Over the years, Michael Connelly has made hundreds of appearances in the Book Review - most of them, of course, on the best-seller list, where his Harry Bosch mysteries are in regular rotation. "The Black Box," his latest, will be published in November. But this week Connelly gets his first byline in our pages, writing about "The Cocktail Waitress," a posthumously published novel by James M. Cain. In some ways the review completes a circle for Connelly, who started his career writing for newspapers and who took early inspiration as a novelist from hard-boiled authors like Cain. "My experience as a newspaper reporter was invaluable in terms of getting me to the kind of writing I do now," Connelly said via e-mail. It gave me a work ethic of writing every day and pushing through difficult creative times. I mean, there's no writer's block allowed in a newsroom. Those times also gave me an ear for dialogue and helped me learn that less is always more, to hone everything down to what's clear and important. Fifty meaningless details become one telling detail, that sort of thing. So it certainly breaks my heart to see so many newspapers failing and foundering, to know that in so many places the daily newspaper isn't the community tent pole it once was. I know there are many reasons for this, and news habits and consumption are changing. But it's hard to see it as an overall gain. Something is being lost. My next novel is about the murder of a journalist, and this idea of a sum loss was not lost on me as I wrote it. That's what I like most about writing fiction over journalism. The easy metaphors!