#1 New York Times Bestselling Author & TV Producer
The winners of the MR. MONK GOES TO GERMANY galley giveaway are Kathleen Hurst of Lawton, Oklahoma, Bobby Vasquez of Tucson, Arizona and Peter D'Antonio of Washingtonville, NY. Congratulations…and thanks for the great reviews! (I know I said I was only giving away two…but it turns out I had three extras).
The paperback edition of MR. MONK IN OUTER SPACE comes out today in bookstores, airports, Walmarts, and finer massage parlors nationwide.
You can read an excerpt from my new book MR. MONK GOES TO GERMANY here.
For book lovers, the pleasure and discovery of browsing through a bookstore’s shelves can never be replaced or replicated by visiting an online site.
A couple of months ago, I was browsing through an independent bookstore in Mendocino, California and happened upon HELL AT THE BREECH by Tom Franklin, which was published in 2003 and yet was still stocked on the shelves as a new title. Imagine a chain bookstore holding on to a title that long. I doubt I ever would have discovered the book otherwise.
I finally got around to reading HELL AT THE BREECH in two long, blissful sittings this week, finishing it at 2:30 this morning, invigorated and wishing the book wasn’t finished. The experience was like re-uniting with an old lover. The pleasure of reading this fine novel brought back memories of all the hours I’d spent reading good books in my life….huddled in my sleeping bag in a cabin at Loon Lake, sitting on the boardwalk in Capitola, sunbathing on a chaise lounge at my grandfather’s place in Palm Springs, lying in the bathtub with my head propped on a wet towel, laying in a hammock with my baby daughter asleep on my chest etc…. and all the associations that came with them, like the smell of suntan lotion, the fresh-caught trout in Nana’s smoker, the soap bubbles in the bathtub, the baby lotion on my daughter’s skin. A good book can do a lot more than simply entertain and pass the time.
HELL AT THE BREECH is one of those books. It’s a wonderfully entertaining book, the best western I’ve read since LONESOME DOVE, though far be it for any of the critics who raved about it….and there were many…to concede it’s a western. The closest anyone came was to refer to it as "historical fiction."
The book is full of vividly drawn, complex characters…violence, humor, and powerful imagery. There are many moving scenes and darkly funny moments…and many masterful descriptions of people, places, expressions and emotions. I often found myself re-reading passages just to experience the beautifully-evoked images and moments again…and to marvel at Franklin’s prose, wishing I had his talent. It’s a book that will make you eager to read another book to recapture that pleasure…and, if you are like me, it will inspire you to write.
I took a little literary vacation last week, taking a breather from my own writing to read the work of others. I read John Hart’s DOWN RIVER (which won the Edgar for Best Novel) and Michael Chabon’s YIDDISH POLICEMAN’S UNION (which was nominated for the Edgar).
DOWN RIVER was a fine book, and I enjoyed it, but I didn’t find the twists all that surprising and cringed every time the hero, Adam Chase, asked someone to "cut to the chase," which was way too often. Even so, it was an interesting and entertaining read…it felt like a literary take on a typical Gold Medal paperback story.
THE YIDDISH POLICEMAN’S UNION was wonderful, wildly inventive, and a pure pleasure to read. It’s a police procedural set in an alternate reality in which the atomic bomb was dropped on Berlin, Marilyn Monroe married JFK, and tens of thousands of Jews settled in Alaska while pining for a homeland of their own in Israel. The story is about a troubled homicide detective (naturally) whose investigation into the murder of a junkie peels back the complex layers of society among the refugee Jews of Sitka. Chabon does an amazing job making his alternative history believable and creating a fully realized world without showing the strain. It’s the most refreshingly original, funny, and compelling mystery I have read in years. I loved every page of it and was sorry when it ended.
I have two extra, bound galleys for MR. MONK GOES TO GERMANY which I will be giving away at random.
Here’s the deal…post a review of your favorite MONK novel on Amazon and send me a copy of it by June 1st at: lee AT Leegoldberg DOT com.
I will put the names into a hat and select two winners at random to receive a signed galley. Please be sure to include your snail mail address in the email. Winners will be announced here.
International Association of Media Tie-in Writers member Russell Davis won the Presidency of the Science Fiction Writers of America in a landslide victory. This is very good news…and gives him the mandate he needs to make a lot of over-due changes.
The Charlotte Observer reports that Penguin/Putnam has dropped romance author Cassie Edwards due to, and this is a phrase I have never heard before, "irreconcilable editorial differences." The differences have to do with Edwards’ lifting text from other people’s books and claiming it as her own, a practice brought to light in meticulous detail by the blog Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Novels.
In a phone interview in January, the author told The Associated Press
that she indeed "takes" material from other works, but said she didn’t
know she was supposed to credit her sources. She then asked her husband
to get on the phone. Charles Edwards said the author got only "ideas"
from other books and did not "lift passages."
SLEEPING DOGS by Ed Gorman proves the old adage that you can’t tell a book by it’s cover. He has been stuck with the ugliest St. Martin’s cover since my book, BEYOND THE BEYOND. It’s a damn shame, because his book deserves more thoughtful packaging– a LOT more. It’s a biting, fast-moving, darkly funny mystery set inside a Senatorial campaign. The hero is Dev Conrad, a political consultant who knows how to play the game and is growing increasingly uncomfortable with the lies, hypocrisy, and self-delusion inherent in his job.
Ed not only gives us an inside look at the dark side of campaigning, he also offers a good puzzle, too, where the "bad guys" are fully fleshed-out characters who aren’t that much different than the "good guys." And after countless books about tortured cops, PIs and forensic scientists…not to mention an endless number of amateur sleuths…Dev Conrad is a fresh, unconventional protagonist. The timing for this book couldn’t be better…but, based on the cover treatment, I fear the publisher isn’t in a position to take advantage of the opportunity.
As an aside, I am awed by Ed’s versatility…he writes westerns, whodunits, thrillers, procedurals and now political novels…all with equal skill. I wish I was that flexible.
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).