erudite conversations in Fortresses of Solitude among stacks of books they collect for fun among their technological marvels.
I just finished a science fiction novel which takes place in our immigration-crazy world about 400 years in the future, used as a background. It extrapolates the rather startling idea that failure creates failure and success creates success and that the reality of that idea and the desire of that idea are polar opposites. I guess you could say in a way its a Die Hard. Only the whole world has been taken hostage
Finally, someone wrote an article about books and writing, and I’ve read all 3 of the authors. I would agree with essentially everything you said, though frankly the nuances would be slightly different. Hunter’s the most political of the three, which is strange because he worked for the Washington Post for so many years. I’ve read in interviews that he’s a Democrat who likes guns; how he gets away with this in DC is beyond me. Maybe he has friends. But the political worldview he puts forth is much more stark and anti-establishment than most writers, and it’s definitely conservative. There’s a plot thread in I, Sniper where a reporter doesn’t recognize that the gun in a photo is too new to have been there when the photo was supposedly taken, and the reporter gets excoriated by letters from readers. One of them just drips with contempt, and is written by a guy who *knows* the reporter thinks him a low-brow moron, because he lives somewhere in flyover country and knows his guns. The guy of course is also some sort of complex surgeon, and highly educated, and the letter he writes the reporter is just funny to read.
Connelly has a more interesting relationship with the media and the establishment. He has a nemesis for his main character, Harry Bosch. The guy is white, but he’s obviously a stand-in for a certain police chief turned city councilman who’s black. When that real life police chief retired and became a city councilman, the new chief of police (Bratton) not-so-quietly announced that recently retired cops could rejoin the department. The subtle implication was that if you resigned because you were so disgusted with the previous chief, Bratton wanted you back. Connelly parralleled this situation in the story arc of his novels, having Harry Bosch retire in disgust with the one chief. Before the next novel, at a speech Bratton was making where Connelly was in attendance (something at the Police Academy) Bratton publicly invited Harry Bosch back into the department. So while Connelly is something of an iconoclast, he’s not always outside the tent when he’s pissing.
Berenson I’ve read less of than the other two. I read the first two books and found them reasonably good, though it felt to me that the Afghanistan chapters were written by someone who’s been embedded in Iraq, and not Afghanistan. Iraq is pretty monocultural, except if you get to the north where the Kurds live, and there it’s bicultural. From what I read, Afghanistan is more multi-cultural, and the book I read had none of that. The premise that the CIA had the foresight to infiltrate an operative into the Taliban before 9/11 is something you’d like to believe, but I don’t think they had either the smarts or the budget to do this, frankly. That was another thing, it was never clear if John Wells had infiltrated the Taliban or al Qaeda. The author seemed to think the two organizations were one and the same–which they aren’t, really. Allies, yes, but not the same.
I’ve just started the latest Clancy paperback, Against all Enemies. I guess Tom didn’t make your list because he’s not a journalist. Anyway, book seems pretty good….
What is MSM journalism? Don’t you think you could have mentioned that bit somewhere in the article?
That would be mainstream media (or in the words of some sage lamestream media)
Thank you so much, David! This is just what we need more of: promotion of quality reading material that provides an enjoyable counter-weight to “the narrative” that the media and “entertainment” industries are always trying to marginalize. There’s no reason why the Left should continue to completely dominate the landscape of books and movies…or jouralism for that matter. There should be no part of our culture where the Left goes unchallenged, especially since they represent the Reactionary Establishment these days, in academia, the media, Big Labor, government, arts and entertainment, etc.
I’d like to see a thriller in which Our Hero gets the goods on what turns out to be the murder, disguised as natural causes, of a dynamic New Media gadfly who is disrupting The Narrative a little too much. Heck, maybe I ought to write it…
“In The Shadow Patrol, Wells is assigned to find a mole in Kabul after al-Qaeda plants a double agent in the CIA who blows himself up to devastating effect (a scenario reminiscent of a real-life incident in Afghanistan a couple years ago)”
That description reminds me a lot of the recent Showtime series HOmeland where Damian Lewis, who played Major Dick Winters in Band of Brothers, plays an American military sniper who had been held captive by the Taliban for several years is finally freed. He returns to the United States as a hero but one CIA agent believes that he has been turned and is a key component in a major action against the USA. We soon see that he has indeed coverted to Islam and is gearing up to do something very big. I won’t spoil you any further in case you haven’t seen it. The first season was a big success and it has been renewed fora second season.
[Sorry, this whole post is a bit off-topic since the writers of the series are not MSM journalists.]
I love thrillers and will try most any author. Recently picked up “Blowout” by lib Senator Byron Dorgan co-authored by David Hagberg who’s written some decent thrillers. I was wary but gave it a try. The book is a ludicrous liberal screed. The villains are white supremacists. They are Posse Comitatus (did Dorgan fall asleep in 1980?) . The characters are cardboard caricatures with no depth and the book is full of lame liberal platitudes. Just shows the total lack of liberal imagination. Avoid this piece of crap at all costs.
Kudos to the author for linking to the Kindle versions of all three books. E-books are the present and future; dead-tree books are the past.
No surprise some conservative journalists are branching out into other forms of writing. They know far better than the rest of us that the MSM are, as Texas Gov. Perry put it in 2010, “yesterday’s news,” and they are not willing to wait around for a federal bailout that likely won’t come (and certainly won’t if Obama is defeated).