Not all heroes are the same. Not even when they are the creatures of the same author.
Hieronymus ‘Harry’ Bosch, the Los Angeles detective, is far less neurotic and whiney than Jack McEvoy, the one time author and journalist who has resurfaced in the 2020 novel “Fair Warning” by Michael Connelly.
I have to admit I am rather fond of Harry Bosch. He has the usual worldly wise mantle of the current crop of fictional literary heroes. He puts me in mind of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher, Ian Rankin’s John Rebus, Jo Nesbo’s Harry Hole and I am not even going to remember the old days; Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade nor Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe.
But Jack McEvoy is not cut from such sturdy homespun cloth. I had failed to recognise his less heroic aspects, I will admit, when I first ran into him in “The Poet”, one of Michael Connelly’s earliest works. My son had passed his copy onto me and I took to Michael and Jack, straight off. Michael Connelly used to be a crime reporter and it shows. His stories have a ring of reality. They seem grounded. They seem the real deal. In “The Poet”, Jack was a writer/journalist and this gave his character a nice resonance with Michael who, while pulling the strings, was much the same. The next Jack McEvoy story, “The Scarecrow”, I am yet to read. And now “Fair Warning”!
And it was with “Fair Warning” that I realised what a good writer Michael Connelly is. Jack McEvoy is quite a different man to Harry Bosch. Harry is grown up, mature, understanding, careful and methodical. Jack is less emotionally secure. More neurotic. More needy. Less kind and less forgiving. More likely to sacrifice others for a good story, for a scoop. That’s not to say he’s a creep. Far from it, but he is human.
But a human hero can be a hard bike for an author to pedal. A human hero is rather like a Superman but one where the deadly kryptonite lurks in his own make up rather than cunningly concealed in the heroine’s handbag by some wily Lex Luther. A human hero can irk! We can weary of his dammed humanity while the perfection of a Jack Reacher can roll on and on like an ocean tsunami that never breaks and never tires.
Or can we? Sometimes I wonder if it isn’t the glitches in the matrix, the facial wrinkles, the drooping eye, the needy personality, the slightly spiteful approach that finally draws us in to characters, less like the fictional Jack Reachers and more like the Jack McEvoys? More flawed, more fragile more like ourselves?
At the End of the Day 