This segment is from early on in The Black Echo, the first in the Bosch series of detective novels by Michael Connelly. I’ve watched all of the TV adaptation, and figured I would give one of the books a read, prompted in large part by an article in the Los Angeles Times by Sue Horton about the centrality of that city (which I have a strong affection for, though I’ve never lived there) to Connelly’s books. There are 25 Bosch volumes to date. That’s a whole lot of Los Angeles, though then again, Los Angeles, nearly four million people spread out over nearly 500 square miles, is a whole lot of city.
The earliest Bosch novel is old enough that the technology here is noticeably pre-modern. In a subsequent scene in the same book, Bosch’s partner, Jerry Edgar, waits for a “machine” so he can take care of writing up the day’s reports. The “machine” is not a computer but a typewriter, of which there aren’t enough in the department to go around. When a computer does enter the picture, along with it comes a dedicated human operator, a signal to the reader of how unusual such an object was back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The first Bosch book was published in 1992, by which time I’d had a computer — two or three, that is — for well over a decade. But the workplace, especially the city government workplace, was and remains a different setting from a home office.
What struck me about this particular section of The Black Echo is how carefully Connelly describes all the details of phone communication: the checking of the pager, the approach to the pay phones, the required coins, and perhaps most importantly, the way meaning can be construed from interactions, like here how quickly Bosch’s partner picks up the phone. This is the sort of writing that someone engaged in historical fiction might work hard at, getting all the micro-interactions, all the object names and uses, exactly right. What’s great is that Connelly did it at the time, writing about the sort of technological interfaces that can get lost as time proceeds — a lesson that those writing today, fiction and non-fiction, should keep in mind, as the technology of communication continues to change rapidly.
