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.' Connelly and his fictional hero could be brothers. Bosch is a military veteran, an orphan, nearly an alcoholic, impossible, resentful of authority. Another brilliant, avenging maverick. 'Yes, I know,' says Connelly. 'All the cliches of the genre. But I grew up reading them, loving them. So, why not write what I like reading?' Connelly is a man of some contradiction. His plots are pacey yet convincing, his characters chummily emotive. But he's not. Everything about him is just adequate. From his handshake to his clothes and his manner. He speaks deliberately, as if dictating, eschews eye contact and, doubtless, has the resting pulse of a dead sheep. If you shouted 'Fire', he wouldn't run. Nor, one suspects, could he. He's self-consciously thick-set, with an all-encompassing reddish beard beneath an improbably unlined brow. He's surprisingly vain. One journalist described his eyes as being too close together - they are - and he keeps mentioning this, crossly. In own-brand jeans, greying sneakers and a horrid lime-green sweatshirt, he looks like a clarinet teacher. Aside from the externals, only his blindingly white smile alludes to his bank balance. He looks as if he's stayed up all night brushing his teeth. Even there he's sensible. 'I just had the front four capped. They're the only ones that show.' When it comes to his books, though, he is painstaking. Connelly crunches detail, nails character, spins gripping, credible plots. The Black Echo won the Edgar Award in 1992 for best first novel by a mystery writer. Lost Light was on The New York Times best-seller list for six weeks. The Narrows will surely follow. A perfectionist, he is stereotypically restless. 'Writing is like a shark,' he says. 'You've got to keep moving.' He's moved most by fear - financial fear. As the son of a peripatetic builder, one of five children, Connelly grew up forever worrying about money. 'My dad was an extrovert, into the grand gesture,' he says. 'He took risks. Sometimes it paid off, sometimes it didn't. When I was 13, we had to load up the car with belongings and go to a flea market just so we could pay the mortgage. My younger siblings were blissfully unaware, but I was the oldest boy. I'm very driven to provide.' At 47, he's still bitter. He treats himself to a new laptop for every book he writes, 'because I can'. Connelly was born in Pennsylvania, but the family moved to Florida when he was 12. A terrible student, he attended four schools in five years. 'I went to Catholic schools and I hated that, the strictness,' he says. 'I could never fit in.' It was assumed that he'd become a builder like his father. He duly enrolled at the University of Florida to study building construction sciences. His course began - and understandably ended - with Introduction to Concrete. It was then that he saw The Long Goodbye, Robert Altman's movie adaptation of Raymond Chandler's novel. 'My mother had always loved crime fiction, P.D. James mostly, but it was only when I discovered Chandler that I knew for sure,' he says. 'I told my father I was going to be a novelist. He said to me, 'I just don't want you to end up waiting tables'. So, we hatched the idea of my going into journalism.' It was through journalism that he met his half-Scottish wife, Linda, who is two years his junior. 'We both took a college class called Ethics of Journalism.' A short course, I suggest. It's the only time he laughs. 'I'd had a cycling accident - broken four fingers, both wrists and an elbow. I was in a cast like this.' He strikes a ghastly pose. 'She took pity on me.' The couple celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary last month, and it's easy to see how it works. Linda is the machine behind her husband's success. She runs the house and his business, and fends off unwelcome requests. She even files his tax returns in 22 countries. 'That stuff can really bog you down,' he says. 'I'm coddled. All I have to do is write.' But it took Connelly seven years of aborted attempts before he at last finished The Black Echo in 1990. 'Journalism helped me a lot,' he says. 'It got me into the police world and prepared me for the unforeseen. But my progress in newspapers was very slow. Increasingly, I could only find fulfilment at night when I was writing fiction. And I used that frustration. If everything had been going great at work, if I'd been on the magic carpet, I doubt I'd have started writing books.' Recognition has come at a cost. Connelly and his wife have just one child, a seven-year-old daughter, Callie. 'We started late,' he says. 'I was selfish. When I was ready, we didn't have time to have a large family.' Few authors happily disclose the autobiographical elements that they all use to shape their work. But Connelly is refreshingly transparent. He uses everything. 'It all comes out of my life. Bosch is my point man, the guy in the jungle. I use him to exorcise my demons. Angels Flight, for example, where he investigates the murder of a little girl - I wrote that when my daughter was two years old. The nightmares of parenting were just awakening in me. I wrote a book about the worst thing that could happen to a parent. I thought it would help, but it didn't. That fear can never go away.' Perhaps the simpler truth is that Connelly has to use everything because he doesn't have that much to use. He has few friends, his parents are dead, and his brothers and sisters are scattered across the country, from Seattle to Boston. 'We're not that close,' he says. Three years ago, he moved back to Florida from Los Angeles, so Callie could spend more time with his mother, who died in July last year. As he admits with perverse pride, he knew nobody else in Tampa. He did meet up with one old friend from college. But mainly because he's a lawyer, and Connelly plans to write a book about a criminal defence lawyer. 'I inhabit a weird world, but you've got to be an introvert to want to do this,' he says. 'I'm very happy with my existence.' I almost believe him. But then, he does write fiction for a living. If he really is so content to be a loner, why is he spending an entire day talking to a stranger when two hours would more than suffice? If I hadn't finally put my notebook away, I'd still be sitting there with him now. He tries again. 'Do I have an emptiness or a secret wound that forces me to be this way? No, this is just the way I am. It's not a pose.' For a millionaire, Connelly cuts a melancholy figure. Now that he lives in Florida, he spends much of his time flying back to Los Angeles, sniffing out new locations for his books. He always travels alone. Just him, a hire car, hotel room and a digital camera. Even his one hobby, sea fishing, is solitary. He has the air of a man who fears it could all be taken away from him. His father died of cancer on August 6, 1991, at the age of 59. His grandfather died of a stroke some 30 years earlier, on August 6, aged 59. Connelly is remarkably sanguine. 'I know that on August 6 in 12 years time, I'm not going to leave the house.' Certainly, there's a remove about Connelly. He talks of playing with his daughter, and 'clowning around'. But, although happy shouts echo round the house all afternoon, only his boxer bitch dares to pad into the office. It's hard to imagine him giving piggy-back rides. Like Bosch, he's always on the outside, looking in. His father was similarly distant. 'When he was diagnosed with cancer, we had a family reunion in Washington, DC,' he says. 'And it was there that my agent got hold of me and said he'd sold The Black Echo. My father was going through radiation, chemotherapy and all that stuff, which burned, and in the afternoons he would go down to the hospital dining room to eat ice-cream, to cool down his throat. 'That's where I told him. It was a great moment for me. But he said he couldn't read my book. He just said: 'I know you're going to do well, but I can't read it.'' Catching my eye for the first time, Connelly says softly: 'I understood.' He should have, but he clearly didn't. Connelly was hurt. Still is. That's the overriding reason for his reliance on Bosch. And it is a reliance. Bosch is his punch-bag and his muse. The shadow, in fact, of his dead father. 'Will Bosch live forever? No, no one does. Harry's on real time. I hope I know when it's over.' The Narrows Give-away The Post has five copies of Michael Connelly's newly released novel, The Narrows, to give away. To win one, be among the first to e-mail bookclub@scmp.com