The Black Echo

The difference between seeking justice—an abstract ideal—or just doing rote police work is a pervasive theme throughout The Black Echo. It is a complex idea because Connelly portrays Los Angeles as a gray area where justice is often impossible.

For Bosch, the quest for justice can be an excuse from procedure and a call to break rules; he sees in his fellow police “too much going with the flow” (109). He explains to Wish that it is not worth connecting Sharkey with a social worker or arresting a man for statutory rape: Bureaucracy sabotages any chance that the kid would benefit or that the man would be punished. When he leaks information to Bremmer at the end of the novel, he knows that heads are not “going to bounce” because institutions like the LAPD and FBI are structured to protect themselves (387). As a crime reporter, Bremmer might have the power to put pressure on the LAPD, but Bosch knows that he won’t because Bremmer is also more concerned with his own job than with justice. For these reasons, it is easy to root for Bosch when he sidesteps the boundaries of his job, works the case when taken off it, or uses his savvy to illegally (but not harmfully) manipulate Sharkey as a witness.

In the novel, policing and justice are at odds. Wish quotes J. Edgar Hoover’s line that “justice is incidental to law and order” (321), meaning that to properly maintain social structure, sometimes justice must be sacrificed because the real work is maintaining the status quo without wasting resources on ideals. This cynical philosophy matches the thematic concerns of the hardboiled genre. Here, we see the sacrifice of justice in the fact that Binh and Tran go free; they have lost their diamonds, but they remain wealthy.

Bosch considers himself above the law. Connelly nicknames him “Harry” in part as a reference to “Dirty” Harry Callahan, a character played by Clint Eastwood and famous for overusing his firearm on the job. Bosch has a reputation for being a “one man army” after shooting an unarmed suspect in the Dollmaker case (43); after Sharkey is killed, Bosch seeks revenge rather than procedural accuracy. It is no wonder that Wish misreads Bosch’s willingness to go outside the lines as a tendency to vigilantism. One of the driving tensions in The Black Echo is whether Bosch intentionally executed the Dollmaker and thus whether Bosch would forgive Wish’s vengeful actions as “justice” for her brother (320). In the end, however, Bosch reveals that he did follow police procedure with the Dollmaker and that he considers vigilantism to be criminal.