Bosch in the MPK
I dropped by Vroman’s this week to catch Michael Connelly—his new book, 9 Dragons, debuted on October 13 —and thank him for his generous praise of The Opposite Field, which he described to The Daily Beast as having “that indescribable thing that is in all great storytelling…that glue, the juice, the stuff that captures the human experience.” Although I do not know Michael especially well, we were both cop and crime reporters in the old suburban sections of the L.A. Times, he in the San Fernando Valley, me in the San Gabriel, and from that shared history, and the common trials inherent in it, perhaps I can say that a certain solidarity was born.
The crowd in Pasadena was big enough to necessitate raffle tickets. The staff handed out more than a hundred of them, calling us up in groups of twenty-five to get our books signed. I was in the third wave, which gave me a chance to flip through 9 Dragons and look for the Monterey Park mentions that I had heard might be there. Sure enough, Connelly’s literary franchise, Hieronymus Bosch, is called on to investigate a murder involving a Hong Kong-based triad known as Brave Knife—a case that, on page 86, takes Bosch to America’s most Chinese city, Monterey Park.
“Fifteen minutes from downtown,” Connelly writes, ”it was like a foreign country with impenetrable language and culture.”
The other MPK references I spotted were of a similarly exotic nature: “the neon, the colors, the shops….” All true, except that my experience in Monterey Park is one that encompasses its middle-class aspects as well: a port of entry and a bedroom community, alien, anonymous, international, square. Michael is in his own stratosphere—”the best mystery writer in the world,” as GQ has dubbed him—and far more people will pick up his book, which is #12 on the Amazon bestseller list today, than mine, which (though not available until October 27) is at this very moment #294,992. But I am tickled and honored that we both, purely by coincidence, found a “fish out of water” story in this suburban Chinatown, one fiction, the other memoir, their protagonists a homicide detective and a Little League commissioner—and that without knowing any of that beforehand, Michael took it upon himself to be a champion of The Opposite Field.
How gratifying to discover that someone who has written twenty-two books still remembers what it is like to write that first one.