Bosch: the greatest cop of all?

For seven seasons we’ve been following Bosch, the longest-running Amazon Original Series.

Bosch is back for series seven

For seven seasons we’ve been following Bosch, the longest-running Amazon Original Series. As driven by his mantra “Everybody Counts or Nobody Counts”, detective Harry Bosch has relentlessly pursued justice on the mean streets of LA. (The motto is quoted on a conference room wall in Los Angeles Police Department’s real headquarters.)

We’ve shadowed the lone-wolf cop through a series of adventures involving serial and copycat killers, drug cartels, unsolved cases, several love affairs, assassination attempts, and the Attorney General’s Judicial Enquiry Unit. We rested with him, listening to his favourite jazz records as he drinks a Flat Tyre beer in his elegant cantilevered house perched on several steel pylons high above the city, silently looking across the Los Angeles Basin at the city he protects.

It’s been must-see TV for crime fiction fans and admirers of Bosch’s creator Michael Connelly, who has published 23 novels featuring his hard case investigator, a character who also appears in five other Connelly crime books. (The 23rd Bosch arrives in November later this year when Harry teams up again with Renee Ballard, who has rejoined the LAPD after quitting the force in the face of misogyny, demoralisation, and endless red tape; he is now rebuilding the cold case unit at the elite Robbery-Homicide Division.)

Connelly, a mild, self-effacing guy in real life, refuses to slow down. His novels have been translated into more than 40 languages, selling more than 70 million copies. (It’s said that when Little, Brown and Co published his debut novel The Black Echo on January 21, 1992, he was deemed so obscure even the newspaper where he worked, the Los Angeles Times, did not seem to notice.)

The character was named after the 15th-century Dutch artist whose fantastic paintings of the fallen in hell serve for the writer as a metaphor for the criminal cesspit that is LA. And the series has been a brilliant exploration of that city’s social evolution as well as an intense representation of its police department constantly suffering political and cultural crises.

“Bosch has allowed me to chronicle the evolution of a city over 20 years,” the author told the UK Independent in 2016. “There is a certain aura about Los Angeles; it’s not necessarily a beautiful thing, but it’s part of Harry Bosch.” And LA is like the other main protagonist in this long-running series.

“Thanks to Connelly’s keen eye for observation and his reporter’s instinct for cultivating sources – especially within the LAPD – the Bosch books, even in their most audacious fictions, remain grounded in fact,” says Bruce Riordan, a lovely writer who is also a federal prosecutor in LA. “For my money, no author, in any genre – fact or fiction – has written more convincingly, over a more sustained basis, about Los Angeles, about the LAPD or about homicide.”

Well, just as we were grieving the end of the series, to one’s enormous surprise, Amazon quickly announced a spin-off series called Bosch: Legacy, a direct sequel to the events of the final season. There, Harry turned in his badge, disgusted with the LAPD, and enrolled as a private investigator.

“We’re really concentrating on one book, it’s called The Wrong Side of Goodbye, which to me, of all the Bosch non-badge books, really is an homage to the great PI writers and novelists,” Connelly told Newsweek.

“It’s very much one of my favourite books; it might be my favourite book, because I finally get to the thing that inspired me to be a writer and that was the private eye novels of people like Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, and Dashiell Hammett,” Connelly added. “So when I wrote the book it was like with those predecessors in mind and now as we make this new tonal change from Bosch detective to Bosch PI it was a no-brainer.”

Bosch: Legacy is one of the first titles to appear under the banner of Freevee, Amazon’s recently unveiled, rather clumsily named free, advertising-supported tier. It’s currently only offered in the US and Britain but set to debut in Germany later this year. And probably it will be here not long after, as part of a move by most streaming services to offer commercial interruptions in exchange for a cheaper subscription price.

Titus Welliver, now so firmly entrenched in the character, returns as Harry Bosch; Madison Lintz is also back as his daughter Maddie Bosch, now with a larger presence; and Mimi Rogers reprises her role as the feared attorney Honey Chandler, still recovering from being shot by a professional assassin in the last season.

There’s a thumping new song over the stylish revamped titles sequence, Times Are Changing by Built by Titan and Skybourne. Certainly we’ve entered a new world for Bosch, his daughter, and Honey Chandler.

Connelly says he played around with different titles for the new show but settled on Legacy, because the series is propelled by the notion of how gaining clarity on what you want your legacy to be can confer meaning and purpose. And how we live on after death. It’s also about the long and tangled history someone like Harry Bosch leaves behind and how on occasions it catches up with him.

Like Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, he carries a shield of cynical apathy, but seeks a moral justice transcending the corrupt routines of society’s legality, even as he seeks answers to the mysteries of his own past.

In the novel Bosch has recently settled a case against the department where he had worked for more than 30 years, believing he had been illegally forced into retirement. While settled to his advantage, there was considerable ill will from within the ranks. Even though during his time wearing the badge he had brought more than a hundred murderers to justice. So it’s understandable that in his new life as a private eye he’s driven by a contempt for the department, the courts and the justice system.

From now on he says, “It’s my way”. He’s working from a small office next to the Athletics Club, the city’s first private club, a handwritten sign on his door, his number unlisted, Bosch now preferring to work through word-of-mouth. The decor is sparse, except for one thing. “Every LA private detective’s office has to have Venetian blinds, right?” Connelly tweeted about the new show. “It’s in the rule book of noir.”

Chief of Police Irving (Lance Reddick) asked Harry Bosch as he turned in his gun and his shield, sickened, “Who are you if you don’t have a badge?”

The suddenly retired homicide detective just shrugged. “I’m gonna find out.”

Now he’s doing standard private investigator stuff, he says, “Background checks, surveillance, runaway kids” and the occasional illegal break-and-enter to retrieve stolen property. “It beats the shit out of retirement.”

The first episode has the same title as the book on which it’s largely based, The Wrong Side of Goodbye, written by Connelly and Eric Overmyer, the veteran writer and producer who’s been with the series from the start, one of its co-creators, directed with just the right snap and sizzle by Zetna Fuentes. She’s one of the directors from the previous series and also helmed episodes of classy shows like The Deuce and Ray Donovan.

As we might expect after seven seasons it all goes off like clockwork, the actors totally in sync with another tightly written script, and the LA setting now so familiar you can feel it in the soles of your feet.

While two years have passed, we see the continuation of the plot arc that saw the seemingly untouchable hedge fund heavyweight Carl Rogers (Michael Rose), who allegedly was involved in a multimillion-dollar inside trading scam, order the attempted killing of both Chandler and Bosch’s daughter Maddie.

She’s now a rookie cop, a so-called “boot” with a call sign of “Adam 79”, and is working her way through the legacy of her father’s reputation as a rogue and unorthodox detective. Already she is in trouble for breaking some arcane department rule.

Chandler is dealing with her own career and the kind of work that made her name. She is determined to put Rogers away and is a victim of a system she had always defended.

And Bosch becomes involved with ageing aviation billionaire Whitney Vance, played drolly by the still imposing William Devane, who is determined to discover what happened to a Mexican girl he once had a relationship with and whether there is an heir to his vast fortune. It’s a case that has uncanny links to Bosch’s own personal history. Bosch grew up in foster homes. He never knew his father and his mother was a prostitute who was strangled and dumped off Hollywood Boulevard.

One thing is certain. While Bosch goes about hunting for the truth we will happily flounder around in mystery, insulated from LA’s violence and corruption by our identification with this great fictional cop.

Bosch: Legacy streaming on Amazon Prime.