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73-449: Dark Sacred Night is the 32nd novel by American crime author Michael Connelly , and the twenty-first novel featuring Los Angeles Police Department detective Harry Bosch . It is the second to feature Renee Ballard. The book was published by Little, Brown and Company in 2018 . Maureen Corrigan of The Washington Post called it "ingenious, frantically suspenseful, and very, very bleak." Kirkus Reviews stated: "Fans who don't think

146-467: A "rather nasty man at times". Anderson nevertheless praised Chandler as "probably the most lyrical of the major crime writers". Chandler's short stories and novels are evocatively written, conveying the time, place and ambiance of Los Angeles and environs in the 1930s and 1940s. The places are real, if pseudonymous: Bay City is Santa Monica , Gray Lake is Silver Lake , and Idle Valley a synthesis of wealthy San Fernando Valley communities. Playback

219-420: A career. Connelly's mother was a fan of crime fiction and introduced her son to the world of mystery novels . At age 12, Connelly moved with his family from Philadelphia to Fort Lauderdale, Florida , where he attended St. Thomas Aquinas High School . At age 16, Connelly's interest in crime and mystery escalated when, on his way home from his work as a hotel dishwasher, he witnessed a man throw an object into

292-402: A cat on a wet floor"; "He was crazy as a pair of waltzing mice, but I liked him"; "I felt like an amputated leg"; "He was about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food." Chandler's writing redefined the private eye fiction genre, led to the coining of the adjective "Chandleresque", and inevitably became the subject of parody and pastiche . Yet the detective Philip Marlowe is not

365-521: A father of a daughter, and it hit close to home. According to Connelly, he didn't mean to write about the biggest fear of his life; it just came out that way. David Geherin states that Connelly "deliberately avoids ornate language, the kind that makes the reader stop and savor the choice of words or elegant phrasing. He doesn't want anything to inhibit the forward momentum he is working to create." Detective Bosch's life usually changes in harmony with Connelly's own life. When Connelly moved 3,000 miles across

438-406: A good way to try to learn to write fiction and get paid a small amount of money at the same time. I spent five months over an 18,000 word novelette and sold it for $ 180. After that I never looked back, although I had a good many uneasy periods looking forward. His second Marlowe novel, Farewell, My Lovely (1940), became the basis for three movie versions adapted by other screenwriters, including

511-417: A great impression on me, because Middleton struck me as having far more talent than I was ever likely to possess; and if he couldn't make a go of it, it wasn't very likely that I could." Accounting for that time he said, "Of course in those days as now there were ... clever young men who made a decent living as freelances for the numerous literary weeklies", but "I was distinctly not a clever young man. Nor

584-478: A heart transplant and he saw what his friend was going through with survivor's guilt after the surgery. When asked if he had anything against the changes made to fit the big screen, Connelly simply replied: "If you take their money, it's their turn to tell the story". Connelly wrote another book featuring Bosch, Angels Flight (1999), before writing Void Moon (2000), a free-standing book about Las Vegas thief Cassie Black. In 2001, A Darkness More Than Night

657-404: A hedge. Connelly decided to investigate and found that the object was a gun wrapped in a lumberjack shirt. After putting the gun back, he followed the man to a bar and then left to go home to tell his father. Later that night, Connelly brought the police down to the bar, but the man was already gone. This event introduced Connelly to the world of police officers and their lives, impressing him with

730-549: A job as a crime reporter at the Los Angeles Times . He moved to California in 1987 with his wife Linda McCaleb, whom he met while in college and married in April 1984. After moving to Los Angeles, Connelly went to see High Tower Court where Raymond Chandler 's character Philip Marlowe had lived (in his 1942 novel The High Window ), and Robert Altman had used for his film The Long Goodbye (1973). Connelly got

803-563: A main supporting character in the Bosch novels The Crossing (2015) and The Wrong Side of Goodbye (2016). Connelly has won nearly every major award given to mystery writers, including the Edgar Award , Anthony Award , Macavity Award , Los Angeles Times Best Mystery/Thriller Award, Shamus Award , Dilys Award , Nero Award , Barry Award , Audie Award , Ridley Award, Maltese Falcon Award (Japan), .38 Caliber Award (France),

