Foreword
by Stephen King
Whether you are the reader or the writer, it can be extremely hard to start a novel. No one in the book is your friend yet, and all the places are strange; hence, starting to read feels like a forced act of intimacy. A hooker can help in this regard. I’m not talking about a prostitute but a good first line. I’m a sucker for good first lines, collect them in a little notebook the way some people collect stamps or coins, and the first line of The Poet is a blue-ribbon winner. Death is my beat, Jack McEvoy writes, and we are immediately hooked and pulled in. It’s not a cheat-line, either, but one that perfectly sets the tone: dark, brooding, just plain scary. It also serves to immediately distance The Poet from the four other novels Connelly had written up to that time. Those books are about a series character. I can imagine Harry Bosch (of The Concrete Blonde, et cetera) saying something like “Death is my beat,” but not until much further along the arc of his disillusionment.
The first thing you need to know about this novel is that it’s a marvelous and sustained piece of storytelling, an absolute joy to read if you like tales of suspense. The book is full of incident and stuffed with characters, many of them colorful; I counted twenty-eight “speaking parts” and know I didn’t even come close to getting them all. Still, you won’t get lost because Jack is almost always there, anchoring the tale, and “Death is [his] beat.”
The second thing you need to know about The Poet is that it’s genuinely terrifying. We all know the corny old cliché about reading with all the lights on (as if you could get much reading done with them all turned out), but the first time I read The Poet—this was in Boulder, Colorado, less than forty miles from the place where Sean McEvoy’s life comes to an end—I did indeed find myself calling for wattage backup as the story wound toward its climax inside and the dark drew down outside. I think of myself as relatively case-hardened to make-believe terrors, but the further I followed Jack into the Poet’s world, the more frightened I became. I don’t believe I will ever again listen to the high-pitched cry of mating modems without thinking of this novel. And Connelly achieves his scares the old-fashioned way, by actual storytelling. There’s plenty of blood for the gorehounds among you—an attractive college student found in two pieces, for starters—but it’s never ladled out simply to pump up a flagging plot. Because the plot of The Poet doesn’t flag. Let me repeat that it’s a novel, not a trick, and brings with it all the novel’s old, delicious pleasures.
Connelly’s writing is by turns elegant and matter-of-fact. It pulls the reader into a tale that works as a classic mystery story (howdunit as well as who, in this case), and at the end, after a series of surprises that go off like well-placed dynamite charges, the reader can look back and see how carefully (and how craftily) the entire work was put together. I repeat, there is no cheating. Writers of this kind of book want us to be surprised—even shocked—when the truth comes to light in the last two chapters. (Think of how you felt the first time you discovered who really killed Roger Ackroyd.) After a lifetime of Ellery Queen, John D. MacDonald, Elmore Leonard, Ngaio Marsh, Ruth Rendell, and a raft of others, we hardly ever are. But at the end of The Poet, I was surprised. Shocked, as well. This is a good deal more than a mystery, but Michael Connelly has paid close attention to the mystery story’s rather strict rules of logic, just the same. The result is a book with true depth and texture, one that bears re-reading, not just twice but perhaps thrice.
This is the best work Michael Connelly, a prolific writer, had done up to this point (1996), and marked him as an important voice in the genre at the turn of the century. I do not use the word classic lightly, but I believe that The Poet may well prove to be one. Sometimes a novelist sends us a wonderful message between the lines: “I am capable of much more than I thought.” The Poet is that sort of book, long and rich, multilayered and satisfying. I wish you all the joy of finding out what lies beyond “Death is my beat.”
Stephen King
October 18, 2003
1
Death is my beat. I make my living from it. I forge my professional reputation on it. I treat it with the passion and precision of an undertaker—somber and sympathetic about it when I’m with the bereaved, a skilled craftsman with it when I’m alone. I’ve always thought the secret of dealing with death was to keep it at arm’s length. That’s the rule. Don’t let it breathe in your face.
But my rule didn’t protect me. When the two detectives came for me and told me about Sean, a cold numbness quickly enveloped me. It was like I was on the other side of the aquarium window. I moved as if underwater—back and forth, back and forth—and looked out at the rest of the world through the glass. From the backseat of their car I could see my eyes in the rearview mirror, flashing each time we passed beneath a streetlight. I recognized the thousand-yard stare I had seen in the eyes of fresh widows I had interviewed over the years.
I knew only one of the two detectives. Harold Wexler. I had met him a few months earlier when I stopped into the Pints Of for a drink with Sean. They worked CAPs together on the Denver PD. I remember Sean called him Wex. Cops always use nicknames for each other. Wexler’s is Wex, Sean’s, Mac. It’s some kind of tribal bonding thing. Some of the names aren’t complimentary but the cops don’t complain. I know one down in Colorado Springs named Scoto whom most other cops call Scroto. Some even go all the way and call him Scrotum, but my guess is that you have to be a close friend to get away with that.
Wexler was built like a small bull, powerful but squat. A voice slowly cured over the years by cigarette smoke and whiskey. A hatchet face that always seemed red the times I saw him. I remember he drank Jim Beam over ice. I’m always interested in what cops drink. It tells a lot about them. When they’re taking it straight like that, I always think that maybe they’ve seen too many things too many times that most people never see even once. Sean was drinking Lite beer that night, but he was young. Even though he was the supe of the CAPs unit, he was at least ten years younger than Wexler. Maybe in ten years he would have been taking his medicine cold and straight like Wexler. But now I’ll never know.
I spent most of the drive out from Denver thinking about that night at the Pints Of. Not that anything important had happened. It was just drinks with my brother at the cop bar. And it was the last good time between us, before Theresa Lofton came up. That memory put me back in the aquarium.
But during the moments that reality was able to punch through the glass and into my heart, I was seized by a feeling of failure and grief. It was the first real tearing of the soul I had experienced in my thirty-four years. That included the death of my sister. I was too young then to properly grieve for Sarah or even to understand the pain of a life unfulfilled. I grieved now because I had not even known Sean was so close to the edge. He was Lite beer while all the other cops I knew were whiskey on the rocks.
Of course, I also recognized how self-pitying this kind of grief was. The truth was that for a long time we hadn’t listened much to each other. We had taken different paths. And each time I acknowledged this truth the cycle of my grief would begin again.
My brother once told me the theory of the limit. He said every homicide cop had a limit but the limit was unknown until it was reached. He was talking about dead bodies. Sean believed that there were just so many that a cop could look at. It was a different number for every person. Some hit it early. Some put in twenty in homicide and never got close. But there was a number. And when it came up, that was it. You transferred to records, you turned in your badge, you did something. Because you just couldn’t look at another one. And if you did, if you exceeded your limit, well, then you were in trouble. You might end up sucking down a bullet. That’s what Sean said.