I mentioned last month, when I started reading the first Bosch book, The Black Echo, a scene in which Michael Connelly, author of the series, highlights the details of such a mundane thing as dialing a pay phone. It’s a moment, as I said at the time (having not yet finished the book), when something someone might not have imagined at the time of the book’s writing, the early 1990s, would ever become outdated was given the attention normally associated with historical fiction: getting all the precise aspects right.
Phones play a crucial role in the novel, as Bosch, a Los Angeles Police Department detective, and his FBI agent partner try to sort out the nature of a complex crime they are investigating. There are office phones and pay phones and home phones, and pagers, and, no surprise to the reader, surveillance taps on such phones, as delineated in this passage above.
The key thing in that passage is Bosch’s ear. This isn’t merely Connelly writing about phones; this is Bosch’s own thinking, the thinking of a detective. He had, earlier in the book, noticed a hang-up on his home phone’s answering machine. Much later in the book he reconsiders what he had heard, and finds meaning in it. The above, per my Kindle, is 58% of the way through the book. The original scene, when he first notices the recorded hang-up, occurs at 41%:
What’s especially funny to me, as the book’s reader, is that like Bosch, I also didn’t take much note of the hang-up at the time. In fact, I highlighted a totally different sentence when I read that paragraph, the bit about how Bosch listens to CDs. I did so because in the TV show, the Bosch character also listens to jazz, but only on vinyl. (I noted this on social media at the time, but somehow left it off my weekly collation of my social media posts, so I just added it.) Above I’ve now also highlighted the moment when this bit of crucial information — in the form of silence — is witnessed by Bosch, and he doesn’t comprehend it until another 17% of the story passes.
