O for a pitcher full of more Bosch thrillers ...

I don’t know what to call this … this craving … there is no more, but I want some more … I finished reading all of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch novels a week ago … though Connelly started the Bosch series of novels in 1992, I arrived late to the party in late 2016, but before long I made up for lost time by catching up till the most recent Bosch novel that came out in 2016, The Wrong Side of Goodbye, the 19^th in the series … I bought most of them secondhand on the used books portal on amazon … and those I didn’t get there or anywhere else, I read their e versions …

I started reading the Bosch series sometime in February this year … I wanted to read from the first in the series onwards and planned the book purchases and e-books accordingly … it started slowly, I needed to get familiar with Bosch, his working style, his philosophy, his quirks, mannerisms, his family, and most of all Los Angeles, which is such a living, throbbing presence in the series … once these became familiar, there was this sudden rush in May and June and I completed the set in one long binge … 19 Bosch novels so far … I wish I had read my schoolbooks with the same passion some 35 years ago … yeah, yeah … kuch nahin hoga tera …

Now, after the 19^th Bosch novel, the path ended abruptly, as it were … this feeling was not something new to me … sometime in October last year I had completed the Inspector Banks series by Peter Robinson … that too had started sporadically, as and when I managed to locate a book at Abids or at Best Books … and then I discovered the used books portal on amazon and then … fffzzzzuuurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr … all systems go, go, go … I finished the whole set … and after that … craving for more … I looked around … any small tidbit would do, it seemed then … I hunted for the short stories … bought them, read them … the next Inspector Banks, Sleeping in the Ground, is due this year … I have been waiting for the 24^th Inspector Banks novel for quite a long time now … 

The next Bosch novel too is due this year … but amazon indicates that it’d be in October … abba … three more months … what to do … again this craving … I feel like Tarzan swinging from one rope while the next rope is yet to be seen … if I don’t find the next rope in time, I am going to crash into the jungle … such is the mess I find myself in now …

As I hunted out any small, however little, bit of Bosch related information on the net, I discovered that Connelly had written short stories … I could make out around 22 short stories and around fourteen stories feature Bosch … there are three published collections with three stories each … Angle of Investigation (2011), Suicide Run (2011), and Mulholland Dive (2012) … these were the easiest to locate … a couple of them are available as ‘shorts’ … and some kind soul has put together seven stories published in various anthologies, into a sort of an e-book … I could account for 18 short stories … and my eyes lit up … mmm … more Bosch stories … I devoured them all …

There were four more stories, three of them with Bosch that I wasn’t able to locate as easily as the others, though the site had given bibliographic details of the four anthologies in which they appear … and when I started my ferreting and located these anthologies on the net, I discovered four fascinating collections of stories … and the stories by Connelly in there were alluring expressions of his creative versatility …