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James Strauss, The Fake TV Writer, Revealed as Convicted Swindler

August 13, 2024April 24, 2014 by Lee Goldberg

Be sure to check the updates at the bottom of this post!

My public outing of fake TV writer James Strauss aka James R. Straus on my blog yesterday prompted several of my enterprising Facebook followers, especially John Hendricks, Barbara Early and Mary Batchellor, to dig into him… and discover his sleazy, criminal past as a conman who was sent to prison for his swindles in the late 90s.

Strauss plead guilty in 1998 to defrauding a teachers’ retirement fund out of $400,000 in an international swindle…but even before stepping into federal prison to serve his two year term for that crime, he was charged with another con, embezzeling $20,000 from a Santa Fe company.

You can see his mugshot and booking info here.

UPDATE AUG 12, 2024 – Strauss is battling three felony fraud charges. Here’s the link to keep up on his prosecution as it moves through the courts.

UPDATE JAN 28. 2015
Fake TV writer and convicted conman James Strauss is back…this time expressing on Facebook his happiness that his author page is finally creeping up to top of Google search results for his name as opposed to all the posts on the web about his swindles. What amuses me about this bizarre post is how he casts himself as a victim…as opposed to the many people that he deceived and defrauded.

The Mail I Get – Mr. Monk Edition

April 24, 2014April 24, 2014 by Lee Goldberg

I get lots of questions and complaints about my Monk novels. Here are just a few recent ones.

In Mr Monk On The Couch there’s an attack on the ACLU that reads like a personal aside. I sure hope you really don’t feel that way. They are a wonderful group that does a lot of good works and deserve support and praise. You’ll thank me later for this pointer.

It wasn’t a personal aside. The book is written from Natalie’s POV and her views don’t always reflect mine. Nor do Monk’s. Nor do Stottlemeyer’s. Nor do the murderer’s. I often write characters who have opinions and beliefs very different than my own. It would get pretty boring if all I wrote about were characters who were identical to me.

I really enjoyed your book Mr. Monk on Patrol. You named the officers in the book Officers Lindero, Woodlake, DeSoto, and Corbin which are strikingly similar to the roads in the Conejo and San Fernando Valleys corresponding to Lindero Canyon Rd, Woodlake Ave, DeSoto Ave, and Corbin Ave. Considering that based on your website you are from Calabasas, I can’t help but ask if the officers are named after the roads along the Ventura Freeway (US 101) as I, myself, am from the Conejo Valley. Thank you very much!

Yes, of course they are named after Ventura Freeway exits. If I could have snuck in Tampa, Topanga, and Winnetka, I would have. What amazes me is that you are the first person who has noticed!

You are an amazing writer, but please could you tell me why Trudys daughter isn’t mentioned in the recent books? In the last TV episode, Mr Monk found out that Trudy had a daughter and he met her and was besotted with her, but there’s no mention of her since, I am intrigued to know why?

She appears in one of my books, Mr. Monk on the Road, but she was not a character I was interested in exploring any further…nor was I much interested in that relationship. I had plenty of established characters and richer relationships to explore. I just didnt see where I could go with her character that would be much fun…or tie into solving mysteries. You’ll have to ask Hy Conrad, who is writing the books now, why he hasn’t chosen to use her.

I want to read all of the Monk books, but I don’t which ones came first and which ones came later or how many there are. Help!

Help has arrived. Here are the 18 Monk books in order, mine and Hy Conrad’s, along with some trivia about them that you might find interesting.

Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse (2006) William Rabkin and I adapted this novel into the MONK episode “Mr. Monk Can’t See a Thing.”

Mr. Monk Goes to Hawaii (2006) Yes, I know about the milk error in this book. A character in this novel also appears in my novel Diagnosis Murder: The Death Merchant.

Mr. Monk and the Blue Flu (2007) This book was loosely adapted into the MONK episode “Mr. Monk and the Badge.”

Mr. Monk and the Two Assistants (2007) This book is unrelated to the MONK episode that brought back Sharona, which came several years after this book was published.

Mr. Monk in Outer Space (2007) Some characters in this book might be familiar to readers of my novel Dead Space (aka Beyond the Beyond). Monk’s brother Ambrose also has a significant role in this novel.

Mr. Monk Goes to Germany (2008) Several of the “assistants” that Natalie meets with in this book were originally introduced in Mr. Monk and the Blue Flu. Monk’s adversary Dale the Whale makes an appearance in this novel.

Mr. Monk is Miserable (2008) This book is a direct sequel to Germany and picks up right where the previous book left off.

Mr. Monk and the Dirty Cop (2009) – There is a call-back in this novel to the MONK episode “Mr. Monk Meets The Godfather,” which I wrote with William Rabkin. There are also some in-joke references to the TV series Mannix and Murder She Wrote.

