The Black Echo

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Harry Bosch #1

I came to this after watching the very excellent “Bosch” on Amazon.

It's interesting to note the differences between the television series and the book. First, the series seems to have run the story-lines of the books through a blender so that bits and pieces of this book's story appear in various episodes; for example, the “Sharkey” element from this story appears in season 4 on Amazon. Second, the series has retconned Bosch's age. On TV, he is a Gulf War vet; in the book, he is twenty years out of service in Vietnam. Third, Titus Welliver is a fantastic Bosch, but the book makes Bosch sound like a description of Tom Selleck.

This book stands alone as a mystery/police procedural. It is roughly 1990. Bosch gets a call about a drug user who has died of a “hot shot” whose body is lying in a drainage pipe. Harry notices details that suggest that the man did not die of an overdose. Harry also knows the man as a former comrade from his days of fighting as a “tunnel rat” in Vietnam. Bosch discovers that his comrade's death involved a theft from a bank, and that brings him to the FBI, and that brings him to a partnership with Eleanor Wish (who is Harry's ex-wife from the series.)

Harry is not a team player. He is at odds with the Internal Affairs department of the Los Angeles Police Department, who have two detectives - Lewis and Clark - watching his moves. He is also at odds with Wish's supervisor, Rourke, who wants to have him kicked from the investigation, but relents when Harry blackmails him into backing off.

The story moves along with plots and counterplots. The ending had me guessing. I thought the writing and plotting were first rate. Bosch is an interesting character, albeit very acerbic. He comes across, at lest in this novel, as a kind of Sam Spade character. The ending reminded me of the ending of The Maltese Falcon - romance be damned, someone's got to answer.

One final aspect of the story that amused me was its late '80s setting, i.e., the world before cell phones. The characters are constantly having to find a pay phone to make their reports. Obviously, these reports are essential for moving the plot along, so that we readers are kept abreast of developments. One thing the advent of cell phones did was eliminate the need of mystery writers to find a way to neatly get their characters to a cell phone without unduly stopping the action.

PSB