The Black Echo

“He looked down and saw a coyote sniffing among the pine needles and trash that covered the earth below the trees in front of the dam. The animal was small and its coat was scruffy and completely missing some patches of hair. There were only a few of them left in the city’s protected areas, left to scavenge among the debris of the human scavengers.”

Bosch examines a murder crime scene and reflects on how both the coyotes and the unhoused population of Los Angeles live similar lives. At the same time, Connelly draws a parallel between the coyotes picking over trash and the police, who are collecting the debris left by humans at the crime scene. Bosch, who is unshaven, un-showered, and wearing unclean clothes, is making his living off of the dead.

“For a moment Bosch smiled at the department’s unceasing need for acronyms. It seemed to him that every unit, task force and computer file had been christened with a name that gave its acronym the sound of eliteness. To the public, acronyms meant action, large numbers of manpower applied to vital problems. There was HITMAN, COBRA, CRASH, BADCATS, DARE. A hundred others. Somewhere in Parker Center there was someone who spent all day making up catchy acronyms, he believed. Computers had acronyms, even ideas had acronyms. If your special unit didn’t have an acronym, then you weren’t shit in this department.”

Connelly portrays the LAPD as a bureaucratic institution first and foremost. The approval process—presumably both for funding and in terms of public opinion—relies not on the needs of investigators for certain tools but on marketability of those tools, the “sound of eliteness” and the illusion of a nickname earned through long-time use.

“The setting sun burned the sky pink and orange in the same bright hues as surfers’ bathing suits. It was a beautiful deception, Bosch thought, as he drove north on the Hollywood Freeway to home. Sunsets did that here. Made you forget it was the smog that made their colors so brilliant, that behind every pretty picture there could be an ugly story.”

Bosch reflects on the beauty of Los Angeles and how that beauty is often a deception. Something beautiful enough “ma[kes] you forget” the “ugly story” behind that beauty, whether it is the smog in a sunset, the sacrifice behind the Hollywood dream, or the over-aggressive policing behind peaceful neighborhoods. This imagery is highly reminiscent of the work of Connelly’s inspiration Raymond Chandler, whose noir novels also set in LA often feature similar observations.