Michael Connelly

Michael Connelly (born 1956) is an American crime novelist, creator of the Los Angeles detective Harry Bosch and the defence lawyer Mickey Haller of The Lincoln Lawyer. He was born in Philadelphia on 21 July 1956 and moved to Florida at the age of 12.

Reading Raymond Chandler at the University of Florida, where he studied journalism, led him towards crime fiction. He worked as a crime reporter in Daytona Beach and Fort Lauderdale, and in 1986 he and two colleagues were Pulitzer Prize finalists for a feature on survivors of the Delta Flight 191 crash, which took him to the Los Angeles Times. His first novel, The Black Echo (Little, Brown, January 1992), introduced Bosch and won the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award for best first novel. The Poet (1996) was his first book without Bosch, Blood Work became a 2002 Clint Eastwood film, and The Lincoln Lawyer (2005) was filmed in 2011 with Matthew McConaughey. Amazon's Bosch ran for seven seasons from 2014, and Netflix has adapted The Lincoln Lawyer. He was president of the Mystery Writers of America in 2003 and 2004 and has received the CWA Diamond Dagger (2018) and the MWA Grand Master award (2023). His books have sold over 90 million copies worldwide.

For collectors

The Little, Brown first edition of The Black Echo (1992) is the cornerstone of any Connelly collection, as both his debut and the first Bosch novel.