The best part of having been around for a while is all the people you run across. Most are chasing a dream, and some actually catch it. Consider Michael Connelly, the cops reporter they said couldn't write.

In 1993, Connelly was on his way out and I was on my way in at the Los Angeles Times. I was replacing him on the cops beat in the San Fernando Valley. Like Florida, the Valley is fertile territory for what used to be known in the newspaper business as "dirtball stories" - love triangle murders, contract killings, mad capers and stupid criminal tricks.

Connelly was getting his first taste of success as a novelist. Even President Clinton was reading him. So he was packing in his press pass to pursue the book-writing thing. He took me on a tour of the Valley's cop shops (there were five) and the place where Rodney King was beaten by the LAPD. Connelly - everyone called him that – was shy and soft-spoken, with just a trace of Philly in his voice.

After the King beating, Connelly had gotten a chance to try out downtown for the paper's Metro edition. Every reporter in the 'burbs longed to go downtown back then. It meant you'd made it to the big leagues. At the time, Metro was filled with poets and stylists, writers who could make pretty words dance on the page, but were short on reporting.

Connelly was different. His prose was spare but he reported the hell out of a story. But because he wasn't a poet in one editor's eyes, Connelly didn't make it to Metro. He became known as the guy who couldn't write.

It was a bum rap, but Connelly didn't complain. He saved his best writing for himself, staying up late at night to create Harry Bosch and Jack McElvoy and Mickey Haller, the characters who drive his best-sellers. He also sprinkles his fiction with the real people and places of Los Angeles. Some of the background players - a Lt. Hilliard or a Sgt. Rector -  take on the names of old editors and colleagues. It's fun to unearth those nuggets.

I was a bit concerned when I read "The Scarecrow" and saw that cops reporter Jack McElvoy's replacement wound up murdered after getting the nickel tour of the LAPD's Parker Center. She was an ambitious, back-stabbing Twinkie whose passing was unlamented.

I couldn't help but ask Connelly: Was that me?

"If it's not your mojo, you have nothing to worry about," he advised.

Over the years, Connelly grew a beard and the cars he drove got better, but he's pretty much the same,­ a guy who never outgrows his friends. He submitted a piece for us because we asked. Trust me, the guy can write.