The Poet | Michael Connelly

This episode of Books for Men features The Poet by Michael Connelly. A crime novel about a small-time reporter trying to solve the murder of his homicide detective twin brother. It turns into a secret FBI hunt for a serial killer who always leaves a line or two from Edgar Allen Poe with each of his victims. It’s dark and propulsive. Listen for more!

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Welcome back to Books for Men, a podcast to inspire more men to read and bring together men who do. So we are switching it up a little bit, and I'm not going to toggle back into a nonfiction book this month. I'm going to stick with fiction, and I think as the rest of the month unfolds, you'll understand why I did it this way. But let's focus on today's book, which is a good one. It's a great one actually. And I read it for a very specific reason. It's called The Poet by Michael Connelly. And I'm sure you've heard of Michael Connelly before. He is someone who I think by the last account has sold, I don't know, eighty, ninety, a hundred million books maybe, something crazy. But just in case you don't know, he is the author of the now iconic detective series featuring none other than Harry Bosch.

(01:05)

And that was also made even more famous or more popular, I should say, by the hit television series that was distributed by Amazon over the last, I don't know, seven or eight years, or something like that. It's pretty much considered the gold standard for detective fiction, at least in a modern sense. So that begs the question, why didn't I feature a Harry Bosch book on Books for Men? That's a very good question. And so, I said as I led this episode off with that, I read this one for a very specific reason, and that is because many would consider The Poet to be Michael Connelly's best piece of fiction. And I never read it before, so I literally just finished reading the book and I wanted to feature it on the podcast, so I put it back in the lineup as a book to feature later on in the year.

(01:59)

And then I said to myself, you know what? Let me just bang this episode out since it's fresh in my mind. It's not something that I normally do. Maybe I should do it more because it would be easier to recollect some of the specific details of the book. I find that to be a challenge sometimes, but as with most of the books that I feature on this podcast or all the books that I feature on this podcast, they leave a pretty large imprint in my mind. So only if I read it a long time ago is it super hard to sometimes remember some of the details. With that being said, usually once I get started, I'm pretty good with it. I should mention that I met Michael Connelly recently at a conference in which he was receiving a Grand Master Award for his crime fiction, and he was kind enough to sign a book for me as well as write a couple of words of inspiration as a writer, which I thought was pretty cool.

(02:54)

And so I felt not obligated because he will probably never remember me, but, I felt an obligation to my own dedication to literature and reading and books, to understand his catalog a little bit better. And that's why I had to read The Poet, or I should say I wanted to read the poet for that reason. I did just want to mention that it was also a top pick of my dad, and that's actually where I got the book. I didn't even have to purchase the book, but I probably will for my bookshelf anyway, he had the mass-market paperback version, and that was a total win because as I've mentioned on this podcast before, I think many times actually, I love the mass-market paperback version of any book. I think that with some books, the trade paperback competes and compares, but the hardcover is definitely, definitely last on the totem pole for me.

(03:55)

And perhaps the biggest reason why I don't read a lot of new fiction when it first comes out is because I like to wait for the paperback version to come out. I will read most new fiction on Kindle rather than read a hardcover. I get it. The hardcover is the way that publishers actually make money, and it's probably great for the longevity of a book, I do buy the hardcover if I really like the book and it goes on my bookshelf, but that's a whole ‘nother topic for another day. Anyway, let's get back to the book at hand, The Poet by Michael Connelly. Actually, you know what, I'm not done just yet with the mass-market paperback edition because it's worth mentioning that this book is a reissue. It was originally published in 1996 and then reissued in 2004, and I read that reissued version.

(04:48)

In that copy, Stephen King has a pretty lengthy forward in which he gives some pretty high praise to the poet and to Michael Conley, and sure it's typical. Stephen King gives praise to a lot of authors because he's great at supporting the community, but this is a little bit more than that in that it's like a mini essay on why the poet is such a great book, and Michael Conley is such a phenomenal author. I think that that's just worth noting and a pretty cool thing to read to kind of set the stage for the book. But after that, what should you expect? Well, the actual novel of course, and it's a story about a small-time Denver reporter who is trying to get to the bottom of his twin brother's death, which is initially framed as a suicide. It quickly turns into this chase for a serial killer known as you guessed it, The Poet, and he's known as The Poet because he leaves Edgar Allen Poe quotes with each of his victims.

