October 2023 - Lee Goldberg

I was saddened to hear about Richard Roundtree’s passing. I had two professional encounters with him….

The first was back in the early 1990s. William Rabkin & I wrote a BLADE feature script for New World Pictures, which owned the Marvel library at the time. New World was courting Richard Roundtree to star. So we joined a bunch of New World execs and Roundtree at a fancy restaurant for an expensive lunch to pitch him the project. That went fine, but a few hours later, we all got horrific food poisoning. I was vomiting for days. I don’t think I’ve ever been so sick. It was a bad omen. The movie…well, our version of it anyway… never got made.

Then, in 2004. Roundtree was cast in an episode of MISSING, a Lifetime series that we were writing & producing…and I ended up spending the day with him in an ADR studio in Sacramento, where I think he may have been living at the time, to re-record his dialogue which, for some reason, was in bad shape. He didn’t remember me, so I mentioned the BLADE meeting and he started laughing. “All I remember about that lunch,” he said, “is that it nearly killed me.”

Crown Vic is a slim new volume from Cutting Edge Books containing two previously unpublished stories about Ray Boyd, an ex-con traveling the open road in an old cop car. Ray is the anti-Reacher. He doesn’t help people in trouble. He helps himself.

Fair warning, these two violent, sexually explicit stories — “Ray Boyd isn’t Stupid” and “Occasional Risk” — are very different from anything I’ve written before (with the possible exception of “Lost Shows,” a short story I wrote for Lawrence Block‘s Collectibles anthology). I shared the stories with Larry, my agent, my brother Tod & a few friends, who all really liked them. But I didn’t know what to do with the stories after that (who publishes short stories like these anymore?) and I had two books to write, so I set Ray aside. That was a few years ago.

Recently, my brother asked me to write a new Ray Boyd story for an anthology he’s editing…and once I got into it, I realized how much I missed the character.

But should I write more about Ray Boyd?

That will depend on you and the response I get to these two stories, which Cutting Edge Books is publishing as a test run. If you like them, let me know by posting a comment here or leaving a positive review on Amazon.