The Joys of Binge Reading

Lee Goldberg is a #1 New York Times best selling author whose had a remarkably durable career as author and TV producer. His latest book is Movieland, the fourth book in the Eve Ronin series. Eve is the youngest female homicide detective in the scandal plagued Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department in a series which is already optioned for TV.

Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler and in Binge Reading today Lee talks about his ambition to develop Eve into the legendary status of fictional detectives like Harry Bosch (in Michael Connelly’s the Lincoln Lawyer series) and John Rebus, (in Sir Ian Rankin’s Rebus detective series)

We’ve got our usual free book giveaways = this week August mystery and suspense books, an another Booksweeps draw for a library of 50 books valued at over $500 and a new E-reader.

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Links for the draw and all the other fascinating topics we discuss can be found in the show notes for this episode on the website, the joys of binge reading .com. If you’d like to ensure you don’t miss out on any episode subscribe to our weekly newsletter for all the relevant links.

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Chuck Greaves, talking about the new Jack MacTaggart The Chimera Club is the Encore author for August.

Check it out on patreon.com/thejoysof bingereading.

Links in this episode:

Lee Goldberg, Monk Series: https://www.goodreads.com/series/60433-mr-monk

Calabasas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calabasas,_California

Malibu Creek State Park: http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=614

Ralph Dennis, the Hardman classics: https://crimereads.com/ralph-dennis-the-lost-hardman-classics/

Lee’s publishing venture – Brash Books: https://www.brash-books.com/

Ian Ludlow series: https://www.goodreads.com/series/218857-ian-ludlow-thrillers

Garry Disher on JOBR: https://thejoysofbingereading.com/garry-disher-gold-standard-crime/

Garry Disher: https://garrydisher.com/

Chris Pavone: https://www.chrispavone.com/

Anthony Doerr: https://www.anthonydoerr.com/

Jane Harper: https://janeharper.com.au/

Michael Connelly: https://www.michaelconnelly.com/

John Rebus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rebus

Harry Bosch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mickey_Haller

Max Allan Collins: http://maxallancollins.com/blog/

Road To Perdition series: https://www.amazon.com/Road-Perdition-Max-Allan-Collins/dp/0743442245

Andy Breckman: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0106563/

Calico: https://www.amazon.com.au/Treasure-Painted-Hills-California-1882-1907/dp/0313308365

Larry McMurtry: https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Larry-McMurtry/547

Jonathan Evison: https://www.penguin.co.nz/authors/jonathan-evison

Where to find Lee Goldberg:

Website: www.leegoldberg.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AuthorLeeGoldberg

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/leegoldberg007/

Twitter: @leegoldberg

What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to the show notes in The Joys of Binge Reading.com for important mentions.
And now, here’s Lee.

Introducing author Lee Goldberg

Jenny Wheeler: Welcome to the show, Lee. It’s great to have you with us.

Lee Goldberg – multi-talented mystery author

Lee Goldberg: It’s great to be here. I wish I was there in person. I love New Zealand.

Jenny Wheeler: Have you been here?

Lee Goldberg: I have. I went to research a novel that I didn’t end up writing. It’s a long story. I hope to write it someday, but I had a wonderful time.

Jenny Wheeler: That sounds fun. You have had a truly remarkable career with an astonishing back list in fiction, non-fiction, writing and directing for TV, and publishing. We’ll get to talk about your publishing work a bit later on, but at the beginning we are focusing on this latest book just published, Movieland, which is the fourth installment in the Eve Ronin detective series.

Eve and her soon-to-be-retired partner Duncan make a memorable and contrasting couple. He’s a wily old fox who is on the verge of retirement, and she’s very much the upstart, new, youngest homicide detective in the LA County Sheriff’s Department. You have got a lot of books there, but I couldn’t see that there was one series yet, apart from this one, which featured a female protagonist. I wondered if this was your first go at writing a female protagonist.

Lee Goldberg: No, it’s not. I don’t know if you have it in New Zealand but I was a writer on the television series, Monk, about a detective with obsessive compulsive disorder. He’s got a nurse who helps him deal with the real world as he’s trying to solve these homicides.

Writing women characters – and real life

I ended up writing fifteen books about Monk, first person, from the point of view of his female nurse/assistant, so I have written quite a few books from the point of view of a woman. In fact my wife, who’s French – and I’m now going to brutalize her accent – says things like, I don’t understand it. In your books you seem to understand women, but in real life you have no clue. She loved how I wrote about women in my books but wishes I was more like that in real life.

