Michael Connelly is expanding into a new medium. The critically-acclaimed author of classic novels like The Lincoln Lawyer and Blood Work has penned dozens of stories throughout his multi-decade career and is now venturing into the audio space, partnering with Audible for The Safe Man.
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“I’m trying to hit all the bases, I guess you’d say,” Connelly told ComicBook. “As a storyteller, I’m kind of fascinated of trying many different things. I did a couple of True Crime podcasts, and I have to say it is a streamlined way of getting a story out there. You get an idea and within weeks, if not days, you can get it going. I have a daughter who graduated from film school and a partner in my television production business, and they came to me and said, ‘We were wanting to look at doing one of these audio dramas and what do you got?’
“I did a couple of kind of do-it-yourself podcasts. I actually recorded them in my garage. I felt like that wasn’t the best delivery system. It was broken up by ads and things like that,” Connelly added. “Eventually, I went to Audible and it was kind of a change of life to see how easy it was to tell an uninterrupted story through their platform. When we came up with this idea of let’s do this fictional major production of an Audible audio drama, it was really a no-brainer.”
What Connelly had was a standalone short story called The Safe Man, a tale that existed outside his fleshed out Harry Bosch world that teetered into some other-worldly elements that had been absent from much of Connelly’s prior works. Taking place in the Florida tropics, The Safe Man chronicles a horror author hiring a man to open an antique safe in his home which results in something sinister being unleashed in the process.
“I’ve always been kind of partial to the one time I stepped out of the lanes that I’m known for of detective stories. I wrote a semi-detective story that had a supernatural angle to it,” Connelly recalled. “I thought that would lend itself pretty well to a cool sound design and telling the story in an audible format. They gave me some time to expand the story, which has quite more stuff in there than was in the short story, that’s for sure. I did that pretty quickly, and then they took it and ran with it.”
The Safe Man reunites Connelly with his longtime collaborator Titus Welliver, the star of , a television series that adapts various Harry Bosch novels from Connelly’s archive.
“It takes about seven months to make the Bosch show, and then the actors have five months off. No one wants five months off. I think when they have a lot of momentum going in their professional career, they’re all looking for other things to do,” Connelly noted. “So I was the guy kind of whispering at the corner, ‘Hey, now that you’re done Bosch, are you interested in telling this story?’ It started with Titus and then Titus could reach out to a lot of actors that he knows. Through him, we got some other really great talent to be involved in this.”
While The Safe Man dips into both a new genre and storytelling medium for Connelly, the audiobook will have plenty of traces of what Connelly is best known for.
“If you like Harry Bosch or Lincoln Lawyer, you’re going to get into a mystery that someone cannot let go and is going to start looking into,” Connelly teased. “There’s some cop stuff, there’s detective stuff, there’s a putting together of a puzzle, but it does have this other dimension to it, a dimension of what happens to us, where we come from and where we go when we pass. These are eternal questions that never get into my books, but I’ve carried for a long time. This story is somewhat inspired by something that happened to me a long time ago. It’s still an extension of what I’m known for, but his is a whole new front for me and I’m quite excited about it. I think people who have been riding with me through my stories for a long time will not be disappointed.”
The Safe Man is available now on Audible.
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