Michael Connelly visits the LA crime lab

Author Michael Connelly's Los Angeles based police mysteries often involve his longest-running character, Hieronymous "Harry" Bosch, making quick runs out to the LAPD crime lab located with the sheriff's lab at Cal State LA. In a guest piece for the campus magazine, Connelly goes to the actual crime lab and talks about how useful it has been for his books. As you probably know, Connelly's books are the basis for a an Amazon original series, Bosch, filmed partly in the CSULA lab. In the latest Bosch mystery, "The Burning Room," the detective's teenaged daughter is making plans to apply to Cal State LA. So the tie-ins are many.

From Connelly's magazine story:

As a novelist I have always followed a simple rule: If I am going to “sell” a reader on a character who is purely a work of fiction, then I need to anchor that character in as real a world as is possible. People enter a story—whether it’s a novel, a television show or a movie—looking for somebody to ride with. That person has to seem real and believable. In many ways their world has to seem more real than the one we are in.

I make that connection by surrounding Detective Harry Bosch and my other characters with the real world. I write about Los Angeles. I use real roads, real restaurants, sometimes even real people in the landscapes of my stories. What I am trying to do is make the line between fact and fiction invisible. To do that I spend time in the places where my characters spend time. This includes Cal State L.A., where I have researched my books at the Hertzberg-Davis Forensic Science Center. The center contains state-of-the-art crime and forensic labs for both the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

I remember the first time I visited the center and was shown around by Doreen Hudson, director of the LAPD’s side of the lab; I was hit with enough ideas for ten books.

Connelly, as his fans know, is a former Los Angeles Times reporter who got started on the Harry Bosch books while working the Valley police beat for the Times. He now has 28 books to his name and there have been a couple of movies made from his characters. This issue of the CSULA magazine has stories by two other LA Times alums: Robert J. Lopez, who is the school's director of communications, and Jocelyn Y. Stewart, who is the magazine's managing editor.