I usually cringe while reading interviews with me… but this one by Conner Reed at Publishers Weekly that’s tied to the release of my new novel MURDER BY DESIGN, turned out really well.
Lee Goldberg knows his way around a murder mystery. If you combine his work on the page (as in the Eve Ronin series) and on screen (as on the 1990s medical crime procedural Diagnosis Murder), the 64-year-old crime writer has dreamt up something like 175 distinct mystery plots. Goldberg loves the genre. It’s given him a career. But a few years ago, he almost started to tire of it.
He insists it was nothing personal. “I’ve just written so many of the damn things,” he says on a video call from his home in Calabasas, Calif., flanked by posters of his own novels and various James Bond films. “I didn’t want to write another book inspired by Sherlock Holmes. I wanted to take all the tropes of the whodunit and turn them on their head.”
It’s a familiar enough refrain from a genre writer. Goldberg’s attempt, though, is admirably nutty: the kind of thing an author can only pull off if he really loves the material he’s turning topsy-turvy. In June, Thomas & Mercer will publish Murder by Design, the first installment in a series centered on former LAPD homicide detective Edison Bixby. It’s a lark.
Bixby is a brilliant, vain investigator with a 100% success rate. He gives partial credit for that record to his parents, an inventor and an architect, who taught him young that the entire world is a contrived environment designed to manipulate human behavior. Early in the novel, a perp shoots Bixby in the face, inducing a case of coprolalia—uncontrolled, often offensive verbal outbursts—that gets him fired from the force. Soon enough, a global insurance firm hires Bixby to flex his investigate genius vetting expensive claims.
“I wanted to come up with a character who was brilliant but wasn’t the typical detective who can’t get laid and has mental illness,” Goldberg quips.
You can read the rest of the interview on the PW site (where you can see three articles for free without a subscription). And, as a cherry on the cake, they also gave the book a great review. Here’s an excerpt.
A struggling actor teams up with a suave, design-obsessed ex-cop to investigate a string of suspicious deaths in this zany series launch from Goldberg…with Bixby coming off like a cross between James Bond and Adrian Monk. This lighthearted whodunit goes down smooth.
I hope you like the book as much as PW does! You can preorder it here.
When I listen to the audiobooks based on my novels, it’s surprisingly easy for me to forget that I wrote them and I get caught up in the characters and story… even though I know what’s coming. The audiobooks arrive usually a year after I’ve finished the novel, so I have enough distance from the work encounter it fresh and to enjoy it. And it’s hard not to have a good time listening to Nicol and Eric.