Crime Beat: A Decade of Covering Cops and Killers. Michael Con-nelly. New York: Little, Brown, 2006.

Ernest Hemingway (1899 – 1961) attributed the uncluttered heft ofhis fiction—just-the-facts plus all that was implied between thelines—to the ‘‘cable-ese’’ that he learned as a young reporter, as MichaelCarlson notes in his afterward to Michael Connelly’s Crime Beat: ADecade of Covering Cops and Killers. Carlson parenthetically suggests thatHemingway may have equaled Dashiell Hammett (1894– 1961) interms of his influence on hardboiled fiction. Similarly, Connelly’s style,and what he refers to as his ‘‘pursuit of the telling detail’’ (10), wasinfluenced by his work as a crime reporter in climes where the sunnever stops shining on the darkest and most disturbing acts of may-hem. Those connections are abundantly clear in this fascinating ifoccasionally redundant collection of crime stories from the South Flor-ida Sun-Sentinel and the Los Angeles Times.

Connelly gained fame as the creator of best-selling books featuringLAPD detective Harry Bosch, whose mission-minded approach to hiswork has everything to do with the murder of his mother and histraumatic experience in Vietnam. Connelly’s fans will have their cu-riosity about the author sated by Crime Beat. At 16, while drivinghome after work as a dishwasher in Fort Lauderdale, he witnessed amurder suspect running toward the surf, tossing a bundle into a hedge.Following an unpleasant but revealing evening in the local detectivebureau, Connelly became fascinated with police work, turning to true-crime books and crime novels by Raymond Chandler (1888– 1959)and Joseph Wambaugh (1937 – ). As a young adult, he saw a future as acrime writer, with the path that would take him there: ‘‘I wanted towork for a newspaper on the crime beat. I wanted to watch and learnabout the detectives and then one day write about them in novels. Allbecause of a moment, because I had looked out my window’’ (7).

As a reporter, Connelly zeroed in on the mundanity of murder cases,the steady drumbeat of the worst crimes, as well as the determinationand pride of those whose job it is to be the best at a ‘‘dirty job,’’ asa Fort Lauderdale police detective told the author for a 1987 story.That piece in the first section, ‘‘The Cops,’’ aptly concludes with areport on the funeral of a slain officer, murdered by a burglary suspecttwo months after the rookie graduated from the Los Angeles Police

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Academy. Part II, ‘‘The Killers,’’ offers close-up views of a serial mur-derer, a man who killed his wife, and a man who killed his father.Humor of a markedly dark variety bubbles to the surface in ‘‘The GangThat Couldn’t Shoot Straight,’’ concerning incompetent but deadlykillers who advertised their services in Soldier of Fortune magazine. Thefinal section, ‘‘The Cases,’’ analyses murders, including that of a nurseapparently killed while trying to help a man lying in the street nearStudio City.

The most entertaining passage in Crime Beat details the foolishlyarrogant Nicodemo Scarfo, AKA Little Nicky, a wealthy mafioso af-filiated with the Philadelphia/Atlantic City mob. Scarfo, like mobstersof yore, moved to South Florida to avoid the northern police agencies.Little did he know that his canal-side mansion in Fort Lauderdale wasin full view of FBI agents stationed at the condominium complexacross the way. Scarfo’s meetings with highly placed mobsters from allover the country were taped. The mafiosos’ etiquette at the gatheringsreflected what they had seen in The Godfather. ‘‘Sometimes it got to befunny,’’ police detective Chuck Drago told Connelly. ‘‘We’d see the carspull up with 10 or 15 guys getting out for a meeting and they’d becircling all over the front yard trying to make sure they kissed orhugged everybody’’ (48). Call it popular culture in reverse: real lifereflected art. The upshot was that the bad guys were caught and theaccount of it all is as gripping as any of Connelly’s fiction.

Philip BoothUniversity of South Florida

Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. HenryJenkins. New York: New York University Press, 2006.

MIT’s Deflorz Professor of Humanities Henry Jenkins has somegood news: contemporary society may be a contested space where me-dia institutions and individual consumers battle, but we should notfret. Out of this agon emerges a new culture, convergence culture. Weshould embrace it. With all the optimism of German philosopherJurgen Habermas’s insistence the public sphere will vindicate ratio-nalism as the best approach to social change, Jenkins provides a lucid

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