Michael Connelly - The Scarecrow

Carver waited in darkness. His mind was a jumble of thoughts. So many he was not sure which were true memories and which were made up.

They filtered through his mind like smoke. Nothing that stayed. Nothing that he could grab on to.

He heard the voices on occasion but could not make them out clearly. They were like muffled conversations all around him. Nobody was talking to him. They were talking around him. When he asked questions, nobody answered.

He still had his music and it was the only thing that saved him. He heard it and tried to sing along but often he had no voice and had to just hum. He kept falling behind.

This is the end… beautiful friend, the end…

He believed it was his father’s voice that sang to him. The father he never knew, coming to him in the grace of music.

Like in church.

He felt a terrible amount of pain. Like an ax embedded in the center of his forehead. Unrelenting pain. He waited for someone to stop it. To save him from it. But no one came. No one heard him.

He waited in darkness.

The author gratefully acknowledges the help of many in the research, writing and editing of this book. They include Asya Muchnick, Bill Massey, Daniel Daly, Dennis “Cisco” Wojciechowski, James Swain, Jane Davis, Jeff Pollack, Linda Connelly, Mary Mercer, Pamela Marshall, Pamela Wilson, Philip Spitzer, Roger Mills, Scott B. Anderson, Shannon Byrne, Sue Gissal and Terrell Lee Lankford.

Many thanks also to Gregory Hoblit, Greg Stout, Jeff Pollack, John Houghton, Mike Roche, Rick Jackson and Tim Marcia.

Excerpt from “The Changeling,” words and music by The Doors, © 1971 Doors Music Co. Copyright Renewed. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission; Excerpt from “Riders on the Storm,” words and music by The Doors, © 1971 Doors Music Co. Copyright Renewed. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission; Excerpt from “The End,” words and music by The Doors, © 1967 Doors Music Co. Copyright Renewed. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

Michael Connellyis a former journalist and the author of the #1 bestsellers The Brass Verdict and The Lincoln Lawyer, the bestselling series of Harry Bosch novels, and the bestselling novels Chasing the Dime, Void Moon, Blood Work, and The Poet . Crime Beat, a collection of his journalism, was also a New York Times bestseller. He spends his time in California and Florida.

Author Q ?amp; A

THE SCARECROW

By Michael Connelly

FOR JACK MCEVOY, THE KILLER NAMED THE POET WAS THE LAST WORD IN EVIL.

THINK AGAIN, JACK.

It has been quite a few years since reporter Jack McEvoy was featured in The Poet. What made you decide to write about him again?

Being a former newspaper reporter, I’ve watched in recent years as the newspaper economy has crumbled and newspapers have tried to figure out ways to deal with advertising and readers shifting to the Internet. Along the way, many people I worked with have lost their jobs to buyouts or layoffs. I am also a big fan of the television show The Wire. In its last season, the show explored in a secondary plot what was happening to the newspaper business. Watching that show made me want to take a shot at a story that would be a thriller first and a torch song for the newspaper business second.

In The Scarecrow, Jack is in his last days of working for the Los Angeles Times, the newspaper you used to work for as a reporter. Sadly, the Rocky Mountain News, Jack’s newspaper in The Poet, has shut down production forever. How did that affect the writing of this book?

As with any sort of downward spiral, the closer you get to the end, the tighter the circles become. In the writing process and thereafter, I kept hearing of things that were happening and had to try to get them into the story. The Times is meant to represent the entire business-all newspapers. So I might hear of something happening at one paper and I would incorporate it into my story of the Times. But after the book was finished, the spiral continued. The day after I turned in the manuscript, the Times ’s parent company filed for bankruptcy. This necessitated several changes in the manuscript. Three days after the book was supposedly locked and ready to be printed, the Rocky Mountain News closed. This meant we had to unlock the book and make changes. Since then, the Times has announced plans to close more foreign bureaus this summer. Sadly, it goes on and on. In many ways, I wish the book weren’t so timely, because what is making it timely is all of this bad news for newspapers.

What is your biggest fear about the decline of newspapers and daily print journalism?

I understand and even accept the shift to online news. What I worry about is the reliability of the news and the loss of vigilance. Anybody can start a website, write a blog or hold themselves out as a journalist. But the newspaper is an institution (the Rocky Mountain News was 150 years old) with set standards and requirements of journalists. It is also the central point of community news. It usually sets the stage for what is important and what is news. A lot of that will be lost. There will be no central place for news. There will be dozens of websites that people will probably pick according to their political persuasion. Ultimately, it will be the public that loses here. A friend of mine who lost her job in the business says that you can bet on government corruption becoming the growth industry because there will be no watchdogs like there are at newspapers. The thing I wonder is whether a bunch of news websites and bloggers could ever bring down a corrupt president the way Nixon was felled by the Washington Post and other papers. At the moment, I doubt it.

Did you make up the name the “Velvet Coffin” (“a place to work so pleasurable that you would easily slip in and stay till you died”) to describe the Los Angeles Times, or was it really called this back when you were a reporter there?

That was its nickname when I went to work there in 1988. I remember people in the business telling me that I had made it to the velvet coffin. That it would be my last stop because it didn’t get any better than working for the L.A. Times. I remember if they sent you somewhere on a story, they flew you first class. In the early ’90s its circulation grew to over 1.2 million and it was the largest daily newspaper in the country. It’s got less than two-thirds of that circulation now, and it is still declining.

In The Scarecrow, you bring FBI agent Rachel Walling and journalist Jack McEvoy back together for the first time since The Poet. In recent years we’ve seen Rachel working closely with LAPD detective Harry Bosch and falling in and out of a romantic relationship with him. Do you think Jack is a better match for Rachel than Harry is?

I think the thing about my books is that nobody matches up well, and in the friction of these relationships is some of the drama I need for each story. For the moment, at least, Jack fits better with Rachel because he needs her more than Harry does. Harry has sort of built himself to need no one on any level. Jack is not that way, and I think that would make him more attractive to Rachel. The question is who and what does Rachel need. I am not sure yet because I need to explore this character more. I hope I get the chance.