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876-444: A man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world." Parker wrote that, with Marlowe, "Chandler seems to have created

949-627: A multi-part series in the New York Times Magazine . After some editing, it was published as a novel in 2007. In October 2008, Connelly wrote The Brass Verdict , which brought together Bosch and Haller for the first time. He followed that with The Scarecrow (May 2009), which brought back McEvoy as the lead character. 9 Dragons , a novel taking Bosch to Hong Kong, was published in October 2009. The Reversal (October 2010), reunites Bosch & Haller as they work together under

1022-636: A mystery writer. Connelly went home and read all of Chandler's works featuring Philip Marlowe , and decided to transfer to the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications , major in journalism, and minor in creative writing. After graduating from the University of Florida in 1980, Connelly got a job as a crime beat writer at the Daytona Beach News-Journal , where he worked for almost two years until he went to

1095-462: A new grave marker above Chandler's, as they had wished. About 100 people attended the ceremony, which included readings by the Rev. Randal Gardner, Powers Boothe , Judith Freeman and Aissa Wayne. The shared gravestone reads, "Dead men are heavier than broken hearts", a quotation from The Big Sleep . Chandler's original gravestone, placed by Jean Fracasse and her children, is still at the head of his grave;

1168-402: A reporter to write full-time. Michael Connelly received a good deal of publicity in 1994, when President Bill Clinton came out of a bookstore carrying a copy of The Concrete Blonde in front of the waiting cameras. A meeting was set up between the two at Los Angeles International Airport . In 1996, Connelly wrote The Poet , his first book not to feature Bosch, instead the protagonist

1241-780: A respite in England, he returned to La Jolla. He died at Scripps Memorial Hospital of pneumonial peripheral vascular shock and prerenal uremia (according to the death certificate) in 1959. Helga Greene inherited Chandler's $ 60,000 estate, after prevailing in a 1960 lawsuit filed by Fracasse contesting Chandler's holographic codicil to his will. Chandler is buried at Mount Hope Cemetery , in San Diego, California. As Frank MacShane noted in his biography, The Life of Raymond Chandler , Chandler wished to be cremated and placed next to Cissy in Cypress View Mausoleum. Instead, he

1314-468: A show of throwing Chandler's two draft screenplays into the studio trash can while holding his nose, but Chandler retained the lead screenwriting credit along with Czenzi Ormonde. In 1946, the Chandlers moved to La Jolla , an affluent coastal neighborhood of San Diego, California, where Chandler wrote two more Philip Marlowe novels, The Long Goodbye and his last completed work, Playback . The latter

1387-575: A situation, I get panned for leaving out what I was panned for putting in the first time." Although his work enjoys general acclaim today, Chandler has been criticized for certain aspects of his writing. The Washington Post reviewer Patrick Anderson described his plots as "rambling at best and incoherent at worst" (notoriously, even Chandler did not know who murdered the chauffeur in The Big Sleep ) and Anderson criticized Chandler's treatment of black, female, and homosexual characters, calling him

1460-425: A stereotypical tough guy, but a complex, sometimes sentimental man with few friends, who attended university, who speaks some Spanish and sometimes admires Mexicans and Blacks, and who is a student of chess and classical music. He is a man who refuses a prospective client's fee for a job he considers unethical. The high regard in which Chandler is generally held today is in contrast to the critical sniping that stung

1533-496: A storage locker in the basement of Cypress View Mausoleum. After Cissy's death, Chandler's loneliness worsened his propensity for clinical depression ; he returned to drinking alcohol, never quitting it for long, and the quality and quantity of his writing suffered. In 1955, he attempted suicide. In The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved , Judith Freeman says it was "a cry for help," given that he called