Mr. Monk in Trouble (2009) There are many, many in-joke references in this book to western authors, television series, and movies, and even radio shows. An excerpt from the book was published as The Case of the Piss-Poor Gold in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, November 2009

Mr. Monk is Cleaned Out (2010) This book features a variation on the classic locked-room mystery.

Mr. Monk on the Road (2011) This is the first book set after the final episode of the TV series and features Monk’s brother Ambrose in a big way.. Excerpt: Mr. Monk and the Seventeen Steps, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, December 2010.

Mr. Monk on the Couch (2011) An excerpt from the book was published as Mr. Monk and the Sunday Paper in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, July 2011

Mr. Monk on Patrol (2012) An excerpt from the book was published as Mr. Monk and the Open House in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine in December 2011. This book features the return of Sharona and Randy Disher.

Mr. Monk is a Mess (July 2012) An excerpt from the book was published as Mr. Monk and the Talking Car, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine May 2012. There is another call-back to the TV episode “Mr. Monk Meets The Godfather” in this novel.

Mr. Monk Gets Even (January 2013) An excerpt from the book was published as Mr. Monk Sees the Light in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, December 2012. Dale the Whale and Monk’s brother Ambrose return in this book, which was my final novel in the series.

Mr. Monk Helps Himself (2013) This is the first book in the series written by Hy Conrad and picks up where my books left off. It’s based on the first, unproduced draft of what ultimately became the episode “Mr. Monk Joins a Cult.”

Mr. Monk Gets On Board (2014) This is based on an unproduced episode written by Daniel Dratch. Monk creator Andy Breckman was always trying to get me to use it for one of my books, but I just didn’t feel comfortable basing one of my books on a script that I didn’t write. But Hy helped plot the story in the writers’ room with Dan, so that’s a bit different than me tackling it. Plus Hy makes some call-backs to Mr. Monk Goes to Mexico, an episode that Bill and I wrote.

Mr. Monk is Open For Business (Coming in June 2014) I don’t know anything about this book…except that it’s bound to be good, since Hy wrote it.

James Strauss and his Fake Writing Credits

January 28, 2015April 23, 2014 by Lee Goldberg

A year ago, I published a blog post here titled “Easily Fooled” about being on a TV writing panel at a mystery conference with a guy whose writing credits were all fake. I omitted his name to save him embarrassment. I was being too kind, because the guy is still hoodwinking conferences and the paying attendees with the same scam. So here’s the post again… with his name included this time.

James Strauss

James gets gigs teaching screenwriting courses based on his experience writing episodes on the TV shows HOUSE, DEADWOOD, SAVING GRACE and ENTOURAGE. The problem is, according to the Writers Guild of America and writer/producers on those shows, James Strauss never worked as a writer on any of those series. So beware. If you run across any conference or seminar programs where he’s fraudulently claiming those credits in his biography, please alert the organizers and have them contact Lesley McCambridge in the WGA West credits department. Okay, so here’s the April 2013 post that tells how I first encountered this fake, James Strauss:

The First Clue: Strauss Didn’t Know What He Was Talking About

Recently, I was a guest at a Love is Murder Conference in Chicago and one of my fellow speakers/panelists was James Strauss, who claimed to have written for scores of acclaimed network TV shows, like House, Deadwood, and Entourage, and a big upcoming movie, The Equalizer. Based on his experience, he’d been invited to speak at writer’s conferences, seminars, and libraries from coast to coast, including some nice paid gigs in Hawaii and Mexico. I’d never heard of him…and the instant I met him, I knew something was off.

For one thing, I knew one of the writers of the big, upcoming movie he claimed to have worked on…and I knew writer/producers on most of the shows he said he wrote for…and when I mentioned their names to James, he was evasive or said he came on the various projects before or after my friends were there. I might have bought that, screenwriting is a pretty nomadic business, but everything he said on his panels and in his talks about writing scripts and working on episodic series wasn’t just wrong, it was inane. Even in our personal conversations, he said some pretty stupid stuff about the business.

The Second Clue: Strauss Had No Credits. Anywhere. For Anything.

So I looked James Strauss up on IMDb. No credits. I googled his name, with the titles of the series he said he worked on, to see what came up… and the results I got all came from his website and the conferences he’d spoken at. Now my B.S. meter was in the red zone.

So I contacted my friends on the shows that he said he worked on. Not one of them had ever heard of him.

So I called the Writers Guild of America’s credits department and asked for his credits. They told me he wasn’t a member and had no writing credits.

Clearly, James Strauss was fraud. And not a very sophisticated one either if a mere google search could unmask him.

Now that the Guild was alerted to the guy, they investigated the issue in more depth, and sent him a strong cease-and-desist letter.

