Michael Connelly's female detective: a different kind of "hardboiled"

 HALLIE EPHRON: Speaking of writing in the voice of a narrator who's  different from the author,  Michael Connelly has successfully managed that transformation. 

After 24 Harry Bosch series novels and 8 Mickey Haller (Lincoln Lawyer) series novels and 3 Jack McEvoy series novels, he started writing a series featuring a woman: Renée Ballard. She's an LAPD police officer.

It's been turned into a series, debuting last week as #1 on Prime Video with 10 episodes available for streaming. (I just watched the first episode and FIVE STARS! It's fantastic. So good that I will NOT binge it but dole it out to myself and spread it out over time.

Last weekend I had the great good fortune of being on the faculty for the Book Passage bookstore's annual mystery writing conference. Michael Connelly was a featured speaker and he talked about creating Ballard after his hardboiled male detectives. (And also about his newest novel, Nightshade (set not on the mean streets of Los Angeles but on the tiny bucolic Catalina Island).

He spoke quite a bit about writing a female protagonist for his Renee Ballard novels, especially after so many novels featuring hardbitten male police detectives and attorneys.

That got me curious to see how Connelly introduced Renee in her first series novel, The Late Show.

Here are the opening lines. Sure enough, Connelly starts right out by writing Ballard in contrast to her male colleagues:

Ballard and Jenkins rolled up on the house on El Centro shortly before midnight. It was the first call of the shift. There was already a patrol cruiser at the curb out front and Ballard recognized the two blue suiters standing on the front porch of the bungalow with a gray-haired woman in a bathrobe. John Stanley was the shift’s senior lead officer — the street boss — and his partner was Jacob Ross. 

“I think this one’s yours,” Jenkins said. 

They had found in their two-year partnership that Ballard was the better of the two at working with female victims. It wasn’t that Jenkins was an ogre but Ballard was more understanding of the emotions of female victims. The opposite was true when they rolled up on a case with a male victim.

I was fascinated listening to him talk about how he writes his books and works with the folks adapting his books for film.

He had three pieces of advice for aspiring mystery writers: 

• "Don't try to be like something else. It has to come from here (heart)." 
• "Keep your head down!" 
• "Make sure on every page, everybody wants something. Even if it's a glass of water." (Quoting Kurt Vonnegut)

 Following this he offered this revelation: "I haven't written a perfect book yet."

Great advice.

Finally, here's a link to the official trailer for the Ballard series: https://www.michaelconnelly.com/ballard-tv/ . 

What mystery series are you watching or possibly bingeing these days?