Facts aren’t everything

Michael Connelly is widely regarded as one of our finest mystery writers. His Harry Bosch novels, which feature an LAPD detective at war with his superiors, his city and himself, have been compared to the work of Raymond Chandler for their gritty evocation of Los Angeles. Yet before Connelly was a novelist, he was a reporter, first in Florida and then at The Times. His experiences on the police beat helped fuel the fiction he would come to write. Connelly’s new book, “Crime Beat: A Decade of Covering Cops and Killers” (Little, Brown: 376 pp., $25.95) is a collection of his best news stories. On the occasion of its publication, Book Review asked him to reflect on the relationship of journalism to fiction, and the elusive border between facts and truth.

A few months after I “retired” from the newspaper business, O.J. Simpson got in his white Bronco and led the police and the rest of the world on a chase into a new media era. A full-time novelist by then, I watched from my house in the Hollywood Hills, where I could see the close-ups on TV and then look out the front window and chart the slow progress of the chase by the swarm of helicopters moving over the cityscape.

When O.J. finally got home to Brentwood and gave himself up, I saw the familiar face of a colleague in the huge knot of reporters standing outside the front gate. I knew that if I had still been on the police beat, the face on the screen could have been mine. I thanked God that it wasn’t and went back to my writing room to continue work on a novel.

I used my work as a reporter on the police beat as a means to an end -- to write fiction about that world. It used to be that as a journalist I would be deeply insulted if you said I never let the facts get in the way of a good story. Now as a novelist I smile and take that as a compliment. A police detective I know calls what I do “faction” -- the blending or bending of fact into fiction.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about my days on the police beat. Mostly because the publication of “Crime Beat,” a collection of stories I wrote as a reporter, has prompted the question: Do I ever miss it?

The quick answer is no. After all, I no longer write under deadline pressure, can write about whatever I want and don’t have the ulcer-inducing pressure of always having to get there first and always having to get it right.

But as I read through my old newspaper clips and helped choose the stories for this collection, I began to realize that maybe there is nothing to miss. I began to realize that my fiction is simply an extension of my journalism. Not a means to an end but all part of the means. An evolution. I still want to get there first and I still want to get it right.

I don’t miss it because I still do it. I just do it differently -- and with an eye toward going deeper than just the facts, ma’am.

There is a saying that if you want to know the facts, read a newspaper, but if you want to know the truth, read a novel. I don’t know where I first heard that phrase, but after many years I am beginning to see the light in it. When I am writing a novel, I take a journalist’s eye to this place called Los Angeles. Then I take what I learn and bring it inside and try to couple it with the truth of human nature and character. What I mean is that I try to give it a flesh-and-blood reality. I try to breathe the truth into it.

When I was on the police beat, I wrote about blood and violence but rarely wrote the whole truth about it. Sure, I got the facts of the moment right, but I almost never followed the ripples those facts created. I wasn’t there when the ripples became waves and crashed onto the shores of a family or a childhood or a neighborhood or a business. Or a city. With my novels, I can do that. With my novels, I have tried to do that. And sometimes when I have been diligent and kept my eyes on that prize, I think I have even succeeded. Maybe.

Once, as a reporter, I stood outside a house in Canoga Park where yellow police tape separated the many police officers and detectives on the premises from the many news reporters and photographers gathered in the street. All we knew was that inside the house there were dead people. A mother and her three children had been shot to death. The family dog was dead too.

Those of us gathered on the sidewalk knew the story could go either way. If the family had been murdered by an intruder, then the story would be launched into the upper stratosphere of media attention. It would be a franchise story, a crime to come back to and write about again and again. But if it was an inside job, if it was the mother who did it -- killed her kids and the dog before killing herself -- then the story would more or less die on the launch pad. There wouldn’t be much to say or write after learning that.

The wait for the homicide detectives to come out of the house with the news extended long into the night. Some of the reporters got an idea. They pooled their money and ordered a pizza and a six-pack of Pepsi. They used the house’s address to direct the delivery man.

At the time, it seemed to me that ordering pizza outside a house of death epitomized the hit-and-run nature of working the cop beat, maybe of all journalism. There was no time for anything but the moment. There was no time for emotion. There was only the surface, and when ripples formed on that surface they were rarely studied or followed. There were facts to report, but not a lot of truth. There was the need for easy sustenance and then it was on to the next story.

When the detectives finally emerged, they told us the mother had done it. She had left a note describing her anguish over financial and family difficulties. I gave my notes to another reporter who would write the story and I called it a day.

There may have been a follow-up to the story the next day, but I didn’t write it. The next day I was on to other stories. That was the way it worked. But all these years later, I still think about that woman who killed her kids. When I am asked what I remember most from my life as a reporter, I don’t bring up the space shuttle explosion or the airline crash or the serial killers or the riots. I don’t mention all the unsolved murders I reported on. I always talk about that woman who killed her kids, the family dog, and then turned the gun on herself.

And when I mention it, I am momentarily able to feel good about myself because I wasn’t one of the reporters who ordered pizza and Pepsi delivered to the crime scene. But then I feel bad about myself because I never went back to that house to try to get the truth. A lot of people have anguish over financial and family difficulties. But they don’t kill their families and themselves. That woman did, and I never bothered to find out what was different about her and why she did it. I took the facts but left behind the truth for others to find.

I have long since left journalism and today work in the realm of fiction. In fact, I have recently reached an odd point of equilibrium: I have been writing and publishing crime novels for 14 years -- the same amount of time I spent as a reporter. But the lesson that woman taught me is one I don’t forget. My job now is to seek the truth, and it’s the facts that are negotiable. You could say that I never let the facts get in the way of a true story. *