Monk Books

Stanley Kamel, who portrayed Dr. Kroger on MONK, died yesterday of a heart attack. Besides being a very talented and versatile actor, he was also a very nice man. I worked with him long before MONK on an episode of the early 90s FOX series LIKELY SUSPECTS. He played a restaurant owner with an indecipherable accent. Much to my delight, when I met him again over a decade later at a MONK rap party, he not only remembered the LIKELY SUSPECTS role…he even remembered his lines! He will be missed.

(That’s Stanley with my daughter Maddie at last year’s wrap party).

Here’s the final front cover of MR. MONK GOES TO GERMANY, which comes out in July. It’s virtually the same picture of Monk that’s on the cover of MR. MONK IS MISERABLE but with a different backdrop. (You can click on the photo for a larger image).

Here’s the first version of the dust jacket for MR. MONK IS MISERABLE, which comes out next fall. (You can click on the image for a larger view).

The Press-Enterprise reports that 11-year-old Nicholas Barry of Riverside, California has read 1,282,442 words so far since August, quite an achievement…and a nice, even number that Adrian Monk would appreciate. So I guess it’s no surprise that Nicholas counts the Monk books among his favorites:

Nicholas, a Riverside resident, said he reads so much because he enjoys it.

"I love the challenge. I don’t do it for the prizes," he said.

Some of Nicholas’s favorite books are the "Star Wars" series by
Timothy Zahn and the "Monk" series by Lee Goldberg. The Accelerated
Reader program lets students take quizzes on the books they enjoy and
allows them to read an assortment of books which benefits the students,
Nicholas said.

"It inspires kids to read. They get to read what they want," he said.

Congratulations, Nicholas!

The Gumshoe Review has given MR. MONK IN OUTER SPACE a nice review.  They say, in part:

Mr. Monk in Outer Space is another typically well-crafted effort
from Lee Goldberg. The scenes flow seamlessly and quickly, the dialogue
is always fun, and while some of the situations frankly stretch the
limits of believability, there is some indefinable quality to
Goldberg’s writing that makes us believe it anyway. There may be some
readers who will say that writing novels based on a television series
is easier than conventional fiction, because the readers will already
have a sense of the characters from having watched the program. But
this reviewer is not a watcher of television, and has never seen a Monk
program. Yet the characters still leap off the page as clearly defined
people, some of them from real life, but more often than not clever
caricatures.

Thank you, Gumshoe!

I thought the two-part MONK season finale was great, but it points out one of the pitfalls of writing a tie-in series while the TV show that it is based on is still in production. It means that there are going to be some continuity miss-matches between the TV series and the books…and there’s nothing that can be done about it.

I finished my book MR. MONK GOES TO GERMANY back in October 2007 and it will be published in July 2008. In between that time, the MONK writers wrote, produced and broadcast the season finale. I am now well into writing MR. MONK IS MISERABLE, which comes out next winter…by the time I deliver that manuscript, the MONK writers will have just begun writing the season seven scripts. You can see the problem.

Andy Breckman, the creator and executive producer of MONK, knows in advance what I will be writing and approves the storylines. But I certainly don’t expect him or his staff to feel creatively bound to any of the events or details that I create in my books. The show comes first. That said, there are bound to be diehard fans who expect strict continuity between the books and the TV series …and they are going to stumble over a few miss-matches.

Both my book and the finale, "Mr. Monk is on the Run," involve Monk encountering a man with six fingers on one hand. That’s actually okay. A fan could assume that my book takes place before the events in the season finale. In fact, it only reinforces Monk’s attitude towards the "second" man with 11 fingers that he meets.  The book and the episode would fit together pretty well chronologically, "factually," and even emotionally, if not for the last scene of the two-parter.

Oh well.

I have a disclaimer in my books that warns readers that, while I try hard to stay close to the continuity of the show, the long lead time of the books makes that next to impossible (an entire season is produced between when I turn in the book and when it comes out).

I read all the scripts and I talk to Andy about what he has in mind for the season ahead, but even so, continuity problems are bound to happen. Hypothetically, for example, Sharona may come back on the show some day and the story they come up with may have nothing to do with MR. MONK AND THE TWO ASSISTANTS (and, unless they adapt the book, won’t acknowledge those events at all).

I don’t obsess about the miss-matches and neither does Andy. He once said to me that, in his mind, the Monk TV series and the Monk books are separate entities…the same characters in parallel universes…and while they are consistent with one another most of the time, there are bound to be some differences now and then.

There’s the TV shows and there are the books. They are not one in the same.  He is okay with that and so am I. I hope that most of the fans will be, too.

The German edition of MR. MONK AND  THE BLUE FLU just came out, and is already getting some very nice reviews, including this one (in German, of course!) from Alligatorpapiere. He likes the first two books in the series, too.