Michael Connelly is as known as the creator of streaming show "Bosch" and the feature film "The Lincoln Lawyer" as much as the novels he wrote that brought those characters to life.
A former newspaper reporter working the crime beat - including a stint at the Los Angeles Times – who became a best-selling novelist, with nearly 40 novels to his credit, Connelly sat down with KNX In-Depth on Thursday to talk about his projects and working through the pandemic.
The aforementioned "Bosch" is in its seventh and final season on Amazon Prime. According to Digital Spy a spin-off featuring the Harry Bosch character will air on IMDb TV.
"It was bitter-sweet. But what’s good about it is that we knew about it going into that seventh season it was going to be the last one," Connelly says of the end of the seven-season run of "Bosch."
"We didn’t know about the spin-off as we were filming the season. That came into play at the end," he said.
While the pandemic won't be featured during the final season of "Bosch," Connelly said the production team felt the impact.
"The story actually takes place in January 2020, so you have the sense we’re on the precipice of something dark happening in LA and the whole world," he said. "But filming was delayed for two months to get protocols in place."
In addition to daily testing and mask wearing, Connelly said the toughest part of filming was the delay in shooting in different locations.
"Normally, we'd shoot a scene and put everyone into a van and go shoot another one, but we obviously couldn't do that," he said. "We limited our moves in a day and therefore, it made filming longer."
Connelly said the pandemic also temporarily delayed his progress in his daily work as a novelist.
"It can kind of paralyze you. That’s kind of what happened to me," Connelly said. "I don’t know what the future is, but I can set a story within the first 3 months of this year and use it to my advantage as a fiction writer, as an entertainer."
Instead of focusing on the elements of life he didn't know about or have control over, Connelly said he stuck to what has worked best: Creating compelling characters.
"It’s a chaotic world out there, but sometimes real life beats fiction," he said. "That’s why when you write fiction, you dig deeper in the character because that’s where you can hold a reader, or a viewer or a listener more so than some kind of fancy plot because real life is always better than all the fictional fancy plots."
One positive during the pandemic was that Connelly said he was able to compartmentalize his writing and his work on "Bosch," the upcoming serialization of "The Lincoln Lawyer,” which is slated for a series run on Netflix.
He is also working on a documentary podcast series "The Wonderland Murders & the Secret History of Hollywood," which analyzes an unsolved quadruple murder in famed Laurel Canyon in 1981.
"It’s connected to drugs and it’s connected to a powerful drug dealer and organized crime figure that basically was the conduit to drugs in Hollywood," Connelly said of the murders.
"Most histories of that time talk about how when it changes from marijuana and hallucinogens into cocaine, that’s when violence came in and when the whole waste of humanity that came addiction and so forth began. When I call it ‘The Secret History of Hollywood,’ that’s the iconic stuff that’s wrapped into this story about a murder."
Connelly said that he plans on using his 65th birthday in July a point to ease his workload.
"It’s hard for writers to retire, but I don’t think I’ll keep this kind of pace. At times it seems crazy," he said. "Maybe (write) one book a year and spend the rest of the time on the beach."