Books

A Good Omen for the New Year

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Book critic Oline Codgill of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel has given me my first review of the new year… here’s an early peek at her Jan. 1st column and her review of THE MAN WITH THE IRON-ON BADGE:

Anyone who has watched television during the past 10 years probably has at least
more than a passing knowledge of Lee Goldberg’s work. As an author, Goldberg’s
name may not come easily to mind. But as a writer/producer, Goldberg’s credits
include Diagnosis Murder, Monk, Nero Wolfe, Hunter, Spenser: for Hire and
The Cosby Mysteries. He has also written a couple of comic mysteries and
the thriller The Walk.

Credits aside, it’s always what can you do
for me today. And Goldberg does quite a lot in the amusingly hard-boiled The
Man With the Iron-on Badge. In this novel about a Los Angeles security guard
for a wealthy, gated community, Goldberg delivers a clever riff on the
traditional private eye novel, resplendent with witty and dark turns.

Twenty-nine-year-old Harvey Mapes is approached by one of the residents,
Cyril Parkus, to follow his wife. The spouse, Lauren, is so perfect that even
Harvey wonders how much of her is real.

He has little illusion about his
job — "I’m there to give the illusion of security. I don’t have a gun, a badge,
or even a working stapler." But this undercover assignment will give Harvey a
new view of his work. Not knowing anything about following someone, Harvey
immerses himself in detective lore — watching a Mannix marathon on TV
Land, reading detective novels by Robert B. Parker, Sue Grafton, Robert Crais —
and tries to pass himself as John D. MacDonald, the best-selling author of
detective fiction who’s doing research. Of course, it would help that he knew
what the D. stood for in MacDonald’s name; or realized that everyone he talks to
knows who MacDonald was.

When the path he pursues following Lauren takes
a dark, twisted turn, Harvey refuses to give up. Along the way he will learn
about the lives of others and about himself.

Goldberg’s penchant for
complexity keeps the story on a twisted keel, and with his background, The
Man With the Iron-on Badge should make a lively movie of the week.

Thanks, Oline!

A Christmas Present from the Chicago Tribune

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Yesterday,  Santa left a nice review for MAN WITH THE IRON-ON BADGE from the Chicago Tribune under my tree:

Lee Goldberg, who novelized the Dick Van Dyke character in TV’s "Diagnosis Murder" series into an interesting human being, now bravely marches into territory already staked out by some fierce competition–Donald Westlake, Lawrence Block, the early Harlan Coben–and comes out virtually unscathed in what appears to be the start of a series about an overeducated and oversexed Southern California security guard named Harvey Mapes.

Hired by one of the residents of the gated community where he works to follow the man’s wife, Mapes rises to the occasion–often. He also finds himself in deeper and darker water than the community’s oversize pool offers.

Bad Sex

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The Guardian posts the short-list for the worst literary sex scenes of the year. Here’s an excerpt from FAN-TAN by Marlon Brando and Donald Cammell:

In a moment Annie was
on his side, Madame Lai was like a plant growing over him, and her
little fist (holding the biggest black pearl) was up his asshole
planting the pearl in the most appreciated place.
"Oh, Lord," he cried out. "I’m a-comin’!"

She could not answer. It is the one drawback of fellatio as conscientious
as hers that it eliminates the chance for small talk and poetry alike.
But nothing is exactly perfect in this life, and for Annie Doultry the
delicate but firm pressure on his rear parts was in perfect harmony
with the eruption of his cock. He came and he came – we are dealing
with a hero here. At one point his lover backed away to inspect the
unaltered gush of it, like a plumber saying to a customer, "Don’t blame
me. This water supply will stop when the dam’s empty."

Here’s an excerpt from BLINDING LIGHT by Paul Theroux:

She pushed him backward
onto the seat and pressed her face down, lapping his cock into her
mouth, curling her tongue around it, and the suddenness of it, the
snaking of her tongue, the pressure of her lips, the hot grip of her
mouth, triggered his orgasm, which was not juice at all but a demon eel
thrashing in his loins and swimming swiftly up his cock, one whole
creature of live slime fighting the stiffness as it rose and bulged at
the tip and darted into her mouth.

Here’s an excerpt from VILLAGES by John Updike:

A flock of crows, six or
eight, raucously rasping at one another, thrashed into the top of an
oak on the edge of the square of sky. The heavenly invasion made his
heart race; he looked down at his prick, silently begging it not to be
distracted; his mind fought skidding into crows and woods, babies and
Phyllis, and his prick stared back at him with its one eye clouded by a
single drop of pure seminal yearning. He felt suspended at the top of
an arc. Faye leaned back on the blanket, arranging her legs in an M of
receptivity, and he knelt between them like the most abject and craven
supplicant who ever exposed his bare ass to the eagle eyes of a bunch
of crows.

