My Blog

I Love the Mystery Guild

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Well, their readers anyway, one of whom clued me in to all the great reviews that MR. MONK ON THE ROAD is getting over there…

Fantastic as always      
If you want some laughter with you mystery then this is the series for you. I have all of them thus far, and will be getting Mr. Monk On the Couch(June 7). Such a lovable, likable bunch of chararcters makes this an easy series to read. Highly recommend. Hope this series will be around a very long time. Pleeeaase Lee Goldberg, keep writing them! Reviewer: William H

Already can't wait for the next one!      
It seems that Lee Goldberg just can't write them fast enough for me. I LOVE this series. Oh well, I can go to my keeper shelf and start all over again. But really, hurry up and get here June(Mr. Monk on the Couch). Can't recommend this series highly enough. If you're missing this series you really are missing a great pleasure. Reviewer: Bridgette H

Another Winner!      
I can't believe Lee Goldberg's record. He has never let me down with this fantastic series. I'm already all sorts of anxious for the next book. If you want a break from the stresses and frustrations of everyday life then read about Mr. Monks stress and frustration in dealing with the everyday world. You'll do a lot of smiling and laughing, and you know that's a good way to ease and escape your own tensions. I'll be rereading this whole series(on my keeper shelf)pretty soon. Highly recommend! Reviewer: Percy P

Yet another winner!      
Loved it, as I have every book in this great series. Monk, Ambrose, and Natalie, what a trio! It was fun for the reader everywhere they stopped. I was worried about the fate of the books with the series ending. Guess I should have known better. Lee Goldberg is an incredible writer and I'm so glad that the Monk series is continuing with the usual laughs and great mysteries. If your not reading this series yet you don't know what you are missing. Highly recommend. Reviewer: Daniel H

After seeing these, I naturally went back and looked to see how my previous MONK books were received…and I am flattered to say they were met with the same, enthusiastic response. Thank you Mystery Guild readers!


Cover Story

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Watch Me Die_5 One of the great things about the ebook format is that it allows you to quickly change your product to adapt to the  marketplace. I learned this lesson when I changed the covers and titles of my .357 VIGILANTE series (to THE JURY SERIES) …and sales immediately and dramatically increased as a result.

That made a big impression on me.

I have since experimented with changing the covers, and in some cases the titles, of some of my other work. Almost always, I have seen a marked improvement in sales. In fact, I recently changed the cover of the JURY SERIES again and sales of that book have more than doubled.

So I now I'm hoping to perform that same magic on THE MAN WITH THE IRON ON BADGE, perhaps most my widely acclaimed novel when it was released in hardcover a few years ago…and yet one of my weakest performing ebook titles today. I have tried changing the cover multiple times…and while that has always helped, the uptick hasn't been much. 

I think the problem is the title. It's awkward, dated, and dull.

So I have decided to take a more radical step…this time I am changing the title and the cover.

It's now WATCH ME DIE.

It's a much more active title and the cover, by Jeroen Ten Berge,  is far more vivid and compelling than any of the others. The image is taken from a key scene in the book.

I predict that sales will go way up…what do you think? Here's the evolution of the covers…

The McFarland &  Company cover for the original, hardcover edition:

MwIOB_lg
The First Kindle Edition, made by yours truly:

BADGE 3
The Second Kindle Edition, designed by Carl Graves:

GOLDBERG_Iron_On_Badge_FINAL
And, once again, the new cover by Jeroen Ten Berge:

Watch Me Die_5

 

 

The Rap on Me and Monk

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Lee Goldberg and Traylor Howard-2 Kirkus Reviews is spotlighting the MONK books today in an interview with yours truly conducted by J. Kingston Pierce, who also runs the excellent Rap Sheet blog.  Here's a taste:

The series focused primarily on Adrian Monk, but your books are told from Natalie’s first-person perspective. What affect has that had on your storytelling?

