He’s written 24 novels and created two of crime and mystery fictions best-known contemporary heroes, Harry Bosch and Micky Haller. In Australia alone, as of early 2011, he’d sold 1.25 million books. His novels now sell an average of 85,000 copies. He’s Michael Connelly, a colossus of his - and indeed any - literary genre, and in this video he’s in conversation with the Wheeler Centre’s head of programming, Michael Williams.
How did it all begin? “I got interested in crime when I was 16 and I was witness to part of a crime, and I spent a night in a police station dealing with detectives… After that night I started reading crime news and newspapers, I started reading non-fiction books about crime, and then I got to fiction.” Connelly attributes the start of his literary crime obsession to Raymond Chandler, whom he came across at university: “Something about reading those books was like an epiphany or a light going off.” He read all of Chandler’s novels in little more than a fortnight, and a career was born.
The Wheeler Centre, in partnership with the Melbourne International Film Festival, will be hosting UK film critic Adrian Wootton in five events, in one of which he’ll be speaking about Raymond Chandler on the silver screen.