What motivates him?
He has no need for or interest in employment. He’s not a proactive do-gooder. So why does he get involved in things? Well, partly because of noblesse oblige, a French chivalric concept that means “nobility obligates,” which mandates honorable, generous, and responsible behavior because of high rank or birth.
Reacher had the rank and the skills, and he feels a slightly Marxist obligation “from he who has, to him who needs.” Again, that attitude predates the twentieth century by a long way. It shows up in nineteenth-century Western heroes, and thirteenth-century European heroes, all the way back to the Greeks and, we can be sure, much further back into oral traditions where no written records exist. Added to which, in Reacher’s case, is a cantankerousness that provokes him.
In Persuader, during a flashback to his military days, he is asked why he became an MP when he could have chosen any other branch of the service. He gives a vague answer, along the lines of wanting to look after the little guy.
His questioner is skeptical. She says, disbelievingly, “You care about the little guy?”
“Not really,” Reacher admits. “I don’t really care about the little guy. I just hate the big guy. I hate big smug people who think they can get away with things.”
That’s what motivates him. The world is full of unfairness and injustice. He can’t intervene everywhere. He needs to sense a sneering, arrogant, manipulative opponent in the shadows. Then he’ll go to work. Partly because he himself is arrogant.
In a sense, each book is a contest between Reacher’s arrogance and his opponent’s. Arrogance is not an attractive attribute, but I don’t hide Reacher’s because I think the greatest mistake a series writer can make is to get too chummy with his main character. I aim to like Reacher just a little less than I hope you will. Because basically a book is a simple psychological transaction.
“I’m the main character,” the main character announces.
The reader asks: “Am I going to like you?”
There are several possible answers to that question. The worst is: “Yes, you really are, and I’ll tell you why!”
But Reacher answers: “You might or you might not, and either way is fine with me.”
Because, as an author, I believe that kind of insouciant self-confidence forms a more enduring bond.
Does it?
MICHAEL CONNELLY
Born in 1956, Michael Connelly grew up in Pennsylvania, attended the University of Florida (graduating in 1980), and went to work as a journalist in Daytona Beach and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, mainly on the crime beat. After he was short-listed for a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, he moved to the Los Angeles Times as a police reporter. A few years later, his first novel about Hieronymus (generally known as Harry) Bosch, The Black Echo, was published. Based in part on a real crime, it won the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America for best first novel.
Fourteen more Bosch novels have followed as the LAPD detective became one of the most popular and loved characters of contemporary detective fiction and his creator became one of the bestselling mystery writers in the world. In addition to the Bosch series, Connelly has produced such bestselling stand-alone novels as The Poet (1996), Blood Work (1998) (filmed in 2002 with Clint Eastwood as director and star), Void Moon (2000), Chasing the Dime (2002), The Lincoln Lawyer (2005), which was nominated for a best novel Edgar®, The Brass Verdict (2008), and The Scarecrow (2009).
In 2003 and 2004, Connelly became the first author to serve as president of the Mystery Writers of America for two years. He served as the guest editor for The Best American Mystery Stories 2002. Translated into thirty-five languages, he has won the major mystery-writing awards in several countries (Japan, France, Italy) as well as in the United States.
He lives in Tampa, Florida, with his wife and daughter.
HIERONYMUS BOSCH
BY MICHAEL CONNELLY
A few years ago I was on a book tour that took me to Bryn Mawr, on the Main Line outside Philadelphia. I got in early and had some free time before my reading, so I steered the rental car west to the small town of Devon. At least it was a small town in the mid-1960s, when I lived there as a boy with my family.
By staying close to the railroad line I was able to find Highland Avenue without difficulty. It was here that my family lived in a middle-class neighborhood close to the tracks. Our house was a two-story white colonial that my father, a contractor, had designed and built.
I stopped the car in front of 321 Highland, but I didn’t get out. I just sat behind the wheel and looked up at the house for a while. Things had changed about the place, but many things were still the same. My eyes were drawn to the upper window that belonged to the bedroom I had shared with one of my brothers.
It was in that room that I would lie on the top bunk at night and look out through the window. I could see the lights through the woods across the street and hear the rumble of the freight trains that intermittently chugged by. I could also cast my eyes into the front yard and, through the shadows of the night, make out the mouth of the tunnel that was down there. The tunnel that would often invade my dreams as a boy. The tunnel in which I believe Harry Bosch was born.
The house was on a piece of sloping land, which meant that when I visited friends who lived behind us, I had to go out the back door and climb a steep hill to get to their yards. If I went out the front door to the street, the lawn dropped down into a gulley that led to a brick-lined drainage tunnel that went under Highland Avenue and into the woods across the street. The tunnel was old and filled with mud and fallen brick-and-mortar rubble. Gnarled roots had broken through from overhead and crept down like hands ready to grab you. Spiderwebs clung to these roots in silvery patterns that caught the light that leaked down from above. The tunnel smelled as damp as a flooded basement.
It was an unspoken rite of passage in my neighborhood that every young boy had to go through the tunnel. On his own, holding no one’s hand, and not turning back or chickening out. Those who weren’t up to it faced certain peer group banishments and the attendant verbal abuse. The tunnel was the crucible that separated the boys from the men. And nobody wanted to be a sissy.
You knew who had been through the tunnel and who had not. There wasn’t a neighborhood list in which names were checked off. It wasn’t even spoken about. It was just one of the things you knew as a boy in that neighborhood. You knew who wore the invisible badge of courage that would soon open the door to manhood, and who had chickened out.
All memories of childhood are exaggerated in some fashion. It was said that if you were down in there when the trash truck passed by up above, the roots swayed and the tunnel rumbled like an earthquake. It was also said that if you called out from the middle of the tunnel, your voice made a perfect echo in both directions. I cannot be sure of the tunnel’s dimensions, but my honest guess is that it was no more than five feet high and forty feet from entrance to exit. But to a ten-year-old it didn’t matter. Whatever the measurements were, they were the dimensions of fear.
As the time for me to go through drew near, I thought about the tunnel a lot. It was summer, and I knew that before the season’s end, before school began again, I had to prove myself. I had to pass through that tunnel. At night on the top bunk, I could see it down there waiting for me.