(05:52)

So the book definitely has a page-turning quality about it. It's primarily in the first person through the eyes of Jack McEvoy, which is the protagonist, the reporter. And there are short or shorter third-person chapters written from the perspective of this mysterious character that I won't mention too much about because obviously as you should expect, it ties into the plot. And with books of this nature, they rely heavily on suspense and what's going to happen next. So, I don't want to talk too much about the plot really. I will say that the book is very chilling. It has sort of this disturbing quality to it. I think that that is a function, not just of the style in which the book is written, which I will say has an electrical charge to it from the very first page, even the third-person chapters which are sprinkled in every second or third chapter or so, doesn't really disturb that propulsive flow to the narrative.

(07:01)

It's just a very high-energy book, right from the very first sentence, which is just a great opening line of a book in general, really. And it's: “Death is my beat.” Oof, what a good way to start a book. But yeah, so not only is the style in which the book is told aiding that disturbing, chilling quality, but the content is pretty gruesome in the topics that it covers as well. Things like rape and pedophilia and serial killers, and just tough to consume things for some people some of the time. So I did just want to put that disclaimer in there, although I would not let that deter you from reading it because like Aristotle, someone who we've featured on this podcast before would say, “The nature of the story itself will teach us what is appropriate.” As you might expect, the topics and the themes and the content that this book covers are essential to telling this story and this plot.

(08:03)

And since I had already brought up Aristotle, I should mention that one of the things that I loved most about this book was that the ending is very self-contained, and “the resolution to the plot came from the story itself.” And that is something that I always love in every book. I hate when things come in from out of nowhere and it's like, oh, what the heck? Like that wasn't fair to the reader at all, you know? Or even worse, it loses its believability. But anyway, this book doesn't do that, so you don't have to worry about that. I'm not going to tell you any more about the plot or the story because I want you to go read it and judge for yourself, and I don't want to ruin it for you. And if I had one critique of The Poet, I would probably say that it could have been a little bit shorter, but that's just my own personal taste.

(08:56)

It's not like it gets super repetitive, it just plays cat and mouse for a little longer than I needed it to as a book. It doesn't lose steam really. It just kind of goes from this amateur sleuth book in the first half to more of a police procedural and that standard back and forth between the different law enforcement agencies and things that you would get in normal police procedural style novels. You get a lot of that in the middle. And so again, it's not really a knock, it's more of just like a personal preference thing. I probably would've liked to see it condensed into maybe 350, 400, but who am I to tell Michael Connelly how to write his books or what works and what doesn't work? I mean, the book is massively successful, so don't listen to me. If you listen to this podcast enough, then it should come as no surprise that I prefer the shorter novel. As a simplifier by nature, I'm sort of biased in that I'm always looking at how something can be just a tad bit leaner and still provide the same or an even greater impact.

(10:01)

All right, that's all I've got. This episode is officially a wrap, and as always, I wanted to remind you that if you enjoyed it to please share it with friends, family members, and other people who you think might like it. Word of mouth is everything when trying to spread awareness. And with this podcast specifically, that is to inspire more men to read. And if you want to double down on that support, then please remember to take just 10 seconds, 30 seconds, however long it takes to rate and review or like subscribe, or follow, whatever the metric is on the podcast platform you're listening to this on do that because it goes a long way in helping other people find the show. And lastly, for more information, visit BooksforMen.org where you can get full transcripts for all of the episodes, or sign up for the newsletter, which is a monthly roundup of every episode, complete with full book and author information, all the best quotes, as well as newsletter-only book recommendations. And again, you could sign up for that at BooksforMen.org.