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1606-602: A time of scrimping and saving. He found steady employment with the Los Angeles Creamery. In 1917, he traveled to Victoria, where in August he enlisted in the 50th Reinforcement Battalion Canadian Expeditionary Force . He saw combat in the trenches in France with the 7th Battalion C.E.F. (British Columbia Regiment). He was twice hospitalized with Spanish flu during the pandemic and was undergoing flight training in

1679-638: A year later. In straitened financial circumstances during the Great Depression , Chandler turned to his latent writing talent to earn a living, teaching himself to write pulp fiction by analyzing and imitating a novelette by Erle Stanley Gardner . Chandler's first professional work, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in Black Mask magazine in 1933. According to genre historian Herbert Ruhm, "Chandler, who worked slowly and painstakingly, revising again and again, had taken five months to write

1752-521: Is Robert Altman 's 1973 neo-noir adaptation of The Long Goodbye . In 2014, the Hollywood Walk of Fame selection committee announced that Raymond Chandler would be included the following year, but as of 2024, he has not been. The intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Cahuenga Avenue in Hollywood, California is named Raymond Chandler Square, a tribute both to the author and to

1825-530: Is considered by some to be synonymous with "private detective". Both were played in films by Humphrey Bogart , whom many consider to be the quintessential Marlowe. The Big Sleep placed second on the Crime Writers Association poll of the 100 best crime novels; Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Lady in the Lake (1943) and The Long Goodbye (1953) also made the list. The latter novel

1898-456: Is going. The books often reference real-world events, such as the 1992 Los Angeles riots and the September 11 attacks . Events that might seem of minor significance are included in some of the books, because of Connelly’s personal interest in them. For example, City of Bones , in which Detective Bosch investigates the murder of an 11-year-old boy, was written during Connelly's early years as

1971-517: Is the only one of his novels not to have been made into a movie. Arguably the most notable adaptation is Howard Hawks The Big Sleep (1946), with Humphrey Bogart as Marlowe. William Faulkner and Leigh Brackett were co-writers of the screenplay. Chandler's few screenwriting efforts and the cinematic adaptation of his novels proved stylistically and thematically influential on the American film noir genre. Notable for its revised take on Marlowe

2044-485: Is thrilling." Michael Connelly Connelly was born in Philadelphia , Pennsylvania , the second eldest child of W. Michael Connelly, a property developer , and Mary Connelly, a homemaker . He is of Irish ancestry. According to Connelly, his father was a frustrated artist who encouraged his children to want to succeed in life and was a risk taker who alternated between success and failure in his pursuit of

2117-602: The Fort Lauderdale News and Sun-Sentinel in 1981. There, he covered the crime beat during the South Florida cocaine wars. He stayed with the paper for a few years and in 1986, he and two other reporters spent several months interviewing survivors of the 1985 Delta Flight 191 plane crash, which story earned Connelly a place as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize . The honor also brought Connelly

2190-663: The Grand Prix de Littérature Policière (France) and Premio Bancarella Award (Italy). In 2012, The Black Box won the world's most lucrative crime fiction award, the RBA Prize for Crime Writing worth €125,000. He received the Cartier Diamond Dagger in 2018 from the Crime Writers' Association . When starting a book, he says, the story is not always clear, but Connelly has “a hunch” as to where it

2263-579: The Mystery Writers of America 's Edgar Award for Best first Novel . The book is partly based on a true crime and is the first one featuring Connelly's primary recurring character, Los Angeles Police Department Detective Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch , a man who, according to Connelly, shares few similarities with the author himself. Connelly named Bosch after the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch , known for his paintings full of sin and redemption, such as

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2336-545: The "literary equivalent of a quick punch to the gut". Chandler's swift-moving, hardboiled style was inspired mostly by Dashiell Hammett , but his sharp and lyrical similes are original: "The muzzle of the Luger looked like the mouth of the Second Street tunnel"; "He had a heart as big as one of Mae West's hips"; "Dead men are heavier than broken hearts"; "I went back to the seasteps and moved down them as cautiously as

