Kevin Pickell asked Michael Connelly:

Tell us about the first time the idea for a Harry Bosch character came to your mind?

Michael Connelly Since I was a teenager I was fascinated with soldiers who went into the tunnels of Vietnam – so called tunnel rats. I thought it must have been one of the scariest assignments ever. I read a book about it, watched a 60 minutes segment, worked in high school on a construction crew with a former soldier who had been a tunnel rat. Many years later as a reporter in Los Angeles, I was allowed to sit in on a briefing in an LAPD detective bureau where they were showing a slide show about a daring bank heist in which the thieves tunneled under the bank and then up into the vault. They were projecting photos from the hand-dug tunnel on the screen and they immediately reminded me of photos I had seen of the tunnels in Vietnam. All at once I thought of writing a story about a detective who was a former tunnel rat and who catches a case involving tunnels and former tunnel rats. It came to me as I was sitting there with all of these real detectives. I started writing what would become The Black Echo, my first published novel, that night.

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