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In another life Michael Connelly was a crime reporter -- and based on the evidence in CRIME BEAT, clearly one hell of one. The book covers nearly ten years of his work for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and the Los Angeles Times. I discovered Connelly fairly late, and am still working my way through the Bosch back catalogue. So don't count on me to notice if any of the plots are based on these real-life stories! CRIME BEAT isn't like David Simon's fantastic HOMICIDE: A YEAR ON THE KILLING STREETS where the Baltimore reporter shadowed city cops and where you could spot who the TV characters were based on, and where the plots had spun off from. Connelly's obviously done the shadowing, but the book is a collection of his articles, divided into cops, victims and cases. In the end, the last two work the best, mainly due to the human interest possibilities of the victims, and the sheer weirdness of many of the cases. My favourite intro (long by UK newspaper standards, but hey, don't you just want to read on!): "Five years ago, June Mincher, a 245-pound prostitute with a lavender Rolls-Royce, was shot to death on a Van Nuys sidewalk by a swift and efficient killer, setting off an investigation that unearthed a bizarre cast of characters and seamy tales, but convicted no one." Others are less gripping but still provide a documentary account of how a crime is investigated and then subsequently reported. Some of the stories have update pars on the end -- and not surprisingly a number are still unsolved. I'm not a true crime fan at all. But I was intrigued by this collection from a journalist's point of view. Based on this evidence Connelly is clearly a class act as a crime correspondent -- and therein lies one of the book's shortcomings. The first thing you learn on a journalism training course is that nothing of you must come through in newswriting -- as the man said "just the facts, ma'am!" It's always an interesting challenge to get journalism students to understand that no, we don't give a damn what they think about a story . . . they have to remain impartial and get others to sound off about the issue. News stories are tomorrow's fish and chip paper -- read quickly, assimilated and then usually forgotten about. And while a good news story will inform and maybe provoke, a string of them in a book won't usually make for gripping reading. There's also the matter of repetition. A news reporter will never assume that the reader knows the back story, so there is a measure of recapping in every story. That's fine in a newspaper; it doesn't work quite so well in a collection. So it's not surprising that it's the human interest features that work the best -- the most memorable one by a mile is an interview with the family of a woman believed murdered by Christopher Wilder. Connelly, who writes diamond-sharp prose, ends with the killer line: "And then she began to cry." And there's also the interview with Gladys Jones, the 60-something woman who was one of the victims of repeat drug addict burglar Billy Schroeder and whose home will never feel safe again. For a UK journalist this book is a culture shock in places. We have much stricter laws regulating what can and can't be written when a crime has been committed, and some of the headlines on the stories made me do a double-take! In the end, CRIME BEAT is a book to keep and to dip into. Connelly is clearly as formidable a journalist as he is a novelist. It's one for the reading lists in any university journalism department and it's also worth shelling out for if you're a fan of this top writer, or a true crime aficionado.
Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, May 2006
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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