Customer Reviews

Crime Beat: A Decade of Covering Cops and Killers

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(31)

 

 

...it was all down hill from there. I bought this book thinking that Connelly was writing about crimes he had covered. That sounded interesting. Instead it appears to be just a reprint of old columns he wrote about various crimes. For each crime, there's a series of stand-alone articles and as a result there's lots of repetition of information from one to the next. I got bored and gave up on it after about 60 pages. It could have been very good if only Connelly had taken the info from each crime and reworked it into one story for each incident.

Meh. I was hoping for more in a book of true crime by a well-reviewed mystery author, but this is just an uneditted collection of Connelly's crime-related newspaper stories from his journalist days of the 1980s and early 1990s. The stories are almost all straight newspaper stories, with all the negatives that implies--little nuance, straight facts, lots of repetitions over a series of stories about the same crime. I was hoping for something more like Ann Rule's "Crime Files" books--yes, reprints, but with some perspective and rewriting. A few of the stories were more interesting, in particular "The Gang that Couldn't Shoot Straight", which is a longer article telling the story of an almost comically inept gang of hitman-wannabes, who unfortunately succeeded in killing a couple of their targets. This story must have been a Sunday feature or magazine article because it had more development and room to breathe without all the repetition of background details.

Okay, but I expected more from someone with Connelly's reputation.

Michael Connelly's "Crime Beat" is a compilation of previously published newspaper articles that appeared in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel from 1984-1987 and in the Los Angeles Times from 1987-1992. In his introduction Connelly explains, "My experiences with cops and killers were invaluable to me as a novelist." Readers beware! This is not a Harry Bosch novel, nor is it a stand-alone thriller. The book is divided into three sections: the cops, the killers, and the cases. Each chapter is a look at how Connelly the reporter views a crime and its aftermath.

The valid question that some reviewers have posed is: Why should we be interested in true crimes from the eighties and early nineties? After all, Connelly's fans buy his books because they love his delineation of fictional characters, his thoughtful exploration of what makes a homicide detective's life so harrowing, and his intriguing story lines. This book provides a different kind of pleasure: a glimpse at how a good reporter parlayed his considerable talent into successful fiction-writing. In "Crime Beat," Connelly describes misdeeds both horrifying and banal, criminals who are drug-addicted, delusional, or sociopathic, and victims who are sometimes innocent and occasionally just plain foolish.

For example, there is an eye-opening account of criminals who flee to Mexico to avoid standing trial in the United States. Connelly introduces us to two detectives who help Mexican authorities find and prosecute fugitives from American justice. Some civil libertarians believe that it is unfair to subject suspects who commit a crime on American soil to the Mexican justice system, which offers fewer protections to the defendant. However, the "foreign prosecution unit" has successfully survived all legal challenges, and authorities in both Mexico and the United States are satisfied with the unit's performance.

In other chapters, Connelly depicts a wide assortment of miscreants: rogue cops, a serial killer, a brazen bigamist, an inept gang of contract killers, and a vicious twenty-one year old man who butchered his own father. Not all of the cases are closed. Some remain open-unsolved until this day, and the reader's heart goes out to some victims' families who do not even have a body to bury.

Connelly has a gift for understanding and interpreting the criminal mind. He also has empathy for the harried, overworked, and often frustrated detectives whose tedious job it is to run down every lead. Cops love it when a suspect jumps out at them right away; however, perpetrators rarely confess immediately. Usually, detectives must work long hours conducting endless interviews, working the phones, checking computer databases, and following dozens of tips before they are ready to make an arrest. In clear, crisp prose, the author provides not only the bare facts, but he also clarifies the legal aspects of each case and gives the reader insight into the personalities involved.

My one quibble with "Crime Beat" is its excessive length. At a bit under four hundred pages, the book eventually becomes repetitious; there is considerable fat that could have been trimmed. Still, Connelly effectively shows how his keen powers of observation, fluid prose style, dark sense of humor, and understanding of what makes people tick has enabled him to make such a smooth transition from reporting to writing superb thrillers.

Michael Connelly is a fine author. He has stories to tell, and he tells them well. I have most of his books, and will no doubt continue buying them.

This one, sad to say, did not please me.

This is the true-crime version of a Dave Barry book, a collection of previously written columns / stories from the author's days as a reporter, in South Florida and in Los Angeles. The stories are all well written; footnotes bring us up to date (whenever possible) on what has transpired in each case in the 15 - 20 years since they first appeared in print.

But Lord, is it dry! If I wanted to spend a few hours reading a newspaper, I'd buy the NYTimes.

Part of the problem is that many chapters consist of multiple stories, written a few weeks / months / years apart. Each subsequent story had to reiterate the important facts, so there is a *lot* of repetition.

