And it made an impression on clients walking out of the courthouse, when this car would pull up and I’d get in.”Ĭonnelly loved this story, about how the Lincoln trunks were big and boxy enough to house filing cabinets. It allowed me to make three or four appearances every morning. “I drove a Lincoln Town Car or a Crown Vic,” Ogden, now retired and living in Montana, said in a phone interview. Ogden said, “Well, I pretty much work out of my car.” Connelly, the storyteller, knew then to be really interested. Connelly politely asked Ogden in which courthouse he most often worked. A mutual friend brought along David Ogden, a criminal defense attorney. Writing “The Lincoln Lawyer” began a decade ago, on opening day at Dodger Stadium in 2001.

He also has a 23-foot Boston whaler, which he likes to take out in the bay, where he fishes and thinks out plot development.Ĭonnelly’s also got the one talent any reporter and writer has to have: an ear for a great story. He has basketball season tickets for his alma mater, the University of Florida. He lives with his wife, Linda, and a teenage daughter, McCaleb, near Tampa. He’s 54, about 6 feet tall, with close-cropped hair, a full Vandyke beard and round, wire-frame glasses. He has figured out what works pretty well by now. There’s plenty of creativity in the process, of course it’s a trick of seeing things in the real world and “knowing what works, and where it works” in fiction. “I want people to think I’m a creative genius.” “I hate revealing this stuff,” he says good-naturedly during a lunch conversation at the Ritz-Carlton in Georgetown recently while in town to promote the film. Macy) the second of his books to make it onto celluloid, speeding into theaters Friday, it turns out his crime fiction still draws heavily from fact. With “The Lincoln Lawyer,” (Matthew McConaughey, Marisa Tomei, William H. Still, he has found some journalistic habits hard to break, such as researching the background of his thrillers. He has sold 43 million of his 23 crime-based novels around the world since hanging up his press card nearly 20 years ago.

Michael Connelly was a cops reporter for about a dozen years, most notably with the Los Angeles Times.

The lincoln lawyer book series