Everybody Counts or Nobody Counts

Where the line comes from

It is not a motto and it was never meant to be said aloud. It arrives in the fourth novel, in a small office in Chinatown, spoken by a suspended detective to a department psychologist he does not trust, because she has asked him why he cared so much about a dead prostitute. He tells her he has one rule in homicide, and then he says it. Everybody counts or nobody counts. He explains it in a sentence: he works just as hard whether the victim is a prostitute or the mayor’s wife.

He is on involuntary stress leave at the time, because he threw his lieutenant through a plate-glass window.

What Connelly does next is why these books are better than their sales suggest. He does not let the line stand. That night Bosch lies awake and the thought will not leave him alone, and the question he asks himself is whether it is something he lives by or merely a slogan, like the one printed on the back of a T-shirt. The answer comes later in the same novel, and it is devastating. He is investigating the 1961 murder of a Hollywood prostitute named Marjorie Lowe, which was closed and buried because nobody with any weight wanted it open. She was his mother. He tells another cop that for a long time she did not count, and then he says exactly who failed her:“Not with this department, this society, not even with me.”

The creed is born out of a man discovering that he has not been keeping it. That is the engine of twenty-five novels.

Watch what happens to it afterwards. It is silent for five more books. In the tenth it comes back in someone else’s mouth, when his old partner phones a retired Bosch and asks whether he remembers what he told her on her first day; he deflects with a joke, she says it for him, and all he manages is that he supposes those are words to live by. Later a councilman he has fought for thirty years throws it at him as a test. Later a chief says it into a bank of microphones and a politician running for governor beams and says he likes it. And by the twenty-fourth novel his own protégée has had it painted on the wall above the door of the cold case unit, and Bosch stands in the corridor hating the sight of it, because it was a thing you felt and knew inside and not a thing to be advertised. A private conviction becomes a slogan becomes institutional property. That is the arc of the series and the arc of a working life.

The tunnel rat

He was a tunnel soldier in Vietnam, in Echo Sector of the Cu Chi district, one of the men sent down into the century-old passages the Viet Cong had dug beneath the villages, with a flashlight and a .45. They had a phrase for going in: out of the blue and into the black. They called what you felt down there the black echo, the sound of your own breathing in a place where you were alive and buried at the same time. In his last tunnel, three men went in and two came out.

Before that, his mother was murdered when he was eleven. Then McClaren Youth Hall, and foster homes he never lasted long in, and the time he stole his foster father’s Corvette as a way of saying something obscene and got sent back to the hall for it. He has a GED. Late in the series he stands in a squad room reading the file of a killer whose life is his own with the dates shifted, and asks the only question that matters to him: what makes people go down different paths, and how come this man became what he became and I did not.

He lives in a small redwood house on steel pylons hanging over the Cahuenga Pass, bought with money a studio paid him for the use of his name. From the back deck the Valley lies out beneath him and the freeway noise softens at night. After the 1994 earthquake the house slid two inches on its bolts, which was enough; the city red-tagged it and ordered it demolished. Bosch cut the lock on the electrical box and went on living in it, parking half a block away so nobody would see him go in. A condemned structure on steel legs over a canyon, occupied illegally by a man who will not leave. There is no better description of him anywhere in the twenty-five books.

A man who is not entirely honest

This has to be said plainly, because it is the thing that makes him interesting rather than pious. Bosch lies for a living and knows it.

He explains it to the psychologist himself, in a speech about walking a tightrope: the rules are stacked against the detective, so you use guile, and you bluff, and you are sneaky, and mostly what the job consists of is getting people to talk. Across the series he blackmails a reporter into killing a story about him by threatening her access. He plants a story in a newspaper to frighten a suspect into moving. He steals a criminal profile off another investigator’s boat and reads it on the ferry home. He works cases he has been suspended from, using a badge that is not his, and a man dies as a consequence and Bosch knows in the dark part of his heart that he is responsible. He carries that badge in his pocket afterwards. Later in life he takes a job for the defense, records colleagues without telling them, and feeds a serving detective information she is not supposed to have.