2409-455: The 1944 film Murder My Sweet , which marked the screen debut of the Marlowe character, played by Dick Powell (whose depiction of Marlowe was applauded by Chandler). Literary success and film adaptations led to a demand for Chandler himself as a screenwriter. He and Billy Wilder co-wrote Double Indemnity (1944), based on James M. Cain 's novel of the same title . The noir screenplay

2482-498: The Pacific Coast in an automobile I began to read pulp magazines, because they were cheap enough to throw away and because I never had at any time any taste for the kind of thing which is known as women's magazines. This was in the great days of the Black Mask (if I may call them great days) and it struck me that some of the writing was pretty forceful and honest, even though it had its crude aspect. I decided that this might be

2555-677: The actor Max Adrian , a founding member of the Royal Shakespeare Company; Max's mother Mabel was a sister of Florence Thornton. Chandler was classically educated at Dulwich College , London (a public school whose alumni include the authors P. G. Wodehouse and C. S. Forester ). He spent some of his childhood summers in Waterford with his mother's family. He did not go to university, instead spending time in Paris and Munich improving his foreign language skills. In 1907, he

2628-475: The author during his lifetime. In a March 1942 letter to Blanche Knopf, published in Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler , he wrote, "The thing that rather gets me down is that when I write something that is tough and fast and full of mayhem and murder, I get panned for being tough and fast and full of mayhem and murder, and then when I try to tone down a bit and develop the mental and emotional side of

2701-662: The banner of the state on the retrial of a child murderer. The Haller novel The Fifth Witness was published in 2011. The Drop , which refers in part to the "Deferred Retirement Option Plan" that was described in the novel The Brass Verdict (2008), was published in November 2011. The next Bosch novel was The Black Box (2012). Connelly's subsequent novel, a legal thriller, was a return to Haller: The Gods of Guilt (2013). His next book returned to Bosch in The Burning Room (2014), and then Connelly used Haller as

2774-598: The belief that Phillip Marlowe 's office was located in Security Trust and Savings at the northeast corner of this intersection. In 1994, the Square was designated Los Angeles Historic Cultural Monument #597. Noirfest 's lifetime achievement award is named the Raymond Chandler Award. In 1991, Fulbright Program gave out a "Raymond Chandler Mystery Writing Award" and in 1994, they gave out

2847-617: The country, Bosch's experiences sent him in a new direction in City of Bones , written at that time. According to Connelly, his "real" job is to write about Bosch, and he brought McCaleb and Bosch together in A Darkness More Than Night in order to look at Bosch from another perspective and to keep the character interesting. Connelly often changes perspectives between characters in his novels. In Void Moon , Connelly frequently alternates between following protagonist Cassie Black and antagonist Jack Karch. In Fair Warning , Connelly outright changes

2920-529: The culminating American hero: wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and rebellious—an innocent who knows better, a Romantic who is tough enough to sustain Romanticism in a world that has seen the eternal footman hold its coat and snicker. Living at the end of the Far West, where the American dream ran out of room, no hero has ever been more congruent with his landscape. Chandler had

2993-436: The fledgling Royal Air Force (RAF) when the war ended. After the armistice , he returned to Los Angeles by way of Vancouver, and soon began a love affair with Pearl Eugenie ("Cissy") Pascal, a married woman 18 years his senior and the stepmother of Gordon Pascal, with whom Chandler had enlisted. Cissy amicably divorced her husband, Julian, in 1920, but Chandler's mother disapproved of the relationship and refused to sanction

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3066-500: The formula, but we usually got caught and sent back. To exceed the limits of a formula without destroying it is the dream of every magazine writer who is not a hopeless hack. Critics and writers, including W. H. Auden , Evelyn Waugh and Ian Fleming , greatly admired Chandler's prose. In a radio discussion with Chandler, Fleming said that Chandler offered "some of the finest dialogue written in any prose today". Contemporary mystery writer Paul Levine has described Chandler's style as

3139-596: The manager of the building to promise to phone him if the apartment ever became available. Ten years later, the manager tracked Connelly down, and Connelly decided to rent the place. This apartment served as a place to write for several years. After three years at the Los Angeles Times , Connelly wrote his first published novel, The Black Echo (1992), after previously writing two unfinished novels that he did not attempt to get published. He sold The Black Echo to Little, Brown to be published in 1992 and won

