Early Life
Connelly was the second oldest child of W. Michael Connelly, a property developer, and Mary Connelly, a homemaker. According to Connelly, his father was a frustrated artist who encouraged his children to want to succeed in life. W. Michael Connelly himself was a risk taker who alternated success with failure in his pursuit of a career. Connelly's mother was a fan of crime fiction and introduced her son to the world of mystery novels.
At age 12, Connelly moved with his family from Philadelphia to Fort Lauderdale, Florida and attended St. Thomas Aquinas High School. At age 16, Connelly’s interest in crime and mystery escalated when, on his way home from his work as a hotel dishwasher, he witnessed a man throw an object into a hedge. Connelly was curious and decided to investigate and found that the object was a gun wrapped in a lumberjack shirt. After putting the gun back, he followed the man to a bar and left to go home to tell his father. Later that night, he brought the police down to the bar, but the man was already gone. This event introduced Connelly to the world of police officers and their lives, impressing him with the investigators’ hard faces and the way they worked.
Connelly had planned on following his father’s early choice of career in building construction and started out at the University of Florida in Gainesville as a building-trade major. After grades that were not as good as expected, Connelly went to see Robert Altman’s film The Long Goodbye and was enchanted by what he saw. The film, based on Raymond Chandler’s novel of the same name, inspired Connelly to want to become a mystery writer. Connelly went home and read all of Chandler's works, featuring Philip Marlowe, a detective in Los Angeles during the 1940s and ‘50s, and decided to switch majors to journalism with a minor in creative writing.
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