Some more Bosch in four fascinating short story anthologies …

This post is a sort of sequel to the previous one … all right and without beating about the bush, which I usually don’t to, I’ll come straight to the point … the four ‘fascinating’ short story anthologies that I stumbled upon while looking frantically for more Bosch stories are –

In the Company of Sherlock Holmes: Stories Inspired by the Holmes Canon (Eds. Laurie R. King & Leslie S, Klinger) is where Connelly’s short story featuring Bosch, The Crooked Man, appears … there are obvious similarities here with the Holmes story of the same name … husband getting murdered and the wife being in the same room, being the most straight one … let me leave it at that and just say that for once Bosch appears baffled at the crime scene and is Watsonned …

In Sunlight or in Shadow: Stories inspired by the paintings of Edward Hopper (Ed. Lawrence Block) … when I realized what this anthology was, I was happily surprised … a book full of stories inspired by the paintings of an artist!!  And you have some top names here: Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, Justin Scott, Lee Child … Connelly, of course … and here Bosch appears in the story, Nighthawks, inspired by Hopper’s painting of the same name …

 

Those who have read the Bosch series would recall Bosch at the end of The Black Echo staring at a print of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks … “A quiet, shadowy man sits alone at the counter of a street-front diner. He looks across at another customer much like himself, but only the second man is with a woman. Somehow, Bosch identified with it, with that first man. I am the loner, he thought. I am the nighthawk. The print, with its stark dark hues and shadows, did not fit in this apartment, Bosch realized. Its darkness clashed with the pastels. Why did Eleanor have it? What did she see there?”  The painting also appears in Trunk Music …

In this story, Bosch is shadowing a girl who sits in front of the original painting in Chicago and is writing … he too enters the hall where the painting is hung … tries to be inconspicuous … he looks at the painting … wonders … and suddenly she speaks … they talk about the painting … and then the story moves …   

Face-Off (Ed. David Baldacci) … this anthology is described as … “For the first time ever the world’s greatest thriller characters meet head to head in eleven electrifying stories” … and here Harry Bosch is in a story called Red Eye alongside Patrick Kenzie, a character created by Dennis Lehane … this anthology is a thriller reader’s dream come true … take two famous mavericks and put them together and see what happens … that means both writers would have had to do a lot of weaving in and ducking out to make their heroes gel well … 

I haven’t read any Patrick Kenzie novels and I was not so familiar with the character … but Harry I knew, and enjoyed his encounter and banter with Patrick Kenzie … here too there are heavyweights … Rankin is here, and so is Lee Child … Peter James, R L Stine, John Lescroat, Heather Graham, Paul Wilson …

And the fourth anthology is called The Highway Kind: Tales of Fast Cars, Desperate Drives and Dark Roads … where Mickey Haller, the lawyer character (and Bosch’s half-brother) appears in a story named Burnt Matches … I am not too familiar with Mickey Haller … he appears in a couple of later Bosch novels, and he has a series of his own … I liked the idea of putting together stories about driving on endless and lonely highways, about American car culture, about American crime fiction and its connection with cars … “Follow a lowered 60s Impala, a Honda minivan, or a new Mercedes S-Class sedan, and you’ll likely end up in three very different places listening to three very different stories,” says Patrick Mullikin, the editor of this volume.

I would love to buy the first three anthologies … I already have Face Off in my shopping cart … In the Company of Sherlock Holmes is available for very less, but the delivery charges are double the price of the book … I’ll wait for some time and see … In Sunlight or in Shadow is available, but very expensive for me now … but this one I want to have … I also want to see if there are any other books like this where paintings have inspired stories …

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 …

The last novels of 2016 … and nine (!) years of blogging …

All these novels came in a big rush towards the end of 2016 … during the last 2 weeks … I had wanted to post these early this year, but as it happens with me, every new year brings in a lot of confusion and uncertainty … I don’t know why, but it happens … and this time, January was also busy with lots of other things … Shruti’s Delhi visit and my parenting for two and a half days that brought its own tensions and anxieties, a celebration that brought in lots of guests and the attendant anxieties, a foolish idea that resulted in an interview and resultant pre- and post- anxieties … I am a great one for feeling anxious … anxiety keeps me together … anyway, the first casualty under the circumstances is my blog … no mental space, you see … so I drifted on … I wanted to write a post to sort of gloat over my 9 years of blogging … 11 January 2008 was when I posted my first piece on my blog … so this ‘gloat’ post too didn’t happen on time … no time to gloat too … he he …

Anyway, so, along the way I discovered this writer (I mean, I discovered for myself!) who is a farmer in Scotland and turned to writing crime fiction … James Oswald … he started in 2012 with Natural Causes … these are police procedural novels and Oswald’s hero is Inspector McLean … and already 5 Inspector McLean novels are released and have become hugely successful … I found three on a used books portal on amazon …

I have all along wanted to read Michael Connelly’s Inspector Bosch novels … again police procedural novels set in Los Angeles … Ian Rankin had referred to his novels in one of his interviews, where he said, “…What I like about crime fiction is the sense of place. You are right to mention Michael Connelly and Henning Mankell.  If I want to find out about contemporary Sweden or contemporary Los Angeles, I will go to these writers.  Not to the literary writers, but the crime writers.”  I had sent up a post when I completed Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus set and had looked for this interview (The Hindu, 28 January 2010) … and when I read this quote again, I was motivated to look for Connelly’s Inspector Bosch novels … and once again, I found these on one of the used books portals on amazon …

 

There are some more that arrived during those two weeks … soon …