Rhythm And Blue: Michael Connelly Interviews Joseph Wambaugh

The Los Angeles Times Magazine offers an interesting piece with crime writer Michael Connelly interviewing with one of his heroes, Joseph Wambaugh.

(Wambaugh is seen in the above LA Times photo by Andrew MacPherson).

Below is Connelly on Wambaugh:

The cop turned author was writing contemporary novels full of grit and humor and street truth. I found them inspiring—and haunting. I can still remember reading "The Choir Boys" in college and the searing images the story conjured in my imagination. All these years later, I remember the “moaning man” from that book as if I had read the passage yesterday. I was probably too young to understand just what Wambaugh was doing—using the police novel to tell larger stories about ourselves and our world.

At that point, I had not even set foot in Los Angeles—and wouldn’t for another 10 years—but it was a place that came alive in Wambaugh’s stories. His books were entertaining as hell, but they weren’t mere entertainments. They transcended that. They told it like it is.

Here is the assessment of him early on from the New York Times: “Mr. Wambaugh is, in fact, a writer of genuine power, style, wit and originality who has chosen to write about police in particular as a means of expressing his views on society in general.”

You can read the rest of the piece and watch two videos featuring the interview via the below link:

http://www.latimesmagazine.com/2012/03/rhythm-blue.html

Joseph Wambaugh's new novel is called Harbor Nocturne and Michael Connelly's latest novel is called The Drop.   

A Q & A With Crime Writer Elmore Leonard

Megan Abbott interviewed crime writer Elmore Leonard for the LA Times magazine.

With Justified, the FX series based on his short story “Fire in the Hole”—and featuring U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, introduced in 1993’s Pronto—Leonard finally has a singer worthy of his hardboiled song. Set in the hollows of Kentucky, the show centers on Givens (Timothy Olyphant) as he wrestles with drug rings, coal-mine feuds and his own itchy trigger finger.

The new novel Raylan, his 45th, emerges as a gift to fans of Leonard’s fiction and the show, the supremely cool eponymous hero navigating a menagerie of lowlifes (where, in classic style, the organ thieves have a slight moral advantage over the coal-company executives). The author happily settled in to discuss his storied career, Tinseltown and the mysteries of inspiration.

You can read the rest of the Q & A via the below link:

http://www.latimesmagazine.com/2012/03/qla-elmore-leonard.html