All detectives have to adorn themselves with an oddity, sometimes a disorder. Crime novel writers have so far found no better way to emphasize their genius, insight, or misanthropy. Almost always solitary, they are presented as verses, rather than loose, dislocated. We really like to see how they solve crimes, but we would not go to dinner with them. There is no one who can stand them. The cliché designates them as “tormented.”
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The weirdness of Harry Bosch (in the Amazon series, Titus Welliver, the actor with the best dog face) is his house. He made a lot of money as a police consultant on a movie and invested it in a designer home perched high above Los Angeles. It is a hostile house that looks like a viewpoint and makes its owner a lookout. At his feet stretch the lights of the city, where crimes take place, where dirt, gangs, the corrupt and the wicked give him no respite. His crusade is the girl victims of violence, whom he almost never saves, but sometimes he comes.
Of course, Bosch is insomniac, like all Guardians. He always comes when called. Tired, old and disbelieving, but present. As a perpetual watchtower, he transcends the commonplaces of the police genre to become a paternal and slightly theological metaphor: he is a lesser god from whom we only hope he will not give up. We forgive him for his failure and we thank him for his vigilance because what the little people of the 21st century are looking for is not the same as those of the 20th century or those of the 19th century were looking for. They lived in capital letters for God, for the Homeland or for the Revolution. We do it in lowercase and settle for a grumpy guardian to tell us from time to time that he tries and that it will turn out better next time.
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