I ended up writing the Eve Ronin novels because I missed writing from a woman’s point of view. I really enjoyed those fifteen novels I wrote from Natalie’s point of view, so that was a conscious decision on my part. Plus I figured there are far too many middle-aged male homicide detectives in fiction right now.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s right. I wondered if you were in any way influenced by what’s been going on in Hollywood over the last few years and the higher awareness there is now of the sorts of issues women face in the work environment.

Lee Goldberg: No, I was not influenced by that. What I was mostly influenced by is, I was raised by a single mother. I’ve got two sisters. I’m married to a very strong woman. I have a 27-year-old daughter, so I’m keenly aware, as I hope most men are or should be, of the issues facing women today. It bothers me how women are portrayed in fiction and there aren’t enough women portrayed in fiction.

‘It’s called fiction for a reason’ – Lee Goldberg

If I had any concern at all, it is that I would get slammed for writing a book from a woman’s point of view. But it’s called fiction for a reason, and there are plenty of women writing about men, so I didn’t think there would be anything wrong with me writing about a young woman. I certainly know a lot of young women and have a lot of young women in my life, and I’ve seen the struggles my mom had to go through as a single mother raising four kids. I’ve seen the struggles my own daughter has had to go through, so that more than anything influenced my writing of Eve Ronin.

Jenny Wheeler: Eve has a double burden, being a straight cop in essentially what is still a dirty system – although there have been changes from the beginning of the series in regard to that – as well as being female. I wondered particularly about the dirty cop thing. There has been a bit of a history, maybe a long time ago now, of that kind of problem in LA.

Lee Goldberg: Eve Ronin is not a Los Angeles police officer. She’s a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputy, and right now the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department is beset by scandal and corruption. It’s very much an active, real thing that’s happening now. There’s a whole scandal going on about these gangs of sheriff’s deputies who are tattooed, who are committing heinous crimes and covering up for one another, and beatings in the jails of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department overseas.

I was playing very much on what’s actually happening in the headlines here in Los Angeles.

The political jungle of policing

Jenny Wheeler: That’s interesting. I know that for people outside of the States, the jurisdictional aspect of the police work is fairly complicated. The fact that even when they go to certain different parts of the city, they have to clear it with different police departments. That’s not quite how we see things here in New Zealand. That side of it is quite political, isn’t it?

Lee Goldberg: It’s also very complicated for people here to understand. I don’t think there are a lot of people in Los Angeles who understand the boundaries between the LAPD and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and how the jurisdictions often overlap and clash.

For me, that conflict and that misunderstanding gave me a lot to write about it. It gave me something fresh. It was confusing even to me and, as it happens, the Eve Ronin novels take place in what is essentially an island in the middle of Los Angeles that is its own jurisdiction. It is patrolled by Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department but surrounded by the LAPD, the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department, the State Forestry Department, all kinds of other law enforcement jurisdictions.

That confusion creates conflict, creates drama, and it gives me a lot to write about. It’s not just you guys in New Zealand who don’t understand how it works. It’s pretty complicated here as well. There are portions of Los Angeles County that are unincorporated or have city governments that can’t afford their own police departments.

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In those areas, the Los Angeles County Sheriff is the law. So you have the LAPD patrolling Los Angeles proper, but you have Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies patrolling West Hollywood, Calabasas, Aurora, the Santa Monica mountains, Malibu and a number of other places.

Jenny Wheeler: In Movieland the story is set against the background of the Malibu Creek State Park where, at the beginning, random shootings are happening with people who are going out for walks in the park. I gather that even that story also has got some basis in fact. Can you give us the background for that particular story?

Lee Goldberg: Malibu Creek State Park is not like Central Park in New York or something like that. It’s a vast wilderness area that was at one time a movie studio back lot. They shot westerns and science fiction and adventures – Planet of the Apes, Logan’s Run, How Green is my Valley, Mash, Lost in Space, Tarzan, Batman. A million movies were shot in Malibu Creek State Park but it’s also a vast wilderness area with mountains and forests and streams.

Back in the 70’s the studio donated the land to the State. Movies are still shot there but it’s also this huge park, and over the last few years there have been a number of shootings in and around Malibu Creek State Park that the Sheriff’s Department have written off as unrelated. Some were people shooting at gophers or what have you, or cars backfiring as they drive through the canyons, or people setting off fireworks, and any number of things. They claimed there was no through line to these reports of shootings.

Facts behind Malibu Creek Park story

But then a young with his two kids was camping in Malibu Creek State Park and someone shot into his tent and killed him in front of his kids. That launched a whole new investigation and eventually the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department admitted, yes, all the shootings were connected and they eventually arrested a homeless man who was living in the park.

