Michael Connelly Reveals Bosch’s Connection to ‘Ballard’s First Case

If you, too, are a Bosch fan who would have loved one more season of Legacy, here comes another Michael Connelly show based on his crime novels to help dull the pain. (Added bonus: Titus Welliver‘s Harry Bosch is a recurring character!)

Ballard is based on Connelly’s novels about police detective Renée Ballard, played here by Maggie Q (Nikita, Designated Survivor). Connelly, who’s also behind The Lincoln Lawyer derived from his Mickey Heller books, gives us a preview of what to expect in Ballard’s first season, which includes a serial killer with a string of victims, a murdered John Doe, and a dangerous conspiracy that strikes close to home.

Why did Renée Ballard seem a good bet for a TV show?

Michael Connelly: Probably the same reason why I wrote books about her. I was inspired by a real detective named Mitzi Roberts, who was helping me with the Bosch books. I didn’t think about asking about her career and her ascendence as a detective until well into our relationship and then when she started telling me stories about how she shaped her career, I realized that there’s some book stuff here. I liked the idea of a woman definitely overcoming obstacles in a male bureaucracy of law enforcement, and that’s where the books came from. I think that appeals to TV as well in terms of finding not only the drama you need in an investigation but also the personal drama of overcoming obstacles and being relentless about it. Relentlessness is a universal trait that appeals across the board, so that’s why I thought this could work.

We caught a little bit of Renée Ballard at the end of Bosch: Legacy, but can you tell us a little more about this woman?

She’s trying to figure out the problem of what she’s missing. What makes these kinds of characters interesting is that she’s good at what she does, she’s fierce about it, but there’s other stuff at work and other stuff going on. She deals with abandonment issues and issues within the department, which really come out in the first season of the show. The way people meet these kind of challenges and how they react and what they do is where you connect. 99.9% of people who watch this show have not solved murders, have not been detectives, but you’ve got to find ways of connecting with them. It’s really the personal characteristics that do that because Renée’s pretty relentless as a detective, but we all want to be relentless in what we do in our lives and so that can be a connecting point. That’s where I think the show works best.

It seems that Renée was demoted from the LAPD’s Robbery/Homicide unit to the underfunded Cold Case division. Why? Did she run into trouble from one of the higher ups in the LAPD?

Well, she made waves and as she says in the show, “What better way to get rid of someone who’s in your face than to stick them in a basement out of sight out of mind.” So, she’s [assigned] to run this Cold Case Unit where she has to find volunteers, who are a singular ragtag group of misfits. I don’t know if I’d call it demotion, more of a lateral move, but it is a political move to get her out of her boss’s face. At the same time, it’s about her finding that this is her spot. This is where she should be, and this is where her talents are best put to use.

What excited you about the Cold Case Unit?

I call them “time travel” cases. It’s really fascinating from the standpoint of a writer. You take a case and you pick the era it occurred, whether it’s 10, 20, or 30 years old. In one of the books, Ballard investigates the [notorious 1947] Black Dahlia murder case. It takes you back in time so you’re writing a contemporary story, but you’re also writing about this time period where society was different, forensics was different, and you get to explore that. I think Ballard’s pretty fascinating, and she works her way through some of these cases and these other times where things were quite different.

Are there flashbacks to when the crimes were committed?

No, in this TV show, we don’t employ flashbacks. There was a show called Cold Case about 10 years ago that always did that, so we wanted to have distinctly our own show. I don’t do flashbacks in the books either. So when I say time travel, it’s really a contemporary story looking at something in the past.