3212-536: The marriage. For the next four years Chandler supported both his mother and Cissy. After the death of Florence Chandler on September 26, 1923, he was free to marry Cissy. They were married on February 6, 1924. Having begun in 1922 as a bookkeeper and auditor, Chandler was by 1931 a highly paid vice president of the Dabney Oil Syndicate , but his alcoholism, absenteeism, promiscuity with female employees, and threatened suicides contributed to his dismissal

3285-407: The new one is at the foot. In his introduction to Trouble Is My Business (1950), a collection of many of his short stories, Chandler provided insight on the formula for the detective story and how the pulp magazines differed from previous detective stories: The emotional basis of the standard detective story was and had always been that murder will out and justice will be done. Its technical basis

3358-680: The overarching perspective of the book on occasion, regularly following protagonist Jack McEvoy in a first-person point of view while occasionally branching away from his story to follow the antagonists in third-person. Every character in the list below, with one exception, has appeared in a Harry Bosch book. All of Michael Connelly's novels occur in the same fictional universe and character crossovers are common. Each of these characters has appeared in at least two of Connelly's novels. Novel collections: Harry Bosch series: Mickey Haller series: Stand-alones: Raymond Chandler Raymond Thornton Chandler (July 23, 1888 – March 26, 1959)

3431-653: The painting Hell , a copy of which hangs on the office wall behind Connelly's computer. Connelly describes his own work as a big canvas with all the characters of his books floating across it as currents on a painting. Sometimes they are bound to collide, creating cross currents. This is something that Connelly creates by bringing back characters from previous books and letting them play a part in books written five or six years after first being introduced. Connelly went on to write three more novels about Detective Bosch— The Black Ice (1993), The Concrete Blonde (1994), and The Last Coyote (1995)—before quitting his job as

3504-429: The police beforehand, saying he planned to kill himself. Chandler's personal and professional life were both helped and complicated by the women to whom he was attracted, notably Helga Greene (his literary agent), Jean Fracasse (his secretary), Sonia Orwell ( George Orwell 's widow), and Natasha Spender ( Stephen Spender 's wife). Chandler regained his U.S. citizenship in 1956, while retaining his British rights. After

3577-525: The railway, abandoned the family. To obtain the best possible education for Ray, his mother, originally from Ireland, moved them to the area of Upper Norwood in what is now the London Borough of Croydon , England in 1900. Another uncle, a successful lawyer in Waterford , Ireland, reluctantly supported them while they lived with Chandler's maternal grandmother. Raymond was a first cousin to

3650-654: The right hero in the right place, and engaged him in the consideration of good and evil at precisely the time when our central certainty of good no longer held." Chandler was born in 1888 in Chicago, the son of Florence Dart (Thornton) and Maurice Benjamin Chandler. He spent his early years in Plattsmouth, Nebraska , living with his mother and father near his cousins and his aunt (his mother's sister) and uncle. Chandler's father, an alcoholic civil engineer who worked for

3723-409: The same point of view as the film makers. When I first went to Hollywood a very intelligent producer told me that you couldn't make a successful motion picture from a mystery story, because the whole point was a disclosure that took a few seconds of screen time while the audience was reaching for its hat. He was wrong, but only because he was thinking of the wrong kind of mystery. Chandler also described

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3796-623: The script and, according to producer John Houseman , Chandler concluded he could finish the script only if drunk, with the assistance of round-the-clock secretaries and drivers, which Houseman agreed to. The script gained Chandler's second Academy Award nomination for screenplay. Chandler collaborated on the screenplay of Alfred Hitchcock 's Strangers on a Train (1951), an ironic murder story based on Patricia Highsmith 's novel , which he thought implausible. Chandler clashed with Hitchcock and they stopped talking after Hitchcock heard Chandler had referred to him as "that fat bastard". Hitchcock made

