by JULIET WATERS

Michael Connelly always sells pretty well, and he has ever since his first novel The Black Echo won the Mystery Writers of America (MWA) Edgar Allan Poe Award. His novels draw from his experience as a Pulitzer Prize-winning crime reporter, and most of them feature ruminative hero and loner, LAPD detective Harry Bosch. But the best selling of all of Connelly's bestsellers is The Poet, a departure from the Bosch series, in which the hero is a journalist on the trail of a serial killer. Connelly is now president of the MWA, and The Narrows, a sequel to The Poet, is one of the best-selling books of the summer. Here last week, on his first visit to Montreal, the Mirror asked him a few questions:

Mirror: In The Narrows you manage to bring Harry Bosch into the scenario you created with The Poet. But you've dropped another favourite character: Los Angeles. Why the switch to Vegas?

Michael Connelly: Vegas is kind of like L.A.'s wild little sister. It's the fastest growing city in the U.S. right now and I've become increasingly interested in it. But mainly the switch was because the plot involved a lot of FBI bureaucracy and I needed to set it in a place where the FBI could have more jurisdiction than the LAPD.

M: Bureaucracy is kind of like a recurring criminal in your fiction. Why is that?

MC: When it comes to crime investigation there's a huge disconnect between reality and fiction. In fiction the criminal gets away because he's clever. In reality he usually gets away by slipping through the cracks.

M: You mention Osama Bin Laden once in the novel. Do you think the public has become more conscious of that aspect of crime investigation, post 9/11.

MC: Yeah. Right now there's a major re-structuring of crime investigation, and that's definitely a concern in my writing.

M: It's looking like The Narrows may be one of your most successful books in a while. Why do you think it's grabbing people?

MC: Part of it may be that it's the sequel to The Poet, which is the book that kind of put me on the map. It wasn't the plan, but writing that novel - which was a journalist's story - I think a lot of journalists wanted to read it to see if I got it right. So there was a lot of attention given to it. They find out quickly that there's no journalist in The Narrows, but by then they've started reading it already

M: So you wrote a book about murder in Vegas and there's no Celine Dion?

MC: I did go and see her theatre. [Silence.] Somebody from Ottawa makes an appearance, though, as a victim… I just stuck it in there without thinking and then I was in Ottawa yesterday and that's what everyone was asking about.

M: What are you reading these days?

MC: I find it's hard to write these books and then read something. It gets intrusive. I guess it's bad for the president of Mystery Writers of America to say, but I read less and less crime fiction. But what I've found is that if I travel outside of the U.S. and read a crime novel set in the U.K. it's just different enough not to be too distracting. A couple of fairly new writers are Denise Mina, who writes about Glasgow. There's another woman named Mo Hayder, who's British, who wrote Birdman. Then there's Henning Mankell. He's Swedish, and his novels are set in European cities. One of the weirder, sad things is that most of us get into crime fiction because we're voracious readers of it. But then when you start writing it, you start reading less of it because you're trying to preserve whatever it is you're doing.

M: So, basically, your advice to people who love crime fiction is to not write it.

MC: Yes it is [laughing].

The Narrows by Michael Connelly, Little Brown, hc, 408pp, $25.95