It is hard to explain, other than to simply say things have changed. Now here I am eight years later, sitting in the same room at the Chateau Marmont where Jack McEvoy encountered Robert Backus, and I am trying to explain to you and myself why I have just written a sequel to The Poet. Before I wrote the first line - Death is my beat - I knew that the book would end with the killer slipping away into the darkness. So I wrote The Poet with the idea that it would be a thrill ride with enough reader fulfillment at the end to overcome the dissatisfaction of having the killer ultimately get away. And so it was hard for me to turn from the reality of the world I knew and write one more murder mystery in which the sun rose at the end and all was right in the world. Simpson start to self-destruct and the Los Angeles Police Department vilified for it.

During the year I was writing The Poet I saw the murder case against O.J. I had written dozens and dozens of newspaper stories about murders that had gone unsolved. I had spent a dozen years as a police beat reporter and I knew that reality was quite the opposite of that. I had recently left my job as a journalist and was still struggling with the idea that as a crime novelist it would be expected that I write stories where good always vanquished evil, where the good guy caught the bad guy, where there were no loose ends - especially a jagged end like a killer left in the wind. WARNING: SPOILERS for The Poet.Īfter Robert Backus headed off into the darkness in the last pages of The Poet my full intention was for him to remain in the darkness, to never return, to always be out there like a killer ghost haunting my fictional world. Home » The Poet (1996) » The Poet Afterwordīy Michael Connelly, from the Limited Edition Release of The Poet.

The poet connelly