The Lincoln lawyer may have ditched his gas guzzler for an EV and eschewed the criminal courts in favour of civil law, but in Michael Connelly’s latest courtroom novel Mickey Haller is still the same resourceful jury-charmer.
Connelly has sold more than 80 million copies of his 39 novels. The Proving Ground is the eighth in his legal crime series, which has spawned a movie and four seasons on Netflix.
Speaking from his home in Los Angeles, Connelly says the TV version of Haller, played by Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, has infiltrated his imagination. Matthew McConaughey did “a great job” in the 2011 movie version, but he never got into Connelly’s head because of his Texas accent.
“I mean, I love that movie, so I’m not slighting him in any way. He just didn’t invade my imagination.”
RM Block
Garcia-Rulfo is closer to the book version of Haller, a Mexican-American.
“I think he could sell burnt matches,” Connelly says of the actor. “And that’s one of the things I’ve always wanted about Mickey, because he has to stand in the proving ground and sell himself as well as this case, and Manuel does that so well.”
The novel centres on a civil lawsuit against an artificial intelligence company whose chatbot told a 16-year-old boy it was okay to kill his ex-girlfriend. Haller represents Brenda Randolph, the murdered girl’s mother, in her fight against the industry.
Connelly’s initial inspiration came from an ongoing real-life civil case, Garcia vs Character Technologies, in which a Florida teenager took his own life after interactions with an AI chatbot.
“Since that was filed, over a year ago, there’s been many cases now, at least in the United States, very similar. A couple involving suicides, a couple of violence against other people. So it seems it’s becoming a groundswell.”
The prospects are frightening, though Connelly emphasises that he doesn’t believe AI is inherently a bad thing.
“AI is good, and it will change the world for the better, but what’s scary is that there’s a lack of foresight, a lack of government control and a lack of common sense.”
He hopes the novel will leave readers with questions about the direction AI is going in.
“Should there be more guardrails, or better guardrails, as this world evolves and changes in really big ways, in very quick ways?”
Connelly himself is part of a real-life battle against OpenAI. The Authors Guild invited him and nine other writers to be the faces of a class-action suit against the company. They claim their copyright was breached after pirated copies of their works were used to train OpenAI’s chatbot without permission.
“Like in your country, there are copyright laws which, on face, seemed to me were just totally ignored,“ he says. ”We’re hoping to establish guardrails, establish some rules regarding copyright for the future.”
Everyone in LA comes from somewhere else. Your biggest anchor is your home, so you get the sense that everything is fragile
— Michael Connelly
A case involving one company, Anthropic, has already settled with an agreement to pay $1.5 billion, or more than €1.2 billion, to compensate authors for an estimated 500,000 books used; that’s $2,500, or about €2,100, per book. Connelly, a former journalist, hopes the settlement will teach such companies a lesson, although he believes the judge’s ruling was “a mixed bag” for the Authors Guild case.
Other elements of The Proving Ground reflect real events, too. The fictional Altadena home of Haller’s ex-wife, Maggie McPherson, is destroyed in the Los Angeles fires; her resulting grief and insecurity are deftly drawn. The fires, in January, destroyed thousands of properties and killed more than 30 people. LA is a “destination city”, Connelly says, with few people born there.
“The only person I really know that’s from here or was born here is my own daughter. Everyone comes from somewhere else. And so your anchors are not set too deep, and your biggest anchor is your home. When something happens on two gigantic sides of the city, you get the sense that everything is fragile, and it’s just very surreal.”
Connelly lost a house, which he felt gave him licence to write about the fires.
“I try to be as contemporary as I can in my writing and about the city, about what’s going on in society. So you have AI, you have these fires. Hopefully it comes off as being very out of the moment and real and not exploitative.”
Connelly incorporates lead characters from other series into the one he’s working on. Haller appears in some of the Harry Bosch novels, for example – the writer has made them half-brothers – and the detective Renée Ballard shows up in Haller’s Resurrection Walk. In The Proving Ground the journalist Jack McEvoy, who is also the focus of a Connelly series, helps with Haller’s AI case. Was it tricky to manage that?
“It was difficult. I mean, this book is about that case, so I knew that Mickey Haller would be the lead. But in my history of writing, I’ve always used Jack to explore new technology. The first book [with McEvoy], almost 30 years ago, was about this new thing called the internet, and then he went into data storage, and then he went into DNA collection and analysis. And so he’s my guy to say, ‘This is the new world, and let’s take a look at it and ask some questions.’ I had to find a way to get Jack in it.”
Did he weigh in more forcefully than expected? Connelly laughs.
“No. I think I had a collar on him, and I should be able to control that.”
McEvoy’s forward-looking attitude seems a mirror of Connelly’s own. The 69-year-old says he has no great interest in the past. He has little curiosity about his Irish roots, for example. His older sister, one of five siblings, told him he has three great-great-grandparents and one grandparent from Ireland, but he has never investigated.
“I’ve gone to Ireland several times, but I’ve never gone down the family-tree thing ... But a couple of my sisters, it’s very interesting to them, and they’ve done that and I think we’re all from Cork.”
His lack of interest may be a fault in his Irish genes, he jokes.
“I’m more of a future guy than a what’s-behind-me guy.”
Has he met any Irish relatives? He shakes his head, thinks for a second, smiles.
“I’ve met John Connolly’s mom, so I feel like she’s my relative. She’s such a nice lady. She’s like my Irish mother.”
His own mother, a fan of crime novels, inspired Connelly’s interest in books as a child. And when his family moved four times in four years, and he went to four different schools, he found solace in becoming a bookworm. Did all the moving trigger in him that sense of outsiderness so many writers talk of?
“I mean, that would do it, yeah. So it was, like, from seventh, eighth, ninth, 10th grades. I was in a different school every year, and cliques are already formed by the time you get there. You go into the lunchroom and you feel so, you know, ‘Where do I sit?’ and ‘No one knows me’. So you become a built-in outsider, basically.”
I just thought the Lincoln lawyer would give up his Lincoln and do something that’s probably better for society and use an electric car
— Michael Connelly
And is that a prerequisite for writing?
“It wasn’t pleasant when I was going through that, but I clearly look back on it now, and know I might not be doing this unless that happened.”
As for Connelly’s decision to ditch Haller’s Lincoln Navigator in favour of an electric Chevrolet Bolt, he says that, along with moving to civil law, it was part of the new direction promised for the character at the end of his previous novel, Resurrection Walk.
“I just thought the Lincoln lawyer would give up his Lincoln and do something that’s probably better for society and use an electric car instead of one of these big behemoths that add to our climate change and pollution, especially in California,“ Connelly says.
“I think I knew when I did it that some people would go, like, ‘Wait a minute: this guy’s the Lincoln lawyer, he’s not the Chevy Bolt barrister.’ So we’ll see what happens.”
The Proving Ground is published by Orion
