In New Thriller, Hero is an 'L.A. Times' Reporter With a Pink Slip

By: Mark Fitzgerald Michael Connelly's newest novel "The Scarecrow" has all the elements of a page-turner thriller: Flawed protagonist and rekindled love interest on a collision course with a seemingly omniscient killer whose deviance might give even Hannibal Lector the creeps.

"The Scarecrow" could also be described as a story ripped from the headlines ... of E&P.

"Scarecrow" hero Jack McEvoy isn't just a Los Angeles Times reporter -- he's just been given his layoff notice as the book begins, and told to acquaint his much-younger, Twitter-friendly, blogaholic colleague with the cop shop beat.

Himself a former reporter for the Times and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Connelly has written a thriller plays out against the background of a declining newspaper industry: Tribune Co. declares bankruptcy, the Rocky Mountain News folds, the Times is tries unsuccessfully to sell its building.

"Like the paper and ink newspaper itself, my time was over," the character McEvoy reflects at one point. He not interested in the flash and distraction, as he sees it, of the mobile journalist. "I'm not a mojo," he says, "I'm an oldjo."

So many of the newspaper developments in "Scarecrow," in fact, are so recent that when I got Connelly on the phone from his home in Tampa, one of my first questions had to be about how the publishing logistics of getting in details such as the Feb. 27 closing of the Rocky.

"With the way they physically print and manufacture books now, you can make changes pretty late into the process," he said.

The Rocky closing was a particularly urgent change for Connelly. "The first time I wrote about Jack McEvoy in 1996 (in the thriller "The Poet"), he wrote for the Rocky Mountain News. Now, of course, he's in Los Angeles. When I first turned the manuscript in the Friday after Thanksgiving, when Jack gets laid off at the Times, a guy from the Rocky Mountain News calls and offers him a job."

Galleys with that passage were being distributed to booksellers when the Rocky shut down. "That would have been pretty embarrassing if it went in" the hardcover, Connelly said.

In writing "Scarecrow," Connelly said, he wanted to reflect on "this downward spiral" of the newspaper business.

"I write thrillers so that obviously has to be my priority here," he said. "But in any story there's always an open window to let something in, some reflection of what's been. Sure, I haven't been a reporter for whatever it is, 14 or 15 years. But I act like a reporter when I'm researching, I use those skills, and of course the business means something to me, so I wanted this to be a sort of torch song for newspapers."

Connelly says he always wanted to write crime novels, and majored in journalism at the University of Florida "because I knew it would take me into police stations with the police beat and I would develop my writing." After graduating in 1980, he worked at the Daytona Beach News-Journal and then the Sun-Sentinel before moving in 1988 to the Los Angeles, where the great noir novelists Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett plied their trade.

A Sun-Sentinel editor told him he was going to the Velvet Coffin, the old nickname for the newspaper under Times-Mirror Co. ownership, when it indulged writers with space and expense accounts.

Connelly found success inside and out of the paper. His first novel, "The Black Echo" in 1992 won an Edgar Award for best first novel. Its plot came from a Times newspaper story an editor used as a test when Connelly was interviewing for the job.

Soon, he says, he felt he had to pick between journalism and thrillers. He took a leave of absence to write one book and realized, when he returned to the newsroom, how much better he could work concentrating only on fiction.

"It was a very reluctant choice on a number of levels," Connelly said. He liked the job, but also worried that giving up his press pass might mean giving up access to the cops and detectives who inspired story ideas and offered real-life details.

He needn't have worried. The Times and the Los Angeles Police Department are mutually suspicious organizations. Connelly could call on the people who knew from his beat -- and they no longer worried something they told him would wind up in the paper.

But writing "Scarecrow," he came to realize how much had changed in newspapers since he left the Times in 1994. "I gave the manuscript to people I knew, and they told me, 'The thriller part is great, but you haven't been in a newsroom in 10 years, have you?'" In went references to mojos and Twitter -- and a certain despondency.

Connelly calls himself "naturally pessimistic," and that view extends to the future of newspapers as well.

In "Scarecrow," reporter McEvoy and an FBI agent/love interest traverse motel corridors where death could be waiting around the corner. They trespass on their serial killer's high-tech lair. But there's a striking passage in "Scarecrow" in which the Los Angeles Times newsroom seems just as spooky:

"The place was completely dead, not a reporter or editor in sight, and I got a stark feeling for what the future held. At one time the newsroom was the best place in the world to work. A bustling place of camaraderie, competition, gossip, cynical wit and humor, it was at the crossroads of ideas and debate ... Now thousands of pages of editorial content were being cut each year and soon the paper would be like the newsroom, an intellectual ghost town. In many ways I was relieved that I would not be around to see it."