That has not gone to trial yet, but even that arrest is open to controversy and second guessing. There are still a lot of claims of a coverup and an incomplete investigation. The investigating detectives were fired and are suing the Sheriff’s Department. It’s quite a scandal here, and I thought it was a great basis for an Eve Ronin novel. I fictionalized it quite a bit and came up with my own solution to the crime which has no bearing on reality, but it’s a fun story, nonetheless.

Jenny Wheeler: It certainly sounds as if the Sheriff’s Department has given you a very rich territory to mine. You mentioned the tattoos and in Bone Canyon, book two in the series, that very much deals with these sheriffs who have all got tattoos in almost like a secret society where they have loyalty to one another before anything else.

Lee Goldberg: That’s all true. At the time I wrote it though, the articles were only just beginning to come out in the media and some people accused me of making it up, that it was absurd. Now it’s a major story here in Los Angeles.

The other thing that’s rich about Malibu Creek State Park is that even if you’ve never been there, if you were to go there right now you would have an incredible sense of déja vu because you have seen the park in Dr. Dolittle and Mash and so many movies that it’s almost part of our shared cultural psyche worldwide. It has been so many fictional places.

So many fictional people killed there

That is part of the allure of Los Angeles. It’s a real place, but it’s also an imaginary one. Just about every street has been depicted as somewhere else, so Hollywood is very much alive here in what we say and do and how we live. That clash between fiction and reality for me is a fun thing to explore in these books. To have a crime take place in a location where so many fictional people have been killed, where so many fictional murders have been solved and committed, was also appealing to me.

I’ve shot there myself. I was the executive producer of a TV series called Diagnosis Murder with Dick Van Dyke as a doctor who solves crimes. We shot in Malibu Creek State Park all the time.

Jenny Wheeler: I was going to move on to talking about your TV background because in the series, Eve has got this situation going on where she’s being wooed to agree to have a TV series made about her. In the first book she goes viral with some of the solving that she does. And she’s got this estranged father who’s a washed up director who is behind the scenes orchestrating things, because he wants to piggyback on her fame. She is resisting it because she thinks it’s going to destroy her credibility.

That whole storyline goes through the series, and I thought to myself, as I was reading the books, that your own background in TV would have given you a great position to be able to understand all the different elements that come into that.

How a TV background helps Lee write

Lee Goldberg: Yes, that’s what I’m playing on. In fact, there’s a scene where Eve goes to visit the producer of the show to have a meeting with the writers, and that studio and that office are my office and my studio when I was doing Diagnosis Murder. I think it’s very interesting for a character to have to live up not only to her own expectations and the expectations of her colleagues and also the expectations of the media, but also the expectations of a fictionalized idealized version of herself, and how Hollywood changes and corrupts and twists and idealizes characters and the conflicts that creates.

I thought it would be a rich area to explore and something that would set my books apart from all the other police procedurals out there.

Jenny Wheeler: It certainly sounds to me like there’s an Eve Ronin TV series in the making, as you go along.

Lee Goldberg: That’s the other irony. The TV rights to the Eve Ronin novels have been optioned, so there is the possibility a Ronin TV series could happen at the very same time as I’m writing about a fictional Ronin TV series in my books.

Resolving the issue of Duncan’s retirement

Jenny Wheeler: That’s amazing. From the sound of it, I don’t think that so far Eve has had this meeting with the writers, so that says to me that there’s a book five already on the way. The thing I’m also interested in is whether Duncan is going to continue or whether he finally is going to retire, because at the beginning he was going to be retired very soon and then they extended his time and extended his time. He has become such a key part of the series that I wonder if he’s ever going to get his retirement.

Lee Goldberg: Well, the first four books all take place in a period of about four months, so he hasn’t exceeded his retirement, the clock’s just been ticking down. In book number four, Movieland, we do meet with the writers of the Ronin TV series and also we resolve the issue of Duncan’s retirement. I don’t want to give that away so I’ll let you read the book to find out.

Jenny Wheeler: It is a while since I read that so perhaps it skated over me.

You started out in journalism, so looking back at this remarkable career of yours, it has obviously given you a very good feel for journalistic experience. I notice in some of the books that you’ve got young reporters starting out who are aiming to climb the heights of being on the LA Times, and a sense that might have been your own experience at the beginning. Tell us about how you transitioned from journalism into fiction.

Lee Goldberg: Both of my parents are reporters. My father was a reporter on television, he was on the news every night. My mom was a print reporter for a newspaper, and I put myself through college as a reporter for the United Press Syndicate and the LA Times and a number of other publications, so that was going to be my path.

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Lee Goldberg – Eve Ronin Mysteries