I think it humanizes Monk. It gives us a necessary distance and, at the same time, a perspective to frame what we’re seeing. In a way, Natalie’s eyes become the replacement for the TV screen that’s was usually between us and Adrian Monk. Also, a little Monk goes a long way. You can overdo the joke and all the obsessive/compulsive stuff. By telling the stories from Natalie’s point of view, we aren’t with him all the time. We get some space, a breather from his shtick, and I think that’s important.

It’s also a conscious homage to Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe, who were seen as well through the eyes of their assistants.

The interview was huge, and all the stuff that Kirkus couldn't use, Pierce has posted on his blog.  For instance,we expanded on the previous question…

JKP: You’ve said before that telling these stories from the first-person viewpoint of Monk’s assistant, Natalie Teeger (played on screen byTraylor Howard), rather than from a third-person perspective more similar to what we saw on television, “humanizes Monk.” Could you explain that further?

LG: [I]t’s allowed me to add an emotional resonance to the storylines that goes beyond just Monk’s eccentricities and the solving of puzzling mysteries. The underlying theme of the book (and yes, there always is one in each tale) is often reflected in whatever is happening in Natalie’s life. Her personal story frames the way in which she perceives the mystery and reacts to Monk, so it’s all of a piece. It’s allowed me to make her a deeper, more interesting, and more realistic character. By doing that, I ground the story in what I like to think of as “a necessary reality.”

Without that reality, Monk would just be a caricature and cartoon character. Natalie humanizes Monk and makes the world that the two of them live in believable to the reader. Through her, we are able to invest emotionally in the story. Without that crucial element, I believe the books would have failed.

MR. MONK ON THE COUCH is out today!

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MM on the Couch.revised_2 My 12th original MONK novel, MR. MONK ON THE COUCH, is out today in hardcover…and as an ebook, too. 

This is the second book set after the finale of the TV series and takes the characters in some new directions, none more so than Monk's assistant and the book's narrator, Natalie Teeger. Over the last few books, she's begun to realize that not only does she enjoy detective work, but she's actually is pretty good at it. But it hasn't been easy to prove herself when she's constantly paired up with a brilliant detective who often solves crimes on-the-spot. In this book, she finally gets the chance…and really comes into her own as a detective (which I take it to the next level in the book I'm just finishing now, MR. MONK ON PATROL). 

Like all of my MONK books, there are lots of little “standalone” mysteries that Monk solves while investigating the major, over-arching mystery of the novel. However, this time the central mystery is less of a whodunit than it is a “what the hell is going on?”

MR. MONK ON THE COUCH is also grittier than any of my previous Monk books…but nothing too extreme. It’s still very much a MONK,  with lots of laughs, but also with a lot more going on and a slightly harder edge.  Plus there’s even a subplot involving Monk’s brother Ambrose, picking up where his story left off in MR. MONK ON THE ROAD.

All in all, there's a lot going on in MR. MONK ON THE COUCH and I hope that you enjoy it.

Doug Lyle is a Royal Pain

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My friend 41G5ikeA7oL Doug Lyle, the medical advisor on my scripts & books, as well as my doctor, is writing the tie-in novels based on the hit USA Network series ROYAL PAINS. It was a series he was born to write…I just had to convince him first.

His opening novel in the series, “First Do No Harm,” has just come out and novelist Laura Benedict, whom I had the pleasure of sharing a panel with at a conference in Kentucky, has interviewed him on her blog. Here’s an excerpt:

Q:     I know readers and writers alike will want to know how you came to be chosen for the gig. Was there a writing/audition process?

A:  I have to blame my good friend Lee Goldberg for this. As you know, Lee writes the Diagnosis Murder and Monk novels. His brother Tod writes the Burn Notice novels and his partner Bill Rabkin writes the Psych novels. These are called tie-in novels because they are tied to a television series.

Penguin approached Lee about taking on the Royal Pains project, but he told them he was probably not the guy to do it but that I might be. He recommended me to them. So that’s basically how it began. After I spoke with my wonderful editor there, Sandy Harding, and my equally wonderful agent, Kimberly Cameron, I finally decided to sign a two book deal with them.

