INTERVIEWING ANOTHER journalist is like kissing your mother on the mouth. It just feels wrong. Millionaire author Michael Connelly - for years a crime reporter on The Los Angeles Times - frees me with his first salvo. 'I was never just a journalist,' he says. 'I was always a writer.' That's all right then. Gloves off.
Connelly is - and acts - fiendishly successful. As one critic puts it, he is 'intelligent but not academic ... the world's best cop novelist'.
Bill Clinton is a fan. Mick Jagger, too. Clint Eastwood so admires Connelly's work that he directed - and starred in - last year's woeful Blood Work. The movie was, as Connelly admits, not great. But it was useful. 'It made people read the books,' he says.
Indeed. His Hieronymus (Harry) Bosch novels have sold seven million copies and earned him a vast presidential pile in Florida, a big boat and expensive teeth. And he's not above flaunting such trophies. In and out he pops, a phone pressed to each ear and a pager chirruping on his belt, giving me plenty of time to note the enormous private wharf out the front, the dazzling array of electronics, and the writer's props oh-so-carefully placed: the bookshelf overflowing with translations of his books (German, French, Italian); the incongruous John Lennon spectacles left on his desk; the Bar Hemingway ashtray.
Now, he has embarked on a world tour - London, Scotland, Hong Kong, Australia - to nip at the increasingly visible heels of Ian Rankin, his great rival, who once said that, after Rebus, Bosch was his favourite detective.
'Ian's a friend,' says Connelly, none too convincingly. 'But he's quite obscure here. I'm not obscure over there. I've had No1 best-sellers in Australia, Ireland, France, Italy.' He counts them off on his fingers. 'I've even had a Sunday Times No1 best-seller. Los Angeles has a built-in intrigue that makes people in Japan want to read about it, whereas Ian is writing about Scotland. He's had a higher mountain to climb.'