Eleanor Wish got gunned down in Hong Kong.

Eleanor was the ex-wife of Harry Bosch, the LAPD detective at the centre of Michael Connelly’s absorbing series of crime novels, and though her murder was hardly the typical fate of the wives and girlfriends of homicide detectives and private eyes in crime fiction, it’s still true that many women, maybe most, who hook up with sleuth figures don’t find especially happy endings in their relationships.

The ultimate giveaway came when Robert B. Parker began running an author’s photo on his book jackets showing him in poses with his dog. For years, and over the course of a dozen or more novels in Parker’s compelling series featuring the Boston private eye Spenser, I had figured that Parker, in shaping Spenser’s personality and back story, had borrowed elements from his own life and grafted them on to his fictional guy Spenser. Parker had fought in the Korean War; so did Spenser.