Last year Michael Connelly took his readers on a slow boat to China. He wrote “Nine Dragons,” a disappointingly flat and gimmicky story featuring his long-suffering Los Angeles police detective, Harry Bosch. Harry’s usual stomping ground is the depraved underbelly of Los Angeles, but “Nine Dragons” sent him on a touristy detour to Hong Kong. It also used one of the detective novel’s cheapest tricks, the kidnapping of someone near and dear to the hero (in this case his schoolgirl daughter) to generate suspense.
Fortunately Mr. Connelly has returned to solid ground. He has written “The Reversal,” which has a “the” title that makes it sound safely like one of John Grisham’s courthouse generics (Mr. Grisham’s next one, due later this month, is titled “The Confession”) and the setting that Mr. Connelly knows best. “The Reversal” also brings back Mickey Haller, the relatively new Connelly character who emerged as a leading man in “The Lincoln Lawyer.” He even showed up in “Nine Dragons,” which seemed to incorporate everything but the Connelly kitchen sink.
Taking no chances this time Mr. Connelly creates major roles in “The Reversal” for both the contentious Mickey and his moodier half brother, Harry. However venerable and well-loved Harry may be, it’s become clear that Mickey’s brazenness brings these books a new brio. So Mr. Connelly gives Mickey the larger role and makes him the story’s narrator. He has dreamed up a criminal case in which both can be involved. And then, once the story’s larger framework is in place, he executes the subtle sleight of hand that makes each of his books so much more than the sum of its parts.
The first few pages of “The Reversal” will convince no one that this book ought to be read on its literary merits. They explain how Mickey, ordinarily a wily defense lawyer (“me, Mickey Haller, defender of the damned”) and a happily outlandish one, is roped into serving as a prosecutor for a change.
The case is 24 years old. The defendant, Jason Jessup, was convicted for killing a 12-year-old girl. He went to prison, but now he is being retried on the basis of new DNA evidence, thanks to the Genetic Justice Project, which has turned the Jessup case into a cause célèbre and Jessup into a lowlife celebrity. The new trial has become so fraught that the district attorney wants to bring in an outsider to keep his own rival, the California attorney general, away from the proceedings. Enter Mickey.
“That case is a duck without wings,” Mickey complains, sounding like no human being this side of a movie screen. “The only thing left to do is shoot it and eat it.” In much the same spirit he throws back talk at the D.A. (“I’m an independent contractor, remember? You treat me otherwise and you’re going to be holding his hot potato without an oven mitt.”) No matter: Mickey is soon hooked. He’d like to prevail against Jessup, a gloating lout who stands to become rich and famous if exonerated. But what the man, whose slogan was once “Any case, Anytime, Anywhere,” likes even better is calling himself “Mickey Haller for the People.”
Now Mr. Connelly works Harry into the mix. Mickey needs an investigator. And, as this author’s longtime devotees know, Harry Bosch is simply the best. The story also draws on Maggie McPherson, a k a Maggie McFierce, the deputy D.A. who is Mickey’s ex-wife, and Rachel Walling, the F.B.I. profiler who has been a very close personal friend of Harry’s. This criminal investigation threatens to turn into a double date.
But the serious strengths of “The Reversal” become apparent after the principals are in place. Mr. Connelly likes to explicate the workings of the judicial process, especially for the benefit of people “who venture naïvely into the justice system” and “leave the courthouse wondering what just happened.” He can illustrate the basics of criminal investigation better than most. And he makes suspenseful use of simple but diabolical complications for the prosecution. In the case of “The Reversal” it is essential that the jury never learn, despite runaway press coverage, that Jessup has stood trial for the same crime before.
All stylistic posturing vanishes when this book gets down to basics, creating a classic detective-story puzzle around the facts of the girl’s disappearance. Her home was near a church. A swimming pool was being constructed in the backyard. So the victim and her sisters were doing something they didn’t normally do by playing in front of the house. The front lawn was obscured by a six-foot-high hedge. One of the victim’s sisters thinks that the abductor was a garbage man, but there were no garbage collections on Sundays. The three main suspects were tow-truck operators who looked for churchgoers’ illegally parked cars. The police were so desperate to find the girl alive that they rushed their investigation, zeroed in on this threesome and then singled out Jessup too recklessly.