James Strauss claims to have written episodes of DEADWOOD. He didn't. — James Strauss claims to have written episodes of DEADWOOD. He didn’t.

Conferences Should Check Credentials of So-Called “Experts”

What I don’t get is how so many conferences, libraries, and seminars could have invited this guy to speak, and paid his way to tropical locales, without doing even the most basic check of his credentials. In this day and age, if a guy says he wrote for some of the most acclaimed shows on TV, you should be able to easily confirm it with a simple Google search. And if you can’t, that should be a big, fat, red freaking flag.

I alerted the conference organizers about this guy’s fraud, and they said they’d always suspected something was off about him, but he seemed very knowledgeable and was so likeable that they let it go. They won’t make that mistake again.

UPDATE 4-22-2014: They actually did! Love is Murder invited James Strauss back again this year to talk about TV writing …even after being alerted by me and the WGA that he was a fraud. But James wisely was a last-minute no-show. The WGA sent him another cease-and-desist letter, and copied the conference. There’s nothing wrong with him teaching screenwriting. What is wrong is claiming credits and experience that he doesn’t have.

Incredibly, James Strauss is still at it, claiming credits he doesn’t have. Yesterday, I discovered another conference that he was scheduled to speak at in May as an expert in TV writing. His bio listed the usual falsehoods. So I alerted the organizers about his fake credits and put them in touch with the WGA. The conference immediately disinvited Strauss. It’s discovering his continued fraud that prompted me to rewrite and repost this blog today.

When he’s asked to validate his writing credits, he claims he can’t because he wrote his scripts “under the table” and “off the books” so David Shore, David Milch, and the other producers he worked for could avoid paying WGA rates for writers. Uh-huh. That tells you how little James Strauss knows about the TV biz…or about the people he claims to have worked with. HOUSE creator/EP David Shore is on the Board of the Writers Guild of America and chairs the New Members committee.

James Strauss is not a clever fake. The problem is that the conference organizers he meets are so well-meaning, gullible and desperate for impressive guest speakers.

Here’s what James Strauss is saying today on his Facebook page about me outing his fakery:

“Ah, this day closes. I am under attack. For being what I am not supposed to be. For saying what I am not supposed to say. For attempting to live through the mythology of our phenomenal existence with little or no respect into a reality of hard truth and unacceptable demonstration of how things are. Just another day. Not so. A tough day and one not necessarily supported by those living in comfort and removed from the harshness of cold real world delivery. And so I bid you all a good night. I hope your day was better than mine but mine, even such as it was, wasn’t so bad as others have it. For them….I wish them love and acceptance. I wish them belief and tolerance. I wish them everything….”

UPDATE 4-24-2014 – James Strauss is a convicted conman.

Diagnosis Murder: 178 Epic Episodes of Crime Fiction Heaven

April 21, 2014 by Kate Goldstone

Here’s a guest post from my friend Kate Goldstone, a big fan in the UK of crime shows, crime novels and everything noir, who has finally discovered Diagnosis Murder, the TV series that I wrote & produced…and the series of eight novels that I wrote based on the show.

I don’t know about you, but TV-on-demand has changed my life. Whoa girl, that’s a bit evangelistic, isn’t it? Yup, but its true. Instead of flipping in increasing desperation through millions of channels looking for something cool to watch – a worldwide phenomenon, I should think – at our place we dive right in and immerse ourselves in entire TV series (which is also available now on DVD!). And Diagnosis Murder has been a telly experience of epic proportions, all 178 episodes of it.

Watching the Diagnosis Murder complete series

Lee was the executive producer and principle writer of the Diagnosis Murder series, which made our adventure into medical crime drama even more exciting. We knew the writer/producer personally. We don’t usually have that kind of connection to the shows we watch. So what’s Diagnosis Murder about? As the plot summary on IMDb says:

“Dr. Mark Sloan is the chief of staff at Commmunity General Hospital. Even though his duties as a doctor keep him busy enough, he still finds time to help the police solve murders (Mark’s father was a Los Angeles police detective). He is assisted by young doctors Amanda Bently and Jesse Travis, as well as by his own son Steve, who took after Mark’s father. Together they solve some of Los Angeles’ toughest murders.”

Us Brits do it pretty damn well. The Scandanavians do it beautifully. But top quality US crime drama is something else altogether. You lot tell great stories. And watching a series back-to-back is a completely different experience from drip-feeding your thrill-starved imagination bit by bit, week on week. .

Watched in action consecutively, a series’ characters are more colourful, with more depth and subtlety. You don’t forget the plot, spending half the next episode puzzling over who did what, to whom, why, when and where, wondering “who on earth is that bloke?”. Freed from all that tedious brainwork, you can relax and enjoy the ride in its full glory. Fine detail assumes greater importance, backgrounds and landscapes have more meaning and relevance. It’s richer, deeper, broader, a million times more absorbing and lets you appreciate the programme makers’ skills to the full.