It matters that Connelly came out of the same kind of trade. He worked the crime beat, in Florida and then at the Los Angeles Times, and the crime beat is a business of access: you cultivate detectives, you trade what you know for what they know, and you knock on the doors of the newly bereaved with a notebook. He does not pretend otherwise. His reporters are never heroes. One of them has written a bestseller about a serial killer and wants to know whether the police shot the wrong man, because his reputation is at stake; Bosch tells him to write another book and take another advance.

So the creed is not a description of Bosch’s conduct. It is a description of the one thing in him that is not for sale. Everybody in these novels is compromised, including the man at the centre, and the line is what a compromised man holds on to in order to tell himself apart from the others. Take it away and he is simply another cop who bends things.

The arithmetic of one

It is worth being exact about what kind of individualism this is, because it is a real one. The nearest ancestor is Bentham’s formula, reported by Mill, that everybody is to count for one and nobody for more than one. But the working philosophy of these novels is closer to the German and Austrian line that runs through Weber and Popper.

Three things follow from it, and all three are visible on the page. First, the institution has no soul. Across twenty-five books the Department never once wants what it says it wants. It wants a good press conference. It wants a dead rookie to have been a hero rather than a suicide. It wants a councilman’s son’s death handled quietly, and later it wants Bosch’s pension not to be paid out. Only the individuals inside it have purposes. That is Buchanan’s politics without romance, done as fiction and without a single equation.

Second, the method is piecemeal and fallible. Bosch never redeems Los Angeles and never attempts to. He closes one case. He is sometimes wrong, and in one novel a lead he failed to follow years earlier gets people killed, and Connelly makes him carry it rather than forgiving him. Understanding a murder means reconstructing what the act meant to the person who committed it, one person at a time, and then being told by the evidence that you were mistaken.

Third, and this is where the philosophy has teeth, a murder cannot be aggregated. Two dead is not twice as bad as one dead, because each one is an entire world ending, and worlds do not add up. Which is why the second half of the sentence is the important half. Everybody counts is a sentiment that costs nothing. Or nobody counts is a threat. Permit a single exception, the gangster nobody misses, the addict, the prostitute, the son of your enemy, and the whole structure fails and no one is counted at all. It is an all-or-nothing claim about persons, and holding it is expensive, which is precisely why Connelly spends three decades showing us the bill.

The city, and where to begin

Los Angeles is what makes the arithmetic nearly impossible, and Connelly dates it with absolute precision across thirty years. The glow of the 1992 fires still in the sundown sky. Red tags bleaching white in the sun on Moorpark Road after the earthquake, with someone’s spray-painted verdict that the fat lady has sung. A city bracing for a second riot after a civil rights lawyer is shot on Angels Flight. The consent decree years. The 2008 crash gutting a small department up in the Valley. Pill clinics on Sherman Way. Tent fires in the encampments on Cole Avenue. A squad room on tactical alert with the Capitol on every screen. And underneath all of it the same exact geography, Mulholland and the Cahuenga Pass and Woodrow Wilson Drive and Mariachi Plaza, unchanged while everything above it changes.

Begin at the beginning, with The Black Echo (1992), which won the Edgar for best first novel and gives you the tunnels. Then read forward. The fourth, The Last Coyote, is where the man is explained and where the line is born. The seventh, A Darkness More Than Night, hands him to another author’s detective and lets him be profiled as a murder suspect under his own strange name, Hieronymus, after the painter whose Garden of Earthly Delights hangs in his hallway. The eighth, City of Bones, is the best single novel of the twenty-five.

Keep going and you get something no shorter series can offer. Radiation he absorbed in the thirteenth book turns up as leukemia in the twenty-second. He learns he is a father on the last page of the ninth and does not get his daughter until the fourteenth. By the twenty-fourth a woman he once mentored is his boss and he has no badge and no gun. By the twenty-fifth his daughter is sitting at his old desk.

He said it once, under duress, in a room he did not want to be in, about a woman nobody had bothered to count. He has been held to it ever since by people who only heard it secondhand. Everybody counts or nobody counts. Every time.