Harry expertly tracks down leads in this long-neglected case, while Mickey prepares for the chess maneuvers of the trial. And when all of the characters begin working together, sparks really fly. Suffice it to say that there is a moment in the courtroom when Mickey outmaneuvers the defense so well that Harry glares at Jessup and feigns a throat cutting, just to indicate which side he thinks is winning. But Mr. Connelly doesn’t really write about winners and losers. He writes true-to-life fiction about true crime. What makes his crime stories ring most true is that they’re never really over.
Shedding Some Light on ‘Darkness’
A lot of motives might have been at play in “The Promise: The Making of ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’ ”: nostalgia, vanity, a desire for documentation or benediction. One thing that’s undoubtedly on display, though, is bravery.
For much of the documentary, making its debut Thursday night on HBO, the director, Thom Zimny, cuts between a contemporary interview with Bruce Springsteen and footage shot more than 30 years ago of the young Bruce, an intense and beautiful creature who looks like the Robert De Niro of “Mean Streets,” but friendlier.
Mr. Springsteen, now 61, is aging remarkably well, but still — how many of us, at that age, would want to spend an hour and a half being compared with our 28-year-old selves?
Those scenes of Mr. Springsteen and the E Street Band in the studio during the year they worked on “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” their fourth album, were shot in grainy black and white by Barry Rebo, a future cinematographer and producer. Along with old color home movies of the Springsteen family, they give “The Promise” a surface resemblance to Bruce Weber’s great musical documentary “Let’s Get Lost,” about the trumpeter Chet Baker.
“The Promise,” however, is much smaller in scope. It’s a standard making-of documentary, proceeding chronologically through the tribulations and triumphs on the road to the 1978 release of “Darkness,” three years after “Born to Run” — an agonizingly long gap at a time when new songs on the radio were the only way to reach a mass audience.
What elevates the film are its subjects, both the artist and the album, which established a style and a set of themes that would define Mr. Springsteen’s subsequent career. Punk, which was developing at the same time, may get all the credit for revolutionizing popular music, but Mr. Springsteen’s determination to move away from the highly engineered and sterile perfectionism of 1970s rock made “Darkness” just as innovative in its own way.
Springsteen fans — a particularly knowledgeable and devoted audience — will be mesmerized by Mr. Rebo’s footage, which, according to HBO, has never been shown publicly. Those of us who remember where we were when we first heard the album can indulge our nostalgia while taking in the evidence of Mr. Springsteen’s stubborn yet calm determination to find exactly the sound he was seeking.
Happiest of all will be the Springsteen completists, rewarded by nuggets like his singing of “Candy’s Baby” (an earlier version of “Candy’s Room”); an alternate verse of “Something in the Night” or the never-released “What’s the Matter Little Darling”; or songs that went to other artists, like “Because the Night” (Patti Smith) and “Talk to Me” (Southside Johnny).
In the background of one shot Mr. Zimny identifies the fan Obie Dziedzic, who advised his hero to record the version of “Racing in the Street” that included a verse about a girl he met — thereby helping preserve some of Mr. Springsteen’s most romantic lyrics. (“Tonight my baby and me we’re gonna ride to the sea/and wash these sins off our hands.”)
In addition to the interview with the latter-day Mr. Springsteen “The Promise” includes reminiscences by most of the core members of the E Street Band and the producers Jon Landau and Jimmy Iovine. Mr. Springsteen is as intelligent and articulate a commentator as always, but he doesn’t have much to say that sounds new. On the themes that underpin “Darkness,” like sin or “deep despair, resilience, determination,” you’d rather just hear him sing.
More enlightening is Chuck Plotkin, who was brought in to help Mr. Iovine mix the album and who describes how Mr. Springsteen communicated the sounds and effects he wanted to achieve through visual, cinematic images. More amusing is Steven Van Zandt, the guitarist and latter-day “Sopranos” star, who still gets testy on the subject of the 70 new songs he had to learn before Mr. Springsteen chose the 10 that would make it onto the album. (“The Promise” was one of the rejects, after the band had spent three months rehearsing and recording it; it would show up 21 years later on “18 Tracks.”)
“The Promise” (the film) fits on the shelf with other friendly documentaries released in the past few years about great rock songwriters of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, like Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Tom Petty. It doesn’t approach the complexity or panache of Martin Scorsese’s movie about Mr. Dylan or Jonathan Demme’s films about Mr. Young, but in its modest way it’s a fitting tribute to an album meant to be lean, angry and unadorned.
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