Michael Connelly confirms Titus Welliver’s return as Harry Bosch

Crime writing titan Michael Connelly has reassured fans Titus Welliver will continue to play his legendary detective Harry Bosch on screen, even when the longest-running streaming series in TV history concludes after its 10th season this spring.

Despite an energetic grassroots campaign to save the show, Bosch: Legacy is due to end after 11 years following a final series in March. But Welliver, 62, will continue to star as the rule-breaking cop in Connelly’s as-yet-untitled new series featuring Maggie Q as Renée Ballard.

Based on Detective Mitzi Roberts, the recently-retired head of the LAPD’s real-life volunteer Open-Unsolved unit, Ballard has shared book plotlines with Bosch since 2017’s The Late Show and the pair appear together for the sixth time in Connelly’s new blockbuster, The Waiting, of which more shortly. While expressing gratitude at the “very flattering” fan-led campaign to save Bosh: Legacy, spun off after seven seasons of Amazon Prime’s original Bosch series, Connelly declares: “It’s very hard for me to argue with having 10 seasons of Bosch.

“Shooting the very first episode of season one, I remember asking Titus, ‘If we get lucky and get five seasons, can you do five seasons?’ And he replied, ‘I’ll do it as long as you want me’. But it turned out to be 10 seasons which is just amazing. And Titus appears in the forthcoming Ballard show just as they work together in the books.

“We didn’t get the word Bosch: Legacy was not going to go on until we were well into producing Ballard but that kind of frees up some of our Bosch characters. So I think going forward there’ll be some surprise appearances.”

While many authors have strained relationships with cinema and television – fans of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher, for example, never liked Tom Cruise’s two films, though subsequently embraced Alan Ritchson in the role for TV – Connelly’s best-loved novels have enjoyed overwhelmingly positive small-screen adaptations.

Season three of The Lincoln Lawyer starring Manuel Garcia-Rulfo as attorney Mickey Haller arrived last week on Netflix, and there’s another potential spin-off in the works featuring Bosch’s ex-homicide partner Jerry Edgar, played by Jamie Hector.

Connelly jokes not unjustly that the MCU – as Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe, featuring dozens of inter-connected characters and plotlines, is commonly known – could equally well stand for the “Michael Connelly Universe”. “I think there’s an understanding in Hollywood that this stuff works and that works to my advantage,” he says with a glint in his eye.

Talking from New York on the first stage of his latest US book tour, the 68-year-old crime writing legend is modestly confident Hawaii-born Designated Survivor and Nikita star Maggie Q, 45, will be a winner as surf-loving cop Renée Ballard. “I’m not as involved as I was with Bosch, but I was involved in casting Maggie,” he says.

“Right now we’re filming the seventh of 10 episodes so we’re well into it, and she’s absolutely fantastic on all levels – people are going to love this show.

“I was always hesitant to make predictions about my other series, so maybe it’s my experience level now, but I feel without a doubt we have a hit here.

“Maggie reminds me so much of Titus in her team effort. You’re only really as good as your number one on the call sheet and she’s the leader of the show. I’ve seen the first five episodes, plus she’s in the last episode of Bosch: Legacy, so I know we have the right Ballard, just like I knew we had the right Bosch. It’s deja vu.”

As for the proposed Jerry Edgar series, Connelly adds: “I don’t wanna say it’s on the backburner but Amazon is gonna see how Ballard does and then, hopefully, we’ll be able to bring Jerry back.”

Despite having sold more than 74 million copies of his books and spawned two huge TV series and counting, there’s no sign of Connelly resting on his considerable laurels.

He’s just “days away”, he reveals, from completing his next, as yet untitled, novel.

Set on Catalina Island – an hour’s boat ride off the coast of southern California – it will introduce an entirely new character to the ever-expanding “MCU”.

“Catalina falls under LA County Sheriff’s jurisdiction and they have a single detective working out there. I wrote a short story once about that one detective and I liked the idea,” he explains. “This is not the same person – this is a total rethinking of it – but it is a book about the lone detective on Catalina.”

A locked island mystery, then? “Not quite,” he smiles. “This guy is in LA for at least a third of the book chasing down leads.” The tale in question, Avalon, included in a short story collection published by The Mystery Writers of America association, had been mooted for adaptation starring Scream’s Neve Campbell as Detective Nicole Searcy.

In a rare disappointment, the ABC network cancelled the production without bringing it to television. Instead, Connelly and fellow producer David E Kelley adapted the Lincoln Lawyer books for Netflix, bringing Campbell along as Mickey Haller’s feisty prosecutor ex-wife Maggie McPherson.

The Waiting – Connelly loves titles with multiple meanings, this latest referring to families longing for justice and Ballard, the surfer, hanging on for the perfect wave – is another gloriously compelling read, the work of a master storyteller whose creativity and workrate are unrivalled in modern crime fiction.