Q:    Royal Pains is such a fun television series. Were you a fan, first? You’ve done a terrific job with the characters’ voices in First, Do No Harm–particularly Divya’s. Does it help to have live actors as models for the characters that you’re writing? 

A:    Thank you. I’m glad you liked the characters and the story. Yes, I watched the TV show before I was ever approached to write the novels. Though I have problems with some of the medical stuff that Hank does–couldn’t happen in the real world–I really enjoyed the characters and their interaction. I liked the humor and I liked the other characters that surround the four main ones. And I thought it was an interesting premise.

As for having live actors as models, it’s a double-edged sword. I have these characters that are already created and so therefore I don’t have to come up with new characters out of whole cloth. But, it also means that I can’t tinker with them or take them in directions that I would like. You are constrained by the creators and the TV series as to what you can and cannot do. But overall it was fun.

He goes on to share more about wriing the ROYAL PAINS novel, as well as his other fiction and non-fiction books. You’ll want to check it out.

Book Review: TV Noir – The Twentieth Century

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9781453696002 I bought TV NOIR: THE TWENTIETH CENTURY by Ray Starman based on a rave review by my friends over at Bookgasm… and because I'm a sucker for TV books. But TV NOIR was a huge disappointment on just about every level, from the actual printing itself to the thin, badly edited, content. 

Even by self-published/print-on-demand standards, the print quality is awful. The photographs look like reproductions of xeroxes. The copyediting and proofreading are atrocious (missing and inconsistent punctuation, show titles with and without quotation marks, etc). It does not look or read like a professionally published work. 

But all of that would be tolerable if the content was worthwhile. Sadly, it's not. There are some compelling ideas here, but you have to slog through some truly awkward, rambling sentences to get to them. Sentences like these: 

Stack was able to overcome his 'tennis anyone' roles and an academy award nomination for the melodramatic "Written on the Wind" ('57) to perfect his underplayed and superior to the later Clint Eastwood's monotone style to gain status as a subtle and ironic characterization that was unique.'

Huh? That's crisp, lean, clear prose compared to this sentence:

Add to the list the controversial but I think brilliant 'Blade Runner' ('82) complete with Harrison Ford's tough guy voice-over reminiscent of Bogart in anything and William Holden's commentary in the noir-ish 'Sunset Boulevard' ('50) and you have future noir served on a platter existing in a dark futuristic society where Harrison Ford, as a 21st century ex-cop is recruited to find alien androids settling among humans.

Painful stuff. This is a writer in desperate need of an editor and a few lessons on how to use a comma. The book is about noir, but he uses the word so much, that I often wondered if his goal was to stick it in as many times in as many sentences as he possibly could. For instance:

Although science fiction is not a particularly strong genre for noir analysis, certain key noir elements may still apply it for noir status.

Or

'City of Angels' is another noir curiosity that only ran from February to August 1976 but deserves inclusion because of its private eye genre, it's noir-ish photography and general 1930-1940s style that lent itself to noir iconograpy.

It's a shame he couldn't have stuck the word noir in there one or two more times. He also spends way too much time sharing with us his own, internal debates about whether shows deserved to be included in his book or not. For instance, in the midst of discussing "Harry O," he starts rambling…

Much lighter in tone than the very dark 'The Fugitive', it still did not reach the humorous heights of James Garner's 'Rockford Files' or even Paul Michael Glaser and David Soul's inspired comic renderings of 'Starsky and Hutch'. Two worthy programs I have not included in my analysis because their humor prevented them from noir status. A tough decision, but Garner's often-folksy humor and Glaser and Soul's comedy team antics were just too light for noir justifications.

As if we cared. But more importantly, what the heck does any of that have to do with "Harry O?" Nothing. 

I love books about TV, particularly those that focus on cop shows. But this book is a mess. And way, way over-priced at $15.95. Skip it.