Michael Connelly

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, best-selling author Michael Connelly is the son of a property developer and a homemaker who introduced her son to the world of mystery novels. At age 11, Connelly moved with his family from Philadelphia to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He was first intrigued by the police as a 16-year-old, when he witnessed a carjacking in Fort Lauderdale and spent the night in the police station answering questions about it.

Connelly was at the University of Florida, studying building and real estate, when he went to the movies one night and saw Robert Altman's film adaptation of Raymond Chandler's novel The Long Goodbye. After discovering the rest of Chandler's books, Connelly decided to become a writer himself.

Connelly became a reporter to learn the territory at his father's suggestion. He went to journalism school, and after graduating in 1980 went to work first for The Daytona Beach News Journal, then for The Fort Lauderdale News. As he was primarily specializing in the crime beat, the timing of his second position was perfect: while there, the city earned the title ''murder capital of America.''

In 1986, he and two other reporters spent several months interviewing survivors of a major airline crash. They wrote a magazine story on the crash and the survivors which was later short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. The magazine story also moved Connelly into the upper levels of journalism, landing him a job as a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times, one of the largest papers in the country, and bringing him to the city of which his literary hero, Chandler,
had written.

According to a 2004 New York Times feature article on Connelly, his most distinguishing quality is his interest in "the psychic toll of police work: not how a cop works on a case, as he puts it, echoing a line of [Joseph] Wambaugh's, 'but how a case works on a cop.'" Connelly's attention to detail and thorough research with actual police detectives moved fellow crime novelist George Pelecanos to say, ''he's the best mystery writer in the world, I think.''

(Information courtesy Connelly's website, The New York Times and Wikipedia.)

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