3869-427: The story. Erle Stanley Gardner could turn out a pulp story in three or four days—and turned out an estimated one thousand." His first novel, The Big Sleep , was published in 1939, featuring the detective Philip Marlowe, speaking in the first person. In 1950, Chandler described in a letter to his English publisher, Hamish Hamilton, why he began reading pulp magazines and later wrote for them: Wandering up and down

3942-420: The struggle that writers of pulp fiction had in following the formula demanded by the editors of the pulp magazines: As I look back on my stories it would be absurd if I did not wish they had been better. But if they had been much better they would not have been published. If the formula had been a little less rigid, more of the writing of that time might have survived. Some of us tried pretty hard to break out of

4015-477: The supporting cases run away with the story will marvel at Connelly's remarkable ability to keep them all not only suitably mystifying, but deeply humane, as if he were the Ross Macdonald of the police procedural." Charles Finch of USA Today rated the novel 3 stars out of 4 and wrote that while the story is "fairly meandering and uncertain", Connelly eventually "hits his stride" and his "denouement here

4088-533: The time of his death, was completed by Robert B. Parker ). All but Playback have been made into motion pictures, some more than once. In the year before his death, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America . Chandler had an immense stylistic influence on American popular literature. He is a founder of the hardboiled school of detective fiction, along with Dashiell Hammett , James M. Cain and other Black Mask writers. The protagonist of his novels, Philip Marlowe , like Hammett's Sam Spade ,

4161-612: The way they worked. Connelly had planned on following his father's early choice of career in building construction and started out at the University of Florida in Gainesville , at the Rinker School of Building Construction , studying construction management. After earning grades that were lower than expected, Connelly went to see Robert Altman 's film The Long Goodbye (1973). The film, based on Raymond Chandler 's eponymous 1953 novel , inspired Connelly to want to become

4234-573: Was I at all a happy young man." In 1912, he borrowed money from his Waterford uncle, who expected it to be repaid with interest, and returned to America, visiting his aunt and uncle before settling in San Francisco for a time, where he took a correspondence course in bookkeeping, finishing ahead of schedule. His mother joined him there in late 1912. Encouraged by Chandler's attorney/oilman friend Warren Lloyd, they moved to Los Angeles in 1913, where he strung tennis rackets, picked fruit and endured

4307-615: Was a sequel to The Poet but featured Bosch instead of McEvoy. Together with this book, a DVD was released called Blue Neon Night: Michael Connelly's Los Angeles , in which film Connelly presents some of the places in Los Angeles that are frequently featured in his books. The Closers , published in May 2005, was the 11th Bosch novel. It was followed by The Lincoln Lawyer in October, Connelly's first legal novel; it features defense attorney Mickey Haller , Bosch's half-brother. The book

4380-562: Was an American-British novelist and screenwriter . In 1932, at the age of forty-four, Chandler became a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression . His first short story, " Blackmailers Don't Shoot ", was published in 1933 in Black Mask , a popular pulp magazine . His first novel, The Big Sleep , was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published seven novels during his lifetime (an eighth, in progress at

4453-720: Was buried in Mount Hope, because he had left no funeral or burial instructions. In 2010, Chandler historian Loren Latker, with the assistance of attorney Aissa Wayne (daughter of John Wayne ), brought a petition to disinter Cissy's remains and reinter them with Chandler in Mount Hope. After a hearing in September 2010 in San Diego Superior Court , Judge Richard S. Whitney entered an order granting Latker's request. On February 14, 2011, Cissy's ashes were conveyed from Cypress View to Mount Hope and interred under

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4526-431: Was derived from an unproduced courtroom drama screenplay he had written for Universal Studios . Four chapters of a novel, unfinished at his death, were transformed into a final Philip Marlowe novel, Poodle Springs , by the mystery writer and Chandler admirer Robert B. Parker , in 1989. Parker shares the authorship with Chandler. Parker subsequently wrote a sequel to The Big Sleep entitled Perchance to Dream , which