The only problem is, it’s like a good book – you can’t put it down. If I had a pound for every night we’ve crawled into bed far too long after bedtime, eyes gritty and stinging, with heads full of murder and mayhem, I’d be a rich lady by now. As it is, I’m just knackered. But boy, have I had fun.

Diagnosis Murder IMDb – Outstanding mystery medical crime drama

Watch the first few Diagnosis Murder episodes in a row and you’ll be hooked. It’s so popular there’s even a roaring trade in Diagnosis Murder fanfiction, some of it uncomfortably X-rated. There are literally hundreds of guest stars listed on the show’s Wikipedia page. And the stars of the show, including Dick Van Dyke, Barry Van Dyke, Victoria Rowell and Scott Baio of Happy Days fame, are developed beautifully throughout the series. The plots are satisfyingly twisty and turny, the science bits are fascinating and the stories don’t date. All the hallmarks of top quality crime fiction entertainment, and great fun.

TV.com rates the show 8.6 out of ten, a great score for a vintage show. Here’s what one of their reviewers says about it:

“Diagnosis Murder is an excellent medical drama without all the blood of those other medical shows. Dick Van Dyke is classic. Dr. Mark Sloan (Dick Van Dyke) is always interesting being the chief of internal medicine at Community General Hospital and still finding time to help his son, Detective Steve Sloan (Barry Van Dyke), solve homicides as an unofficial consulant to the LAPD. Every episode they manage to find themselves in the middle of a murder, and wittily solve it. It just never gets old. This is just purely a superb show. I’m am very glad that they decided to put Diagnosis Murder on DVD. Many more people need to discover the fascinating addictive show of Diagnosis Murder.”

But there’s more…there are Lee’s Diagnosis Murder books. Which means I am in heaven.

Diagnosis Murder novels

Lee wrote eight novels based on the Diagnosis Murder TV show. I’m currently working my way through them. And it’s another completely different experience. I was unable to get the TV actors out of my head as I read the first few chapters of the first book, The Silent Partner. I suppose that’s kind of inevitable when you’ve just watched 178 episodes in a ridiculously short space of time. But then I got lost in the reading, which is exactly what should happen when you enter a jolly good book. I’m developing my own images of the characters now that I am half way through The Death Merchant, the second in Lee’s series. They don’t look or sound like their TV counterparts. I’ve made them mine. That’s books for you.

Oddly enough, the TV series also dovetails cleverly with Lee’s Monk books, with two of the characters he created for The Death Merchant turning up out of the blue in Mr Monk Goes to Hawaii and Mr Monk and the Two Assistants. I love it when that happens, when two fictional worlds collide. It makes their reality seem even more alive, populated with comings and goings that are hidden from the reader or viewer, in the imaginary background. Almost uncanny.

5 Diagnosis Murder TV movies for bereft DM obsessives

In case you didn’t know, there are also five Diagnosis Murder TV movies to watch. Good to know when the end of a particularly thrilling TV crime series leaves you feeling oddly bereaved, like you’ve lost a good friend.

Diagnosis of Murder, 1992
The House on Sycamore Street, 1992
A Twist of the Knife, 1993
A Town Without Pity, 2002
Diagnosis Murder: Without Warning, 2002

Movies, books, TV shows. If that lot doesn’t fuel your obsession with classic TV crime drama, I don’t know what will. Give Diagnosis Murder a whirl. Just don’t blame me if you lose sleep because you can’t leave the TV remote alone, can’t put the books down, can’t walk away from the movies. With a bit of luck it’ll keep you off the streets and out of trouble for a few months.

What keeps you up nights?

Breaking Bad, Dexter, Deadwood, The Wire, Justified. They’ve all kept millions of us awake long past bedtime. What’s your latest crime TV series obsession, and why?

Attention Fanfic Authors: The Characters Don’t Belong To You

April 20, 2014 by Lee Goldberg

I am always amused when fanfic authors get upset when the creators and copyright holders of the characters they are writing about dare to assert their legal, creative and moral rights. A great example comes from this recent Wall Street Journal article about Amazon’s Kindle Worlds, which allows fanfic authors a platform to write, publish and sell books about characters and fictional worlds they didn’t create and don’t own.

To avoid copyright infringement, Amazon struck deals with several authors and entertainment companies. Amazon gives them a cut of royalties and the rights to use the new characters and plot lines in the fan-fiction material in exchange for licensing their intellectual property. So far, Amazon has acquired licenses for 22 fictional properties, ranging from the novels of Kurt Vonnegut, to the comic series G.I. Joe, to Alloy Entertainment’s popular teen book and TV series “Gossip Girl,” “Pretty Little Liars” and “The Vampire Diaries.” […]The move to profit from fan fiction has alarmed some writers and copyright experts who see it as a naked attempt to rob amateur writers of their intellectual property, before they have a chance to build an audience.

