How finding a gun at 16 changed the course of Michael Connelly's life
The bestselling author discusses the night that sparked his fascination with crime
Over his three-decade career, bestselling crime writer Michael Connelly has published 38 books and sold more than 85 million copies worldwide. But if it weren't for an experience he had one night when he was 16, he may not be the successful novelist he is today.
While living in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Connelly was driving home from his late-night job as a dishwasher when he noticed a man running along the deserted street.
"He wasn't a jogger," Connelly recalls in an interview with Q's Tom Power over Zoom. "I saw him strip off an outer shirt — he still had a T-shirt on — wrap something that had been in his hand that I hadn't noticed, and then stick the shirt into a hedge as he kept running."
Instead of continuing home, the teenaged Connelly decided to investigate what the man had stashed in the hedge.
"[I] pulled out this shirt and it was wrapped around a gun," he says. "At that time, I had never held a gun in my life…. I put it back in there. This was a long time ago — no cell phones — and I went to a phone booth and I called my dad, woke him up, and told him what I'd seen and what I found."
As he and his dad were talking, the night was lit up with the blue lights of several cop cars descending on the area. Connelly's father advised him to tell the police what he had seen.
"I led them to the gun," he says. "I didn't see this crime, but apparently a man, in what we would later call a carjacking, had refused to give up his car and he ended up getting shot. The bad guy was the one I saw running….
"He was running towards what was a well-known biker bar near the beach, and [the cops] figured that was his destination. So they went in there and grabbed a lot of those people. You know, I described the guy [as having] long hair and a beard, wearing jeans, boots and a T-shirt, which is like every biker in that bar. So it was a long night of looking at lineups."
Ultimately, Connelly didn't identify anyone, but the night he had spent in the police station fascinated him.
"It left an impression on me," he tells Power. "From that point, I started reading. I wanted to read the newspaper to see if they ever caught anybody. So I was reading crime news and I started reading true crime books. And then I started reading crime fiction and one thing led to another. About three years later, I said, 'I want to try to do this.' So if I had not glanced to my left and seen that guy running, I might not be doing what I'm doing today."
The full interview with Michael Connelly is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. He also talks about his latest novel, Resurrection Walk, and why he thinks the true crime genre has become so popular. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Interview with Michael Connelly produced by Ben Edwards.
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