4599-614: Was discovered among the uncatalogued holdings of the Library of Congress . The work was never published or produced. It has been dismissed by the Raymond Chandler estate as "no more than… a curiosity." A small team under the direction of the actor and director Paul Sand is seeking permission to produce the operetta in Los Angeles. Cissy Chandler died in 1954, after a long illness. Heartbroken and drunk, Chandler neglected to inter her cremated remains, and they sat for 57 years in

4672-473: Was made into a film in 2011, starring Matthew McConaughey as Haller. After releasing Crime Beat (2004), a non-fiction book about Connelly's experiences as a crime reporter, Connelly went back to Bosch with Echo Park (2006). This book sets its opening scene in the High Tower Apartment that Connelly rented and wrote from. His next Bosch story, The Overlook , was originally published as

4745-473: Was naturalized as a British subject in order to take the civil service examination, which he passed. He then took an Admiralty job, lasting just over a year. His first poem was published during that time. Chandler disliked the servility of the civil service and resigned, to the consternation of his family, became a reporter for the Daily Express and also wrote for The Westminster Gazette . He

4818-410: Was nominated for an Academy Award . Said Wilder, "I would just guide the structure and I would also do a lot of the dialogue, and he (Chandler) would then comprehend and start constructing too." Wilder acknowledged that the dialogue which makes the film so memorable was largely Chandler's. Chandler's only produced original screenplay was The Blue Dahlia (1946). He had not written a denouement for

4891-440: Was praised in an anthology of American crime stories as "arguably the first book since Hammett's The Glass Key , published more than twenty years earlier, to qualify as a serious and significant mainstream novel that just happened to possess elements of mystery". Chandler was also a perceptive critic of detective fiction; his " The Simple Art of Murder " is the canonical essay in the field. In it he wrote: "Down these mean streets

4964-545: Was published, in which Connelly united Bosch and McCaleb to solve a crime together, before releasing two books in 2002. The first, City of Bones , was the eighth Bosch novel, and the other, Chasing the Dime , was a non-series novel. In 2001, Connelly left California for Tampa Bay, Florida , together with his wife and daughter, so that both he and his wife could be closer to their families. His novels still took place in Los Angeles. In 2003, another Bosch novel, Lost Light ,

5037-461: Was published. With this book, a CD was released, Dark Sacred Night, the Music of Harry Bosch , featuring some of the jazz music that both Connelly and the fictional character Bosch listen to. While writing Connelly listens exclusively to instrumental jazz, though, because it does not have intrusive vocals, and because the improvisational playing inspires his writing. The Narrows , published in 2004,

5110-503: Was reporter Jack McEvoy. The book was a success. In 1997, Connelly returned to Bosch in Trunk Music before writing another book, Blood Work (1997), about a different character, FBI agent Terry McCaleb . Blood Work was made into a film in 2002, directed by Clint Eastwood , who also played McCaleb, an agent with a transplanted heart, in pursuit of his donor's murderer. The book came together after one of Connelly's friends had

5183-511: Was salted with quotes from the original novel. Chandler's final Marlowe short story, circa 1957, was entitled "The Pencil". It later provided the basis of an episode of the HBO miniseries (1983–86), Philip Marlowe, Private Eye , starring Powers Boothe as Marlowe. In 2014, "The Princess and the Pedlar" (1917), a previously unknown comic operetta, with libretto by Chandler and music by Julian Pascal,

5256-434: Was the relative insignificance of everything except the final denouement. What led up to that was more or less passage work. The denouement would justify everything. The technical basis of the Black Mask type of story on the other hand was that the scene outranked the plot, in the sense that a good plot was one which made good scenes. The ideal mystery was one you would read if the end was missing. We who tried to write it had

5329-484: Was unsuccessful as a journalist, but he published reviews and continued writing romantic poetry. An encounter with the slightly older Richard Barham Middleton is said to have influenced him into postponing his career as writer. "I met ... also a young, bearded, and sad-eyed man called Richard Middleton. ... Shortly afterwards he committed suicide in Antwerp, a suicide of despair, I should say. The incident made

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