What irks some of these fanfic authors are the clauses in the Amazon Kindle Worlds contract that reminds them that, hey, you’re welcome to play here, but you don’t own the underlying rights, the creators and copyright holders of the characters do.

The move to profit from fan fiction has alarmed some writers and copyright experts who see it as a naked attempt to rob amateur writers of their intellectual property, before they have a chance to build an audience.

These same “experts” aren’t concerned when amateur writers nakedly rob authors of their intellectual property by writing and disseminating unauthorized fanfic based on characters and worlds the fanficcers didn’t create and don’t own. They are only concerned when the creators and rights holders have the audicity to exert their moral, artistic, and legal rights to “profit for fan fiction”:

“It feels like a land grab,” said Francesca Coppa, an English professor at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Penn., who writes “Sherlock,” “True Blood” and other fan fiction on the side. “Big companies are trying to insert themselves explicitly to get people who don’t know any better to sign away rights to things that might be profitable.”

No one is stopping Ms. Coppa or these writers from going out and writing their own, wholly original, legally unencumbered stories. Instead, these writers choose to write Vampire Diaries or Silo Saga fanfic instead… to utilize characters that don’t belong to them and then whine when the creators want to share in any profits that arise from the sale of those works. If there’s a “land grab” here, it’s not the creators and copyright holders who are making it… it’s the fanfic authors who think they should be able to freely use, and profit from, other people’s creations. The fanfic writers should be delighted and thrilled to have the chance through Kindle Worlds to actually sell their fanfic…instead of complaining that they can’t own the stories set in the fictional worlds that they didn’t create.

“Under the Amazon agreement, writers are giving away more rights than they would for something that is quote unquote original,” Ms. Tandy said. “Writers should be very careful that they’re comfortable giving away those rights.”

I love how Ms. Tandy puts quotes around original as if its a lesser form of writing than stuff based on someone else’s work…and implies that it’s unfair for the creators of original work to want their legal, creative and moral rights protected…and that fanfic authors of quote unquote unoriginal work somehow deserve greater protections. She has it all ass-backwards. Fanfic writers aren’t “giving away” more rights in this scenario, they are being granted rights they didn’t already have… to use and profit from characters they didn’t create and don’t own.

(I should mention my own novel franchise, The Dead Man, is part of Kindle Worlds and that there are presently four licensed fanfiction books based on the series, which I co-created with William Rabkin. I also wrote, as a work-for-hire writer for Penguin/Putnam, eight books based on Diagnosis Murder and fifteen books based on Monk, two TV series that I didn’t create. So I know what it means to write novels that I don’t own and, on the other side, to own a franchise licensed to Kindle Worlds.)

Read the Contracts

April 19, 2014April 19, 2014 by Lee Goldberg

It astonishes me that writers, who make their living from their words, don’t bother to read the contracts that they sign. If you want a good example of this, read the Wall Street Journal interview with Vampire Diaries author L.J. Smith.

She was hired by Alloy Entertainment to write a horror book series that they had in mind about a woman in love with two vampires. When she signed the deal, she failed to notice that it was a work-for-hire contract and that Alloy owned the underlying rights…. because she apparently didn’t bother to read her contract.

The books were an enormous success, and inspired a TV show, but she wanted to take the series in a different direction than Alloy did. So they fired her and hired another writer to continue the series.

Ms. Smith was stunned.

“I knew that they were a book packager, but I didn’t realize that they could take the series away from me,” she says. “I was heartbroken.”

She should have read the contract before she signed it. She was dealing with a book packager, after all. What business did she think they were in? How did she think they made their money? Okay, so she made a dumb, rookie mistake. You’d think she would have learned an important lesson from that “heart-breaking” experience. You’d be wrong.

Now that Amazon is offering people the opportunity to write, publish and sell Vampire Diaries fanfiction through their Kindle World’s platform, LJ Smith has decided to write new Vampire Diaries novels and take the series in the creative direction she always wanted it to go. But she was stunned to learn that she doesn’t own the work that she’s publishing on Kindle Worlds:

Ms. Smith says that when she began publishing her Vampire Diaries fan fiction on Amazon this past January, she wasn’t aware that she was giving up the copyright to those stories, too. Nor did she realize she’d be giving Alloy a cut of earnings from the new stories. But had she known, it wouldn’t have deterred her, she says. “It wouldn’t have stopped me,” she says. “I didn’t do these books for money. They’re entirely a labor of love.”

If Smith had bothered to read her simple, and very clear, Kindle Worlds contract, none of that would have been a surprise. I hope she takes the time to read the next publishing contract that she signs or she could end up writing entirely for love.

