When crime-writer Michael Connelly was 13, his family relocated from Philadelphia to Florida. 'My mum worked at a bank and she would take me and my two brothers to this big city park,' he recalls. 'We'd have to play sports and take care of ourselves. She'd pick us up on her way home
from work.'
Their only respite from Florida's humid climate was a small, air-conditioned library on the corner of the park where the boys would cool off. 'The librarians knew what we were doing, so they instituted this rule that you had to be reading inside the library.'
Anyone caught without a book was marched to the stacks and handed one from the shelves.
On the day this happened to Connelly, the librarian chose To Kill a Mockingbird. His life changed there and then, although the teenager didn't realise it at the time. 'I can't say I was hit by a bolt of lightning and said, 'I'm going to be a writer'. It wasn't like that. But it put me on the road to being a reader. I started pursuing stuff in the stacks without a librarian pulling me by the ear. I became quite voracious. It was the foundation of wanting to write.'
Forty years on, Connelly is one of the world's top-selling novelists. Page-turners such as The Poet, The Lincoln Lawyer and Echo Park sell by the million and have been translated into 31 languages; 1998's Blood Work was made into a movie by Clint Eastwood.
Yet, Connelly has never forgotten his crucial introduction to literature, and has used his 18th novel, The Overlook, a slippery tale mixing murder and terrorism, to pay his respects. The dedication reads: 'For the Librarian who gave me To Kill a Mockingbird'.