Michael Joseph Connelly was born on July 21, 1956. He is an American writer who writes detective novels and other crime stories. He is especially known for writing about LAPD Detective Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch and a criminal defense lawyer named Mickey Haller. His books include ten stories that feature both of these characters. Connelly has written 42 novels and one non-fiction book as of May 2026. More than 74 million copies of his books have been sold worldwide, and his works have been translated into 40 different languages. His first novel, The Black Echo, won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel in 1992. In 2002, Clint Eastwood directed and starred in a movie based on Connelly's 1997 novel Blood Work. In 2011, a movie version of The Lincoln Lawyer was released, with Matthew McConaughey playing the role of Mickey Haller. Connelly served as President of the Mystery Writers of America from 2003 to 2004.
Early life
Connelly was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as the second oldest child of W. Michael Connelly, a property developer, and Mary Connelly, a homemaker. He has Irish ancestry. Connelly explained that his father was an artist who felt frustrated in his career and encouraged his children to work hard and take chances. His father had both successes and failures in his job. Connelly’s mother loved crime fiction and shared her interest in mystery novels with him.
At age 12, Connelly moved with his family to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He attended St. Thomas Aquinas High School there. When he was 16, his interest in crime and mystery grew after he saw a man throw an object into a hedge while walking home from his job as a hotel dishwasher. Connelly decided to investigate and discovered the object was a gun wrapped in a lumberjack shirt. After placing the gun back, he followed the man to a bar and then returned home to tell his father. Later that night, Connelly called the police to the bar, but the man had already left. This experience introduced Connelly to police work and showed him how officers do their jobs.
Connelly originally planned to follow his father’s career path in construction and began studying construction management at the Rinker School of Building Construction at the University of Florida in Gainesville. After receiving grades that were not as high as expected, he watched the movie The Long Goodbye (1973), directed by Robert Altman. The film, based on Raymond Chandler’s 1953 novel of the same name, inspired Connelly to become a mystery writer. He then read all of Chandler’s books featuring the character Philip Marlowe and changed his major to journalism at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications, while also minoring in creative writing.
Early career
After graduating from the University of Florida in 1980, Connelly began working as a crime reporter at the Daytona Beach News-Journal. He stayed there for nearly two years before moving to the Fort Lauderdale News and Sun-Sentinel in 1981. At that newspaper, he covered crime stories during a time of major cocaine-related crimes in South Florida. He remained with the paper for several years. In 1986, Connelly and two other reporters spent months interviewing survivors of the 1985 Delta Flight 191 plane crash. This story made Connelly a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Because of this honor, he was offered a job as a crime reporter at the Los Angeles Times. In 1987, he moved to California with his wife, Linda McCaleb, whom he had met in college and married in April 1984.
After moving to Los Angeles, Connelly visited High Tower Court, a building where the character Philip Marlowe lived in the 1942 novel The High Window by Raymond Chandler. The same building was used in the 1973 film The Long Goodbye by Robert Altman. Connelly asked the building manager to contact him if the apartment became available. Ten years later, the manager found Connelly and offered him the apartment. Connelly rented the space, which he used for writing for several years.
After three years at the Los Angeles Times, Connelly wrote his first published novel, The Black Echo (1992). Before this, he had written two other novels that he did not publish. He sold The Black Echo to Little, Brown for publication in 1992. The book won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award for Best First Novel. The story is partly based on a real crime and introduces Connelly’s main character, Los Angeles Police Department detective Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch. Connelly said Bosch has few similarities to himself. He named the character after the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, known for art showing sin and redemption, such as the painting Hell, a copy of which hangs in Connelly’s office. Connelly describes his writing as a large canvas where characters from his books move like currents in a painting. Sometimes, these characters collide, creating new connections. Connelly uses this method by bringing back characters from earlier books to appear in stories written years later.
Connelly later wrote three more novels about detective Bosch: The Black Ice (1993), The Concrete Blonde (1994), and The Last Coyote (1995). After these, he left his job as a reporter to write full-time.
Full-time novelist
In 1994, Michael Connelly received a lot of attention when President Bill Clinton left a bookstore with a copy of The Concrete Blonde in his hands. Cameras captured the moment, and a meeting was arranged between Connelly and Clinton at Los Angeles International Airport.
In 1996, Connelly wrote The Poet, his first book that did not feature detective Harry Bosch. Instead, the main character was a reporter named Jack McEvoy. The book was successful. In 1997, Connelly returned to Bosch with Trunk Music before writing Blood Work (1997), which focused on FBI agent Terry McCaleb. Blood Work was adapted into a movie in 2002, directed by Clint Eastwood, who also played McCaleb. The book was inspired by a friend of Connelly’s who had a heart transplant and experienced survivor’s guilt. When asked about changes made for the movie, Connelly said, “If you take their money, it’s their turn to tell the story.”