One Reason Why I Write

April 16, 2014April 16, 2014 by Lee Goldberg

There are lots of reasons why I write mystery novels and thrillers… To entertain myself. To make a living. To tell a story. But sometimes it’s not easy to put my butt in the chair and write. But then I come across a Goodreads blogpost like the one from author Richard Wheeler…and it’s a big motivator.

Each day I read to my wife a couple of chapters from one of Lee Goldberg’s Monk novels, based on the TV series about the obsessive-compulsive San Francisco detective Adrian Monk.

My wife, Sue Hart, is in an assisted living place three blocks from my home. She spent half a century as an English professor, specializing in Montana literature and other fields, before her short-term memory began to fade.

She loves the Monk novels. She had been unfamiliar with them until I started reading them to her in her room, and now she laughs and smiles right along with me, as I spin out the story for her.

There is a genius to the Monk novels. Mr. Monk is crazy and outrageous– but we don’t laugh at him, because there is the pathos about him, and what we feel is tenderness toward him, no matter how peculiar he seems.

These reading sessions, which light up my wife, have made me aware of how gifted Lee Goldberg is as a novelist and storyteller. There is something about reading a story out loud, and catching the response, that tells me more about the work than if I had read it silently to myself. And it is telling me that Lee Goldberg is a splendid storyteller with a great sense of the human condition.

I am touched, and very flattered, by Richard’s post. I’ve received quite a few letters from people who read my books while going through chemotherapy, or healing from an injury, and they tell me how much the laughter, or the mystery, or the adventure has helped them deal with, or forget, the pain. That’s just amazing to me. So now I think of those people whenever I sit down to write.

The USA’s best thriller books from 2013 – 3 brand new crime classics

April 15, 2014 by Kate Goldstone

Here’s a guest post from my friend Kate Goldstone, a big fan in the UK of crime shows, crime novels and everything noir, talking about the amazing year 2013 was for mystery thriller books. Do you agree with her? I’d be interested to know your recommendations, so leave a comment…

What a year 2013 was for US mystery thriller books. It was an epic twelve months in which some of the best and least well-known thriller authors scored massive commercial hits. Stephen King delivered a sequel to The Shining, to the delight of millions of fans who never quite forgot the skin-crawling terror of redrum and always wondered what happened to little Danny. Lee Child, Sue Grafton and Michael Connelly released the latest in their iconic series’ too, making 2013 a year to remember in the best thriller books stakes.

All of which made me a very happy bunny, as we say in Brit-land. Hand me a new crime mystery or thriller, switch the sunshine on, let me loose in the yard and I’m sorted.

Here are three of the best from last year. If you’re on a mission to identify the best of the genre in time for the Easter break, you could do a lot worse than grab these three and run with ’em.

The Mail I Get Rerun – I Don’t Want to Find You an Agent

April 12, 2014 by Lee Goldberg

Here’s a golden oldie from a few years back…

I got an email today from a guy who says he’s been writing scripts and entering competitions for the last five years, ever since he got his MFA from York Univeristy in Toronto. He can’t get seem to get any “reputable agents” to read his work.

I’m sure you can see where this is going. So here is my very presumptuous request: I’d like to send you one of my scripts. Read it when you have a moment — even if its a year from now. If you like it good, you can refer me to your agent. If you don’t, no harm, no foul.

I assure you that it will NOT be a waste of your time.

I get this request, oh, about 80 times a month. It makes no sense to me. So, to all eighty of you getting ready to write me the same email next month, here’s why it’s a dumb idea to ask me to read your script and refer it to my agent.

1) I’m a writer, I’m trying to market and sell my own work, not yours.

2) It’s not my job to screen potential clients for my agent. Finding clients is his job. I like to think he works for me rather than the other way around. Besides, I want him spending his time on the phone getting me work, not looking for new clients who will divert his full attention from me, me, me. (That’s not to say I haven’t recommended clients to my agent… I have, many times. He’s even signed a few. But they were close friends of mine or people whom I’ve worked with and admire).

3) I’m not a studio or network development executive. I don’t care if you’ve written a good script. I’m not hiring writers. If I was, I’d hire myself.

4) When I am looking for writers to hire on staff or invite in to pitch for episodic TV assignments, I only read writing samples that come through agents. Why? Well, we said it best in our book, “Successful Television Writing” —

You probably think that’s because we’re a close-knit group of elitist jerks who want to horde all the money and opportunities for ourselves, and agents are just one more gigantic obstacle
we’ve come up with to keep you out.

You’re right. Sort of. Agents are the first line of defense for us. They read through all the crap to find the very best people, the writers they can make a living on. And the only way an agent is going to make a living

The great thing about this system, for us, is that the agent has a real motivation to find the best writers out there, saving us the trouble. Because let’s face it, elitist jerks like us don’t want work any harder than we have to.

