Michael Connelly&rsquo;s Harry Bosch series of detective novels began with &ldquo;Black Echo&rdquo; in 1992. It was based in part on a true crime that happened in Los Angeles, where Connelly had worked on the police beat for the Los Angeles Times. </p><p>The novel won the Edgar Award for best first novel. </p><p>Connelly has returned many times to Detective Harry Bosch and his gritty, Chandleresque Los Angeles. With the publication of his newest book, &ldquo;Nine Dragons,&rdquo; he takes Bosch out of the city for the first time. And it&rsquo;s not a short trip: Much of the novel takes place in Hong Kong.</p><p>Connelly&rsquo;s journalistic work was short-listed for a Pulitzer Prize in 1986. His fiction has regularly appeared on the New York Times&rsquo; best-seller list. He is at work on his 16th Harry Bosch story, which will also feature Mickey Haller, another of his recurring characters. He speaks in Kansas City on Thursday.</p><p><strong> &ldquo;Nine Dragons&rdquo; is set partly in Hong Kong. What is the significance of the title?</strong></p><p>There&rsquo;s a part of Hong Kong called Kowloon, which is across the Hong Kong harbor, and the translation of Kowloon is &ldquo;Nine Dragons.&rdquo; The lore behind that is an emperor was chased by his enemies into the mountains that surround what is now Hong Kong. There are eight mountain peaks around Hong Kong, and the emperor was considered a mountain himself, so they called the nine peaks &ldquo;nine dragons.&rdquo;</p><p> I took it for the book because, while a third of the book takes place in Hong Kong, the heart of the story takes place in Kowloon.</p><p><strong>Most of your Harry Bosch novels take place in Los Angeles. Why Hong Kong now?</strong></p><p>I&rsquo;ve been lucky that I&rsquo;ve been able to write about him for a long time. If you have that kind of good fortune, you can always pop off with a fish-out-of-water story and take your character out of his comfort zone, out of the area where readers are expecting to find him.</p><p> I visited Hong Kong about six years ago and immediately felt that this would be the fish-out-of-water place for Harry. It was vibrant, it was very visual, it was interesting and there&rsquo;s this sense that anything can happen there. That kind of bridged it to Los Angeles for me. It had a lot of the same feel as Los Angeles.</p><p><strong>Before you wrote fiction, you worked as a crime reporter in Fort Lauderdale and Los Angeles, and you had a memorable night with police at a young age. How did these experiences shape you as a writer?</strong></p><p>When I was 16, I was witness to a shooting and robbery and spent the night in a police station telling a detective what I&rsquo;d seen. I saw the shooter run and hide his gun. I saw where he hid, too, and led the police (there). </p><p>That night at the police station watching the detectives got me interested in their work and turned me into a reader of crime fiction and true crime. That eventually led me to write these kinds of books. But I still only had that one experience, so I decided to go into journalism and become a crime beat reporter, which I thought would teach me how to write as well as expose me to the world I wanted to write about. </p><p>The journalism in particular was a key thing. It gave me the work ethic of writing every day, which I carry over into what I do now. It taught me how to be concise but still carry information, how to listen for dialogue that carries the story further. </p><p>All these things come out of the constraints of journalism, and that builds a velocity that&rsquo;s very important in the reading process in crime fiction.</p><p><hr class="infobox-hr-separator" /> <div class="infobox"> <strong><span class="infobox-head">MEET THE AUTHOR </span></strong><br /> Michael Connelly will discuss and sign his new novel at 7 p.m. Thursday at Unity Temple on the Plaza, 707 W. 47th St. Admission is $30.10 (includes a copy of the book and two tickets). Call 913-384-3126.</p><p></div>