In Connelly’s 25th novel featuring Harry Bosch, his plotting has become ever more complex. Is that just a reflection of his maturity as a writer, I wonder, or a reaction to his TV work?

“The maturity part, I think, is true because it’s hard to kind of weave all these Byzantine plots together even though they’re more reflective of true life,” he says.

“No police detective ever works just one case at a time – they’re always spinning plates. That’s hard to do without confusing readers and I think I’ve gotten better as I’ve written more.”

That plate spinning is key to the new book. In The Waiting, the splash of a pebble – Ballard’s Land Rover Defender being robbed while she is surfing – leads to a tsunami of action.

“I like the idea that from something small, something big happens. This book opens with Ballard getting ripped off and look what it leads to,” smiles Connelly.

As she tries to get her badge and gun back, Ballard’s Open-Unsolved team is tracking a serial sex attacker dubbed the “Pillowcase Rapist” in a dramatic cold case. The story is based on a real-life sex offender in Florida where Connelly grew up.

“Way back in the 80s when I was a cop reporter in Fort Lauderdale, there was a guy known as the Pillowcase Rapist,” he explains.

“It wasn’t a time of mass communications like the Internet but there was almost mass hysteria because there were 40-plus attacks in a very short window of time.

“He was never caught and he disappeared. And then almost four decades go by and this guy’s arrested and, after DNA is taken as a matter of course, they’re able to determine his father was the Pillowcase Rapist.”

In fact, Robert Koehler, 64, who used pillowcases or other material to smother his victims while he attacked them, was finally convicted last year of sexual battery, kidnapping and burglary as a result of DNA technology advances.

“It’s messy justice, justice unrequited,” continued Connelly. “It finally came, but it was way late. And victims and families had to deal with that trauma for decades.”

Two gripping subplots involve domestic terrorism – featuring the ongoing fallout in the US from the Capitol invasion of January 6, 2021 – and efforts by the cold case unit’s newest volunteer, Harry’s cop daughter Maddie, to solve LA’s most notorious unsolved murder – that of good-time girl Elizabeth Short, 22, AKA the “Black Dahlia”, whose horrifically mutilated body was found in January 1947.

In real-life, the case remains officially unsolved and controversial in LA.

“Mitzi Roberts, who up until a couple of months ago ran the cold case unit, told me a week doesn’t go by that they don’t get some kind of call with someone with a theory about the Black Dahlia,” explains Connelly.

“It’s in that dark pantheon of LA murders whose ripples go around the world. That one was especially brutal and bloody and, to think about the psychology of the mind of whoever killed this poor woman, it sticks with you. What I wanted to do – and this probably gives away too much – is I wanted to solve the case by not solving it, so it remains LA’s biggest mystery.”

You’ll have to read The Waiting to learn more but, even before the book landed on UK bookshop shelves, there have been grumbles among LA’s real-life crime junkies. One website, ironically run by a former LA Times colleague of Connelly, accused him of contributing to the “folklore” around the case. The author himself remains relaxed.

“My answer to critics: ‘Hey, this is a novel’. I’ve spent 30-plus years writing fiction about Los Angeles and to avoid writing about this seems like a hole. So now I filled that hole.”

In fact, the case has influenced Connelly since the start, beginning with fellow LA author James Ellroy’s own bestselling novel, The Black Dahlia, which was inspired in part by the real-life unsolved rape and murder of his own mother.

“The psychology seemed to be pretty clear: he [James Ellroy] had this terrible thing happen in his own life, and he’s working it out by writing about murders. And I just thought, ‘What about a guy who has the same kind of backstory but is solving murders?’” says Connelly.

“That was one of Harry’s key drivers; the psychology of somebody whose mother was taken from him in such a brutal and unsolved way would be the motivation of his life – to become a detective who’s drawn empathically to cases involving women.”

The real-life Open-Unsolved unit in LA, which has some 4,000 unsolved crimes on its books, is still closing cases, even if it hasn’t nailed the Black Dahlia killer yet.

“Mitzi Roberts retired but she’s staying on as one of the part-time volunteers,” says Connelly. “So she hasn’t stopped her pursuit of justice.”

Sadly, given its obvious importance to victims and families, cold case work often falls victim to live cases and day-to-day policing.

“No police department has enough bodies to put on everything,” says Connelly.

“So cold case work is often on the back shelf. The last LAPD chief was more interested in putting uniformed officers on the streets to prevent crime – being more proactive than reactive – and how can you argue with that philosophy? But cold cases are important. The idea people can get away with murder is not good for society.”

Connelly remains humbled by his huge success and longevity, adding: “It’s an amazing cosmic gift I’ve been given but, at the same time, I don’t want to sound cavalier.

“I have to treat it as something sacred and I can’t lower the bar, I have to raise it every time, and I have to write about serious things.”

For now, The Waiting is over. It’s another triumph.

The Waiting by Michael Connelly (Orion, £22) is out now. Visit expressbookshop.com or call Express Bookshop on 020 3176 3832. Free UK P&P on orders over £25