But agents do more than save us extra work. They also protect us. That doesn’t mean they’ll take a bullet for us or taste our food to make sure it isn’t poisoned. But they’ll make pretty sure we don’t get sued.

We’ll give you an example of what we’re talking about. Let’s say you sent us a script a month ago in which the hero of our show loses his memory. Then you turn on the TV this week, and
what do you see on our show? A story about the hero losing his memory. You’re going to think we stole it and sue our asses.There are a lot of similar themes in stories being developed all the time, and a television professional, will understand that. A professional will also understand that the development process is much longer than a month, and that our script was probably written long before yours showed up in the mail. And a professional will figure that we’ve probably been pitched fifty amnesia stories, because it’s a terrible cliche, right up there with evil doubles and the return of long-lost siblings, that’s eventually done on every show.

But without an agent representing you, and vouching for you, we have no assurance that you are, indeed, a professional.

Which leads me to my next point.

5) I don’t want to read your script because I may be working on something similar. I don’t want to get accused of stealing your ideas.

So no, don’t send me your script. Don’t try to send it to any other professional writer, either. It’s a stupid idea.

Okay, so that’s what I told him. And here’s his response:

Your use of the word “professional” here implies that you regard me as an amateur.
Your used of the word “stupid” needs no comment. Well, it’s true that I’m not a professional
in the sense that I never got paid for my screenwriting up to now. However,
as I indicated in my (very polite) message to you, I have a long career
behind me as a journalist. I was hoping for a more mature response from you
on that basis alone — at least a response that does not belabor the obvious.

james-bond-secret-agent-007-black-&-white-silo_618697 You’d think he would have put his journalism skills to use and a) read
my blog before emailing me and discovered the many, many posts where I discuss the
pointlessness of sending your scripts and series ideas to me and b) he would have
researched the industry a bit and realized sending his script to a screenwriter was not the best way to find an agent or break into the business. He goes on to say:

Would you have been so patronizing if I had a name other than
Mohamed? Or if I was not a Canadian? Perhaps not. At any rate, your comments
are duly noted and I wish you continuing success with Diagnosis Murder
and whatever else it is that you do.

Ah yes, the last gasp of the desperate… the racism, sexism, ageism, or xenophobia card. To be honest, I didn’t even notice his name or where he came from. I didn’t bother to read that part of his original email since I had absolutely no intention of contacting him about his screenplays. But you’ll notice that rather than learn from his mistake, and accept that his proposal might have been wrong-headed, he has to flail around for some other, hidden reason that I won’t read his scripts. With an attitude like that, it’s not surprising to me he’s been entering his scripts into competitions for five years instead of selling them.

The Mail I Get Rerun – Stop Looking for a Short Cut

April 11, 2014April 10, 2014 by Lee Goldberg

Here’s a golden oldie from yesteryear’s mailbag..

I received a polite email from a guy on the East Coast who says he has a great idea for an episodic legal drama:

Though I spend a great deal of my time developing and
selling creative concepts (for direct marketing applications), I’m not a script
writer. I’m contacting you because I’m looking for a talented television writer
with industry credibility that might be interested in partnering to develop a
pilot. If you are interested in exploring this or know of a
writer who might be, please let me know.

I get this offer several times a week from people outside the industry who have “great ideas” but just need a guy like me to partner up with.

To be blunt, why would I want to do that? What’s in it for me? I’ve got lots of ideas of my own and all you’d be doing is benefitting from my experience, my “industry credibility,” and years of hard work. What do you bring to the table? An idea. Sorry, but that’s not enough.

There’s a saying in television, ideas are cheap and execution is everything. The networks don’t buy ideas, they buy ability, experience, point-of-view, and a track record. LOST is not a great idea — People shipwrecked on an island. It has been done a hundred times before. What ABC bought was hit-maker JJ Abrams doing people shipwrecked on an island. NYPD BLUE is not a great idea. It’s cops in NY solving crimes. What ABC bought was Steven Bochco doing cops in NY solving crimes. They also bought the proven ability of JJ Abrams and Steven Bochco to write and produce a series.

I know… that’s what you need me for, right? You need my “industry credibility” and “talent.”
But here’s the thing: there’s absolutely no upside in it for me, or any other established writer-producer, partnering up with you. We didn’t work for years to establish “industry credibility” so someone else without any could take a shortcut and ride on our coat-tails.

If you were a bestselling novelist with an idea, that’s something else. You have something to offer beyond an idea. You bring your name, reputation, and proven track record as a storyteller. If you were a famous actor, that’s something else. You bring your image, your fans, and proven ability to draw a large audience. If you were an ex-D.A., and your idea draws on your background in the field, then you have something to offer. You bring years worth of courtroom experience and credibility in the field (for instance, I’ve partnered with cops before to pitch ideas based on their unique experiences).