How to Order a Signed Copy of MR. MONK GOES TO THE FIRE HOUSE

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Here’s how you can order your own, signed copy of MR. MONK GOES TO THE FIRE HOUSE.

  1. Email Mysteries to Die For with the following information:

Name

Address

Phone number

Method of payment (check, money order or credit card)

Info about how you want the book inscribed (signed only, inscribed to ‘name’, etc.)


  1. Mail your check or money order made payable to Mysteries to Die For ($10.50 if you live in California; $10.00 for all other states except Alaska and Hawaii – if you live outside the contiguous 48 states, we’ll email you with pricing information) to this address: Mysteries to Die For, 2940 Thousand Oaks Blvd, Thousand Oaks CA, 91362.
  2. If
    you want to use a credit card, we will call you to get the necessary
    information so please be sure to include your phone number.
  3. If you want more than one copy of the book, we’ll email you specifics as to cost.

There is a possibility I will be signing with MONK co-star Traylor Howard. Please indicate on your order how you would like her to sign the book as well…assuming she is able to attend.

Early Christmas Present for Me

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Monkrevised_1
Today my author’s copies of MR. MONK GOES TO THE FIRE HOUSE arrivedMonkhawaii on my doorstep. I still get a thrill every time I see one of my books for the
first time…ah, that new book smell.  I love it. The book includes a teaser excerpt from MR. MONK GOES TO HAWAII, which comes out in July and has my name so small on the cover that you’ll need a magnifying glass to spot it.  Coincidentally, today I also finished writing the outline for MR. MONK AND THE BLUE FLU, the third book in the series. 

One of the things I’ve discovered with these books is how hard it is to be funny in an outline…unless you go into tremendous detail, include sample dialogue, and practically write the entire scene, which I am unwilling to do. So the outlines come across rather flat. I have to trust that everyone who has to read the outline and approve it will see the potential for comedy within the situations I’ve set up. The nice thing is I have two MONK books behind me already, so they know I will come through on the humor even if the outline isn’t a laugh fest.

Mostly what I do on the MONK outlines is get across broad stroke of the plot, leaving out the specific clues and jokes — knowing I will come up with them as I write. The finished book inevitably differs from the outline, but the basic spine of the story always remains the same.

I hope to start writing MR. MONK AND THE BLUE FLU around the first week of January to make my mid-March deadline…and then I start work on DIAGNOSIS MURDER #8, though I have no idea what that one will be about yet.

BADGE a Bestseller

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Someone just sent me this list of December bestsellers from the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association:

Hardcovers
1. CONSENT TO KILL by Vince Flynn
2. SPECTRES IN THE SMOKE by Tony Broadbent
3. THE LINCOLN LAWYER by Michael Connelly
4. GRAVE SIGHT by Charlaine Harris
5. THE MAN WITH THE IRON-ON BADGE by Lee Goldberg
6. SHROUD OF THE THWACKER by Chris Elliott
7. DELETE ALL SUSPECTS by Donna Andrews
8. FALL OF THE PHILANDERER by Carola Dunn
9. DERMAPHORIA by Craig Clevenger
10. THE FIREMAKER by Peter May

FYI, the number one paperback on the list is SOLOMAN AND LORD by my buddy Paul Levine, so he’s buying when we have lunch next week.

UPDATE 12-22-05: I have reason to doubt whether this list is accurate. The email I received reproduced an Independant Mystery Bookseller Association bestseller list that was reprinted in the December newsletter of the Aliens and Alibis Bookstore. However, the December IMBA bestseller list doesn’t actually come out until January…so where did this list come from?

I’ve contacted Aliens and Alibis, and they aren’t sure where they got the list that they published. I’ve enlisted some friends of mine at various mystery book stores to help me figure out whether this is an early IMBA list, another individual bookstore’s bestseller list, or whether it’s a Christmas shopping list someone dropped on the sidewalk somewhere. I’ll let you know what I discover.

Life After Death?

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Bill Crider pointed me to this interesting publishing experiment…

Lawrence Watt-Evans, who has written dozens of books, recently had his series Legends of
Ethshar dropped by his publisher after eight novels. So he started shopping the series around…

Alas, no major mainstream publisher is interested in continuing the Ethshar
series at present. On the other hand, I had several readers saying they
desperately want to see more. I decided to see whether enough of them were
willing to put their money where their mouths are to finance more Ethshar
stories — and perhaps eventually continuations of other series that no longer
have major publishers.

