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.
Bixby certainly isn’t that. But Murder by Design does offer a humbler audience surrogate in the form of narrator Wally Nash, a semi-delusional L.A. actor whose powers of empathy move him to imbue his gassy drug commercial characters with elaborate backstories. Such imagination, it turns out, makes Nash an effective investigative partner for Bixby, and the two set out to probe a series of suspicious deaths—namely the grisly impalement of a PR employee at a shopping mall after she tumbles down a still-under-construction flight of stairs.
Telling the tale from the perspective of an aw-shucks onlooker instead of the quirky sleuth is a technique Goldberg cribbed from his own novelizations of Monk, the much-loved TV crime drama centered on Tony Shalhoub’s titular PI. Rather than inhabiting the brilliant-but-eccentric Monk’s point of view, Goldberg’s books are told from the perspective of Monk’s assistant, Natalie. Doing so, the author says, helps sharpen focus on the key to all successful mysteries: a memorable detective.
“When you ask somebody about a Harry Bosch novel, they’re not going to tell you about the great story,” he explains. “They love the character of Harry Bosch. When I think of a mystery, I don’t start with the mystery itself. I start with the character, then consider what situation I can put that character in that will bring out their dramatic or comedic or emotional qualities—something that will illustrate who the character is without me having to tell you.”
Such philosophizing about plot fundamentals highlights the fact that Goldberg sees himself as more of a craftsman than an artist. His younger brother, Tod, also writes crime fiction, including the critically acclaimed Gangsterland trilogy. Though the brothers are in constant contact, and they eagerly read each other’s work, Goldberg stresses that, unlike Tod, he has “no literary aspirations whatsoever.” Then he puts it even more bluntly: “I don’t give a shit about theme. I just want to entertain.”
It’s an ambition he can trace back to his 1960s childhood. The son of a San Francisco news anchor and an East Bay Times society columnist, Goldberg always knew a life of writing was within reach. He started cranking out novels by the time he was 10 years old, selling them to the fellow residents of his cul-de-sac. Like Goldberg’s beloved Hardy Boys and Tom Swift adventures, the books were pure pulp, populated by time travelers and amateur sleuths cracking cases and saving the world.
When Goldberg enrolled at UCLA, he was already freelancing for the likes of United Press International and Playgirl, but his dream of making up stories for a living felt out of reach. Then a trusted journalism adviser hooked Goldberg up with a gig he didn’t want, penning lurid action thrillers for Pinnacle Books. Goldberg chose the pseudonym Ian Ludlow, “so I’d be on the shelf next to Robert Ludlum, who was the biggest selling author at the time.” The gambit paid off.
Goldberg’s 1985 debut as Ludlow, .357 Vigilante, was a bestseller (owing in part to its eerie overlap with the Bernhard Goetz case, which was in the headlines at the time), and New World Pictures quickly snapped up the film rights. Reissues of the book under Goldberg’s real name continue to sell remarkably well.
The rest of Goldberg’s early career is a case study in remaining open to opportunity. After publishing three Ludlow novels, Pinnacle went bankrupt, and Goldberg’s film deal fell through. Devastated, he took a job at a TV trade magazine and kissed his entertainment career goodbye—only to land an agent and a screenwriting job after submitting a spec script for the goofy ’80s PI series Spenser: For Hire with a friend. From there, Goldberg spent a decade writing and producing TV, then pivoted back to novel writing after an Edgar nomination for one of his Likely Suspects scripts got him in touch with WME’s Mel Berger. Ever since, he’s done both simultaneously.
Novels based on TV shows, TV episodes based on those novels, original series, and a smattering of standalones have followed. As Goldberg prepares to introduce the world to Edison Bixby, he’s also getting ready to launch the six-episode first season of You’re Killing Me on AMC’s Acorn TV, which stars Brooke Shields as a crime writer who teams up with a true-crime podcaster to solve a case.
Through it all, Goldberg’s work has set itself apart with something his early, gritty Ludlow novels lacked: a sense of humor. “I just believe that there’s humor in life,” he says. “Even in some of the darkest, most horrible moments of my own life, there have been bizarre moments of levity. I find books that don’t have humor, that are so dark and grim and unremittingly gruesome, not to represent the world as I know it.”
In more ways than one, Goldberg’s world now transcends anything he could’ve imagined as a bright-eyed fifth grader hawking time-travel fantasies in his Northern California cul-de-sac. “I just wish I could go back in time and tell myself it’s all going to come true,” he says wistfully. “The books, the hundreds of hours of television, the fact that I’ve managed to meet all my idols in both books and TV. I’m literally the luckiest person I know. If I complain, you should come here and shoot me. I mean it. I’ve got nothing to complain about.”
