Mr. Monk and the Gumshoe

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The Gumshoe Review has given MR. MONK IN OUTER SPACE a nice review.  They say, in part:

Mr. Monk in Outer Space is another typically well-crafted effort
from Lee Goldberg. The scenes flow seamlessly and quickly, the dialogue
is always fun, and while some of the situations frankly stretch the
limits of believability, there is some indefinable quality to
Goldberg’s writing that makes us believe it anyway. There may be some
readers who will say that writing novels based on a television series
is easier than conventional fiction, because the readers will already
have a sense of the characters from having watched the program. But
this reviewer is not a watcher of television, and has never seen a Monk
program. Yet the characters still leap off the page as clearly defined
people, some of them from real life, but more often than not clever
caricatures.

Thank you, Gumshoe!

The PW Variation

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Mark Sarvas,  who runs the excellent L.A.-centric lit-blog The Elegant Variation, has his first novel HARRY, REVISED coming out in May and it has earned a glowing review from Publishers Weekly, which can’t help commenting:

[…] though there may be legions of writers spurned by his blog just willing Sarvas to fail, this is a self-assured, comic and satisfying story.

It will be interesting to see how the Los Angeles Times reviews his book.

Finding Religion

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The MWA anthology BLUE RELIGION, edited by Michael Connelly, scored a rave review from Publisher’s Weekly:

The Mystery Writers of America presents a high-quality anthology of 19 original stories that explore a wide range of police experiences, from newcomer Polly Nelson’s superb tale set in 1864 Kansas, "Burying Mr. Henry," to editor Connelly’s powerful and grim Harry Bosch investigation into a young disabled boy’s death, "Father’s Day." The sordid mean streets, depicted in Persia Walker’s "Such a Lucky, Pretty Girl," are nicely balanced with the lighter touches of Jon Breen’s "Serial Killer," a darkly comic tale in which two police detectives recount one of their cases to a community college writing class. TV writer Paul Guyot contributes one of the volume’s strongest selections, "What a Wonderful World," about a cop’s obsessive search for the killer of a hot dog vendor. This is one of those rare themed anthologies that can be enjoyed at one sitting.

I was chairperson of the MWA committee that selected half of the stories for the book, so I’m very happy about the review. And I am doubly pleased to see my friend Paul Guyot’s story singled out for praise.

Mr. Monk and the Parallel Universe

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I thought the two-part MONK season finale was great, but it points out one of the pitfalls of writing a tie-in series while the TV show that it is based on is still in production. It means that there are going to be some continuity miss-matches between the TV series and the books…and there’s nothing that can be done about it.

I finished my book MR. MONK GOES TO GERMANY back in October 2007 and it will be published in July 2008. In between that time, the MONK writers wrote, produced and broadcast the season finale. I am now well into writing MR. MONK IS MISERABLE, which comes out next winter…by the time I deliver that manuscript, the MONK writers will have just begun writing the season seven scripts. You can see the problem.

Andy Breckman, the creator and executive producer of MONK, knows in advance what I will be writing and approves the storylines. But I certainly don’t expect him or his staff to feel creatively bound to any of the events or details that I create in my books. The show comes first. That said, there are bound to be diehard fans who expect strict continuity between the books and the TV series …and they are going to stumble over a few miss-matches.

Both my book and the finale, "Mr. Monk is on the Run," involve Monk encountering a man with six fingers on one hand. That’s actually okay. A fan could assume that my book takes place before the events in the season finale. In fact, it only reinforces Monk’s attitude towards the "second" man with 11 fingers that he meets.  The book and the episode would fit together pretty well chronologically, "factually," and even emotionally, if not for the last scene of the two-parter.

Oh well.

I have a disclaimer in my books that warns readers that, while I try hard to stay close to the continuity of the show, the long lead time of the books makes that next to impossible (an entire season is produced between when I turn in the book and when it comes out).

I read all the scripts and I talk to Andy about what he has in mind for the season ahead, but even so, continuity problems are bound to happen. Hypothetically, for example, Sharona may come back on the show some day and the story they come up with may have nothing to do with MR. MONK AND THE TWO ASSISTANTS (and, unless they adapt the book, won’t acknowledge those events at all).

I don’t obsess about the miss-matches and neither does Andy. He once said to me that, in his mind, the Monk TV series and the Monk books are separate entities…the same characters in parallel universes…and while they are consistent with one another most of the time, there are bound to be some differences now and then.

There’s the TV shows and there are the books. They are not one in the same.  He is okay with that and so am I. I hope that most of the fans will be, too.

Mannix comes to DVD

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Mannix_s1Back in November, the Washington Post wrote about MANNIX and efforts by fans to get the iconic private eye show on DVD. Well, I guess the publicity paid off. TVShowsonDVD reports that the first season of MANNIX is coming to DVD in June. But that first year of the show was about an "old school" detective Joe Mannix (Mike Connors) working for a "high-tech" computerized detective agency run by Joseph Campanella. The ratings weren’t great so, for year two, it became a straight-forward, old-fashioned, PI show with Joe Mannix on his own, aided only by his secretary (Gail Fisher) and his various friends on the police force. The ratings rebounded and the show ran for seven more years. It was canceled while it was still a hit, making a baffled Connors wonder if then CBS-boss Fred Silverman was simply tired of the show…

I know both sides of the story (I worked with Connors and Silverman), but I’m not telling. Maybe Connors will tell you more about it in the interview that comes as one of the DVD extras.

It’s Just Pathetic

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The Diary of a Mad Editor tackles the fanfic issue. He says, in part:

[…]fan fiction isn’t a bad thing just because the writing’s
bad – it’s bad because it also undermines the integrity of the original
work […]Clearly, though, there is a difference between what Goldberg writes and what some acne-faced turd on Quizzilla.com or FanFiction.net writes.

[…]See, Goldberg’s
writings are licensed by the original creators of the characters he
writes about whereas fan fictioneers are infringing on the original
authors’ copyright.
One form of writing is done by professionals for commercial purposes
and the other is done by delusional amateurs purely for love/self-love.
Here’s the problem — now the fanfic losers want copyright protection
extended to their “original” creations.

He believes that if the efforts by the Organization of Transformative Works to extend copyright protection to fanfic are successful, it could have a wide-ranging, negative impact on all writers.

If fan fiction receives legal parity with original work, it would
create a wave of frivolous lawsuits in which any author of fan fiction
could claim that the original author stole their ideas. As a writer, I
cringe at this very thought. Giving derivative works that kind of
legitimacy would destroy any value intellectual property protection has
for writers.

I think he sums up the fanfic issue pretty concisely when he says:

A 14 year old kid writing fan fiction is unfortunate but forgivable,
but when you’re 30 and still writing it, it is just pathetic. If you
want to be taken seriously as a writer and have full copyright
protection and all that good shit, write something original and worth
reading.

Only in L.A.

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Yesterday, I was having coffee with a writer friend of mine at the Starbucks in Pacific Palisades. My friend was telling me some of the pilot ideas that he’s going to pitch this week and wanted my opinion of them. But that’s not all he got.

A stranger spoke up from the next table. "I have to disagree. I couldn’t help over-hearing. I think the guy should be more working class, a plumber or something."

"I don’t think so," said a stranger at another table. "Working class works for me."

Neither stranger was in the TV business, but they wanted to give my friend their input, since they were eavesdropping anyway…

Only in L.A.