Connelly continued writing Bosch novels, including Angels Flight (1999), before writing Void Moon (2000), which centered on a Las Vegas thief named Cassie Black. In 2001, A Darkness More Than Night was published, uniting Bosch and McCaleb to solve a crime. That year, Connelly moved to Tampa Bay, Florida, with his wife and daughter to be closer to family, though his novels remained set in Los Angeles.
In 2003, Lost Light, another Bosch novel, was released. A CD titled Dark Sacred Night, the Music of Harry Bosch was also released, featuring jazz music that both Connelly and Bosch enjoy. Connelly listens to instrumental jazz while writing because it helps him focus. In 2004, The Narrows was published as a sequel to The Poet, but it featured Bosch instead of McEvoy. A DVD titled Blue Neon Night: Michael Connelly’s Los Angeles was also released, showing locations from his books.
In 2005, The Closers was published as the 11th Bosch novel. Later that year, The Lincoln Lawyer was released, introducing defense attorney Mickey Haller, Bosch’s half-brother. The book was made into a movie in 2011. After writing Crime Beat (2004), a non-fiction book about his work as a crime reporter, Connelly returned to Bosch with Echo Park (2006), which began in an apartment he once lived in. The Overlook was originally published in The New York Times Magazine before becoming a novel in 2007.
In 2008, The Brass Verdict brought Bosch and Haller together for the first time. This was followed by The Scarecrow (2009), which returned McEvoy as the main character. 9 Dragons (2009) took Bosch to Hong Kong. The Reversal (2010) reunited Bosch and Haller to work on a retrial. The Fifth Witness (2011) was another Haller novel.
In 2011, The Drop was published, referencing a plan described in The Brass Verdict. The next Bosch novel was The Black Box (2012). Connelly returned to Haller with The Gods of Guilt (2013). He then wrote The Burning Room (2014) for Bosch, followed by The Crossing (2015) and The Wrong Side of Goodbye (2016), where Haller appeared as a supporting character.
In 2017, Connelly introduced Detective Renée Ballard in The Late Show. Like Bosch, she works in Hollywood but on the night shift. Ballard and Bosch appeared together in Dark Sacred Night (2018), The Night Fire (2019), The Dark Hours (2021), Desert Star (2022), and The Waiting (2024).
Awards and honors
Connelly has received nearly every major award given to mystery writers. These include the Edgar Award, Anthony Award, Macavity Award, Los Angeles Times Best Mystery/Thriller Award, Shamus Award, Dilys Award, Nero Award, Barry Award, Audie Award, Ridley Award, Maltese Falcon Award (Japan), .38 Caliber Award (France), Grand Prix de Littérature Policière (France), and Premio Bancarella Award (Italy). In 2012, his book The Black Box won the world's most valuable crime fiction award, the RBA Prize for Crime Writing, which was worth €125,000. In 2018, he was honored with the Cartier Diamond Dagger by the Crime Writers' Association.
Writing techniques
When starting a book, Connelly says the story is not always clear at first. However, he often has a guess about where the story might go. His books sometimes include real events, such as the 1992 Los Angeles riots and the September 11 attacks. Some events that seem small are included because Connelly is personally interested in them. For example, in City of Bones, Detective Bosch investigates the murder of an 11-year-old boy. This book was written during Connelly’s early years as a father, and it reminded him of his own life. Connelly explains that he did not intend to write about his greatest fear, but the story naturally reflected it. David Geherin notes that Connelly avoids using complicated or fancy language. He prefers simple words to keep the story moving forward without slowing the reader down.
Detective Bosch’s life in the books often changes in a way that matches Connelly’s own life. When Connelly moved 3,000 miles across the country, Bosch’s story in City of Bones also changed direction. Connelly says his main job is to write about Bosch. He brought two characters, McCaleb and Bosch, together in A Darkness More Than Night to explore Bosch from a different angle and keep the character interesting.
Connelly often switches between different characters’ points of view in his novels. In Void Moon, he follows both the main character, Cassie Black, and the antagonist, Jack Karch. In Fair Warning, he mainly tells the story from the perspective of the protagonist, Jack McEvoy, but sometimes shifts to follow the antagonists using a different storytelling method.
Recurring characters
Every character in the list below, except for one, has appeared in a book featuring Harry Bosch. All of Michael Connelly's novels take place in the same imaginary world, and characters from different books often appear together. Each of these characters has been in at least two of Connelly's novels.