I'm not sorry I read it; I just wish I had waited for the paperback.

I recently "discovered" Michael Connelly and after reading all of his fiction books, the only thing left was his non-fiction work, Crime Beat: A Decade of Covering Cops and Killers. I have enjoyed everything I've read until now. Unfortunately, I found Crime Beat to be a big disappointment.

I have always been a person who enjoys the story behind the story. For that reason, I was anxious to read Crime Beat. I thought it would provide some insight into Connelly's characters--especial his LAPD homicide detective, Harry Bosch. He got off to a great start with his forward. Connelly explains how he came to be a crime writer, and how he incorporated the things that he saw as a beat reporter into his works of fiction. But after that, the remainder of the book (except for an afterward by Michael Carlson) is just the reprinting of articles he wrote for the "LA Times" and the "South Florida Sun-Sentinel." Although I could pick some of his fictional characters out of his articles (especially the Poet and a Bosch-like detective), I would have enjoyed Crime Beat much more if Connelly had actually explained the influences in each case. As the stories stand, he only adds a brief update to some of them. Some of the crimes had a series of articles that repeated the same background information over and over again. Except for the forward, not much additional effort was expended here.

Michael Connelly is a talented writer and has quickly become one of my favorites. But I think I'll stick to his works of fiction.

A different approach from his typical novels. It provided insight to real crime cases, but was a tad bit repeatitive within some of the stories.

This book is like a Master Class for potential crime authors. In fact, for all authors.

What Mr. Connelly does here is show you how he sought "hooks" when covering the Crime Beat in LA and Florida -- angles that made his stories seem alive and human. From the chewed eyeglass frames of his over-worked and near burned-out Detective to the mother of a missing woman who sadly says she cant get her daughter "past the gas station" where she was last seen, Mr. Connelly shows you how he takes the inhumanity of murder and makes it human, bringing it down to a common denominator that shows it can happen to any of us any time.

His insight never wavers when writing about mass murderers who criss-cross the country claiming victims along the way or helping us understand how the Rodney King incident opened a can of worms for every defense attorney in LA to harvest and turn against the very people defending the city.

Then, Mr. Connelly shows you how he takes bits and pieces of these real life incidents and flawlessly weaves them into first class works of fiction. This book is sure to help any aspiring writer to become a better writer. As one of those writers, I have nothing but gratitude. Thanks, Michael.

Michael Connelly has a well-deserved reputation as one of the best mystery writers in the business today. But before he became a novelist, he was a reporter, handling crime writing both in the South Florida Sun Sentinel and the Los Angeles Times. Crime Beat is a collection of some of the articles he wrote for both papers.

Covering an eight year span between 1984 and 1992 (around the time his fiction career really took off), Crime Beat follows a number of different cases, sometimes focusing on the cops, other times on the criminals. Since this is real-life stuff, resolutions are not always present, although some articles end with notes about what happened after the original story came out.

The Call, the opening story, is Connelly's description about the workings of a homicide department. Right off the bat, he captures our interest with his true tale of the frustrations in solving murder cases. Not all stories, however, favorably present the police: in particular, we get a series of articles about L.A.'s Special Investigation Section, which was accused of the ambush and killing of several robbery suspects and would culminate in a series of lawsuits.

On the other side, we see the criminals: people like Christopher Bernard Wilder who had a cross-country killing spree and David Miller whose bigamy and shady financial dealings would eventually drive him to kill. There is also the gang of wannabe mercenary killers who tried to be cool and professional but were anything but; although successful in a couple murders, they also botched a number of attempts and didn't really cover their tracks well.

The stories are interesting, but the main insight that Crime Beat offers is a look into the formative years of Connelly and what made him the great novelist he is. And while the writing is good, you might be disappointed if you expect it to meet the caliber of his fiction: after all, Connelly was still developing his trade, he was under much tighter editorial supervision, and his creativity was constrained by the facts. Nonetheless, this is a nice set of short, true-crime stories.

Wish I had read the reviews. I bought it on the strength of the other books by Micheal Connelly that I thoroughly enjoyed and was very disappointed. Newspaper articles rehashed over and over. I tried to finish it but it just couldn't hold my interest. First book I have put down before finishing in years!

Most crime stories take a single major crime or serial criminal and dig into it in depth, or to a lesser extent, do so with perhaps 5-6 situations. Connelly, however, overdoes it with 22 short vignettes about various crimes, killers, and cases. The material is almost entirely previously printed news stories, though the "good news" is that when several were written on a single case they are all included together. (The other "bad news" is that this also leads to some repetition, and it was originally copywrited in 2004 - "old news.")

Bottom Line: A fast read, but too superficial and not very exciting.