Spot news opportunities give way to features in “Crime Beat,” which is divided into three parts.
Michael Connelly doesn’t just write about a cop. He writes about the cop’s glasses.
Now a famed fiction novelist responsible for bestsellers like “The Poet,” Connelly said it was the “moments” that kept him writing for major newspapers for over a decade. Through his writing collection, “Crime Beat,” he shows how looking beyond the yellow tape can enhance stories on arrests, murders and convictions.
One of his best attributes is mastering the relationship between reporter and cop. Sergeant George Hurt, who was on the homicide squad in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. when Connelly wrote for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, often faced a string of homicides during the ‘80s. That stress impacted Hurt’s glasses, which he put in his mouth when looking at a victim’s body.
Though Hurt never discussed the glasses, Connelly knew that he chewed into the plastic as a way to take off the tense moments in Ft. Lauderdale’s crime scene.
Connelly claimed details like Hurt’s glasses were key to the job, carrying him from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, to the Los Angeles Times, where he stood out among countless reporters in an unforgiving city.
Spot news opportunities give way to features in “Crime Beat,” which is divided into three parts. Connelly first features the cops, who crack cases in ways imagined by many by watching “CSI” and “Law and Order.”
“The mob squad,” focuses on a crime intelligence unit in Florida’s Broward County. Agents stay in a house across from the vacation home of mob boss Nicky Scarfo and use surveillance equipment to help law enforcement officials in Philly and Atlantic City get information on a once unattainable organized crime legend.
Part two, stories about the killers, dips into the people affected by crimes. Connelly is brave to lead a piece with two women crying from the loss of their young daughters in “Wilder victims still missing one year later,” about the late Christopher Wilder’s kidnapping rampage.
The cases themselves make the third section, with Connelly writing on the difficulty of investigations like the gunshot death of John Willers during the Los Angeles riots. Connelly’s pieces prove truth to be stranger and just as captivating as fiction.
