Posted in: Amazon Studios, Audio Dramas, TV | Tagged: Audible, Audio Drama, Bosch, Michael Connelly, The Safe Man

The Safe Man: Michael Connelly Discusses First Foray Into Audio Drama

Author Michael Connelly discusses entering the world of audio drama, adapting his short story The Safe Man, working with Audible, and more.

Bestselling author Michael Connelly is best known for his crime novels and the expanding "Bosch" television universe, and The Safe Man is his first foray into audio drama. The 2012 story was originally written for an anthology where authors were briefed to write a story not in the genres they were known for, and Connelly decided to write a ghost story. Bleeding Cool spoke with the author about the decision to adapt it into an audio drama for Audible and much more – here's a look!

How Michael Connelly Come to Write His First Audio Drama

"It's been a long road," said Connelly. "Call it a storyteller's ego. I thought it didn't think it got the audience it should have in the book of short stories. I liked the story so much, so I teamed up with a friend of mine who's also a crime writer named Terrill Lee Lankford and we wrote a script about ten years ago based on that story. It was never rejected; it was never really sent out. We got busy with our own projects, and we always thought that we would come back to it. We never did, and we had this rise of audio drama largely because of Audible. Audible has really perfected the delivery system and they're also very accepting of these ideas. I mean, it's a tough sell to get a TV show going – I know because I've been doing that, so I thought this was a possible way of reviving that story, expanding it, telling it new. And we went from there."

"One of the inspirations was also the two producers, Teresa Snider, who works for my television company, and my daughter Callie Connelly, who had just graduated from film school," Connelly continued. "She'd been working for a few years now in the film business and was looking for her own thing. She wanted to produce something, to short-cut her career to become a producer. They came to me and said, 'What could we do? You've written a lot of short stories,' and I said, 'Oh. I have a ghost story that I think should have a wider audience'. So we went from there. The last thing I'll add is I'd been sporadically doing True Crime podcasts based on true stories that had come from detectives that helped me with my books and my television shows. The last one I did, I took it to Audible because I wanted uninterrupted storytelling. The typical model of a podcast, especially True Crime, is you have all these ads that drop in the middle of your narration that really bothered me. The third time out, I went to Audible, and we became pretty good partners. When I decided with my team there to expand "Safe Man," they were the logical and only choice."

On Writing and Producing Radio Drama

Since the original prose version of The Safe Man was driven primarily by dialogue, it wasn't difficult to adapt the screenplay to audio drama. "Our part was just to adapt the screenplay into that script," said Connelly. "You go from the interior thought and it's really all about dialogue and action. You're mindful that the cliffhangers that were going to keep people involved and connected to the story are all delivered by dialogue, essentially. It's a little tweak on storytelling, and I'd written a lot of scripts for television shows and so forth, so I really had to dig into myself in whatever I'm writing, in books, scripts, or whatever – I'm looking at a screen imagining what I'm going to see and have to capture that essence and put in some story. So, I was looking for things that would trigger the imagination of the listener. It's a little bit of a new path for me, but still a branching off the path I'd been as a storyteller for the past thirty-plus years."

When asked about the process of producing the audio drama with Audible, Connelly said, "This is a sophisticated way of telling a story, and I was really stunned by what Mark Philips could do with this story. It really kind of lives and dies, I think, in the sound design, and that's one thing that Audible brings to the stage. They know what they're doing. This thing was partially completed when we brought it to them. I'm really not a guy who goes around selling ideas. I usually go, 'This is the script. Do you want it? Do you like it?' That was kind of what we did with Audible. Then they brought in their really smart people to say, "This is what you need'. They were very specific about 'We need a better cliffhanger here, we need this, we need that,' so it was a very good partnership."

Connelly Has Ideas for Sequels in "The Safe Man" Universe

The original prose story ended on an ambiguous and disquietening note, and Connelly said the audio adaptation would have a slightly different ending. "I wanted to keep with the theme about fate. I was hoping we could have a higher discussion besides 'Boo! It's a ghost!' I wanted to expand that and keep that going through the story to the end. I've been doing this for a long time, so I'm always thinking ahead. So, if this thing works, how can we come back to this story? We have ideas about that. It's more the premise and the themes. There's more than one safe out there, so there's all kinds of ways that I could get back to the story, and a lot of that will depend on how this one does, and we'll see what happens."

The Safe Man by Michael Connelly is available on Audible from May 16th. Bosch and its sequel series Bosch: Legacy, are on Prime.

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