To my surprise, there were enough. My fans came through, and I have
now written the ninth Ethshar novel, financed entirely by reader contributions
rather than an advance from a publisher.

How has his experiment fared? It’s hard to say based on what he reports…

From April to October I posted the first draft of The Spriggan Mirror,
the ninth novel in the series, chapter by chapter. The last two chapters, along
with the epilogue and some endnotes, were posted on October 16, 2005. Below
you’ll find some options for making donations; each week, if I’d received
another $100 in donations (as I always did), I posted another chapter.

If I hadn’t received $100 to pay for a given week’s chapter, it
wouldn’t have been posted — but that never happened. If more than the $100
target came in, as it usually did, the extra was credited toward the following
chapter. No one needed to worry about ”wasting” a payment if I received more
than was needed for a particular chapter. At this point the entire novel has
been paid for, but the more money that comes in, the sooner I’m likely to start
a new serial.

So how much did he make? Was it comparable to what he would have received in advances and royalties if Del Rey had opted to publish another book in the series? I don’t know because he doesn’t say. For now, you can read the entire book for free on his website…until New Years Eve, when he’s signing the rights over to an e-publisher.

UPDATE: In a related story, GalleyCat reports that novelist Diane Duane is making the unpublished third volume in her TO VISIT THE QUEEN series available using POD:

she’s willing to consider satisfying her earlier fans’ desires by using
print-on-demand to bring The Big Meow out… if the market will bear it.
"Let’s just say that a ‘trade paperback’… is going to cost you hardcover
prices, not paperback," she suggests. "If I’m to make any money at all on the
deal (by which I mean, at least recoup my publishing and labor expenses), you’re
going to be paying $20-25 for a copy of this book." And then she invites her
readers to tell her whether they’re prepared to do that.

…Even Duane acknowledges that the demand remains to be measured, and she’ll be
waiting at least until next spring before she decides if there’s what we used to
call on Usenet "A Great Need."

Do I Write Scripts or Advertising Copy?

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More and more commercials are creeping into the narrative of TV shows. Here’s an example mentioned in Wired magazine:

The use of product placements has increased 84 percent on television in the last
year, according to the WGA’s call for regulations. "There is no clear line
separating a TV show from an advertisement anymore," said Carrie McLaren, editor
of Stay Free
magazine.

In a recent episode of the NBC series Medium, writers had to
work the movie Memoirs of a Geisha into the dialogue three times
because of a deal the network made with Sony earlier in the season. They even
had the characters go on a date to an early screening of the movie and bump into
friends who had just viewed Geisha to tell them how good it was.

It’s one thing to have James Bond drive a BMW  (or, going back a few decades, Efrem Zimbalist Jr. drive a new Ford around D.C. landmarks each season during the end credits of THE FBI), or Monk using a particular brand of disinfectant wipe, but it’s quite another to create whole scenes purely for the purpose of pushing a particular product. The MEDIUM example strike me as particular egregious…and something a writer should be additionally compensated for.

He’s Back!

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078601709001_sclzzzzzzz_There are only a few living authors of western literature who can truly be called legends in the field — Richard Wheeler is one of them. He started a fascinating blog some time ago, then abandoned it, offering his views on writing and publishing on Ed Gorman’s blog and in comments here. But now he’s back with a blog of his own. Whether you read westerns of not, I highly recommend you put him on your blogroll for his valuable insights, candid opinions, and informed take on the biz (he was an editor before he became a novelist, so he knows both sides of the biz)

Today, in a discussion of Gary Svee’s book SANCTUARY, he blames publishers with a deeply-held, anachronistic view of westerns for the demise of the genre in print:

In the last several decades, western fiction has been forced into a procrustean
bed by New York’s mass-market publishers. And now almost all the western lines
are defunct as a result.

The idea, apparently, was to have a "line" of
books with similar classical covers and contents, and this would surely reach
the vast market of western readers pining for stories with 1940s titles that
employ words like "vengeance" and "showdown." This notion had the power of
religious conviction in New York, and still does even though most western lines
have gone to heaven, or hell as the case may be.

Wheeler’s new book FIRE IN THE HOLE is saddled with one of those traditional western covers…which bares no relation to the actual story. The hero isn’t a U.S. Marshal, he’s a detective posing as a vermin exterminator in a filthy, Montana mining camp. Not exactly your typical western hero or setting.  All you have to do is read the opening chapter and you’ll be hooked.