I think you get my point. Thank you for thinking of me, but I’m not interested.

That’s what I told him. Here’s his reply:

Feel the need to vent? No problem! Since we don’t each other, it can’t be
personal. A simple, “not interested” would have done the trick though.
The television saying you mentioned….we say that same thing in
marketing and advertising! Since I’m a professional in my chosen field too
(no, really), I receive numerous offers to partner from people looking to break
in. Though it almost never goes anywhere, I usually offer some slight
encouragement. The upside is so much greater than the downside and the cost to
let it play out is so insignificant…..so why not?

Instead of offering encouragement, I offer honesty and reality. Obviously, you didn’t want to hear either. You can’t expect to scrawl a drawing of a car on a napkin and sell it to Ford… why should you expect it to happen with a TV series idea? The way to break in is not to look for shortcuts, for a way to start at the top…which is what you are trying to do. The way to break in is to write a terrific script, get hired as a freelancer on a show, get picked up on staff, then work your way up the writer/producer ladder until you reach the point in your career when someone from a studio or network calls and says “Hey, got any ideas for a series?”

As for the networks buying years of
experience and a track record……I sincerely hope that is true (means better
television). The jury seems to be out though: Overnight
successes…..Schwartz, who at 27 created The O.C….Trey Parker and Matt Stone
created South Park while they were still in college.

I figured that’s where you were coming from. You didn’t do your homework. Josh Schwartz worked on other shows and wrote other pilots before THE OC. Parker and Stone made a short animated film, THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS, that wowed the industry. That short film proved their skill as animators/writers/performers and they got a series… based on that short film. They weren’t car salesmen from Topeka with a really great idea for an animated TV series.

What must I have been thinking when I contacted
you? I mean…how on earth could a professional television writer really be
interested in what someone from outside the industry has to offer?
“. CSI, the No. 1 show was created by relative newcomer, Anthony
E. Zuiker…. CBS hired experienced writer-producers Carol Mendelsohn and Ann
Donahue to run the show…”

Again, you aren’t doing your homework. Zuiker didn’t sell his idea by emailing producers with a come-on saying he had a great idea for a show and he just needed someone with “industry credibility” to sell it for him. He wrote a script. From the CSI Files Website:

Zuiker himself got his start when childhood friend Dustin Lee Abraham, now a CSI scribe but then an actor, would get Zuiker to
write him monologues for auditions. “I wrote a speech about a man, mentally
retarded, watching his wife give birth. He’s a degenerate gambler, and he went
into an announcing [mode, a play by play],” Zuiker says of the monologue that
got him attention in Hollywood. The speech was turned into a movie, The
Runner, which was made for seven million dollars. It turned out to be
Zuiker’s gateway to Hollywood.

You’re wowed by what you think are strike-it-big-in-Hollywood-quick stories that really aren’t. Stop looking for a short-cut. The best way to sell a series is to write some great scripts. Don’t look for someone with “industry credibility,” earn some of your own instead.

UPDATE: 4/10/2014

Someone named Jerome read this post and actually sent me this question:

Hey Lee: I get where you are coming from regarding someone with what they believe is a great idea for a TV show wanting to partner up with you. But I wonder what if someone came to you with an idea that has never been done before in a TV show? And if that idea for a premise had never been done before and could be executed well then that may be a possible reason why someone would want to partner up with someone else? I guess I am saying this because whenever I hear many of the pilots that are going to premiere it is upon hearing the “premise” that I start to think this is another tired old idea that has been done before again and again.

This has to be a prank, right? I mean, how could anybody read this post and then send me that question? Assuming it’s not a prank, holy crap, some people are really DENSE. As I said before, ideas are cheap, execution is everything. A show about a cop teamed up with a robot has been done before. Many times. But Fox bought it because it was JJ Freaking Abrams who pitched it. They were buying him, and his team, not the idea. And JJ Freaking Abrams doesn’t need you to give him Your Idea For a Premise That Has Never Been Done Before. Because he’s JJ Freaking Abrams and can sell yet another show about a cop teamed with a robot without sharing a dime with you. Here’s his reply:

I get it ideas are cheap and though I wonder why NBC is launching that contest May 1st for anyone to enter in their “idea” for a sitcom and NBC will make and pay for numerous pilots from unknown unproven beginner people with no experience or credits?

There is a big difference between approaching a writer you dont know with your Idea For a Premise That Has Never Been Done Before and entering a contest hosted by a network…one presently mired at the bottom of the ratings and desperate for positive publicity. Let me ask you a question. Can you count how many times a network has had a contest soliciting sitcom ideas? I can. This is the one time. If I were you, I’d take advantage of it quick.