[00:00:00] There is nothing unusual about a con.
[00:00:03] People think, oh, you're conning someone else to get something.
[00:00:07] You're conning someone else to make yourself feel better, to get laid, or to make money,
[00:00:12] or to avoid prison, or the thing is, we don't just con other people.
[00:00:18] We con ourselves all the time.
[00:00:20] We trick ourselves.
[00:00:21] We misdirect ourselves to avoid responsibility, the Ian Ludlow series, and a slew of books that were based on the television shows Diagnosis Murder and Monk. You've probably watched television shows he's been involved with,
[00:01:43] shows like Monk,
[00:01:44] Psych, Stephen King's best book, but put it down to read Malibu burning. Don't worry, Stephen, I came right back to you. So let's jump right into it. How does Lee come up with the scams for his stories? And I usually start with a character. I usually start with a conflict and build the story out from there. I don't usually start with the crime.
[00:03:02] Though in the case of Malibu burning, I had this notion for a crime in a con and did
[00:03:07] build the story of the department. And it's a job she did not deserve, and she knows she doesn't deserve, and has to prove herself every single day, not just to the world around her and to the media, but to herself. In my view, a con has to be simple for the viewer or reader to understand and outrageously complicated to pull off. So all kinds of things can go wrong and the protagonist has to make changes on the fly
[00:05:40] and in the perfect con, in my view, con's together. I wanted to take the traditional police procedural and expand it into more of a summer blockbuster movie sort of story. So it tells us it's a dual timeline story. It's about the biggest wildfire in California history.
[00:07:02] The two arson investigators who are looking into it and who begin to realize there's more Television is a whole different thing. I will go into pitch something I know the network is looking for. They say, oh, we're looking for police procedurals, or we're looking for medical mysteries, or we're looking for whatever. And I pitch my take on that. And I have to come up with a concept that I know will last for 100 episodes and have enough conflict in it to generate 100 stories and that I can tell stories in 44 minutes
[00:08:24] about 60 pages per story. badly to start with. I'm going to pitch it the same way now to you. There's this guy from San Francisco who goes to Mexico on vacation and he does skydiving and he goes to pull the rip cord and it comes out in his hand. He goes to pulp the emergency rip cord. It comes out in his hand, hits the ground, splat, he's dead. But it turns out it's not the fall that killed him.
[00:09:42] His lungs are full of saltwater. He's somehow time he's there. And Andy goes, sold! That's it, don't you want to know how the impossible murder happened? I don't care! That's a great Monk story. So the key is to tell a story that can only be told on your show, or with your characters.
[00:11:01] It has to come from character.
[00:11:03] It has to come from conflict.
[00:12:08] They would recruit somebody from outside the intelligence service, you know, a card sharp or a magician or a scientist to help them achieve
[00:12:15] their con. But what I don't do at my cons is the elaborates of pulling off a fake face and using
[00:12:18] outrageously sophisticated technology. I
[00:12:23] believe in simple human nature is the best
[00:12:26] weapon to use you the trouble. They beat him up anyway. Rockford then goes to his mechanic who's been taking care of his car while he was out of town and discovers the law, about politics, and I just listened to the way he thought, and the way he looked at a crime scene, and the way he looked at an incendiary device, and tried to understand how the incendiary device reflected the character of the person who made it. It was fascinating, and when I wrote the book,
[00:15:00] there was no dialogue in the book from him,
[00:15:02] but his wife read it and said,
[00:15:03] God, it sounds like you.
[00:15:06] I mean, I had a great experience years ago. we had the post-game examination of what we experienced and how we were manipulated and what they were trying to accomplish. And it was fascinating. They love to talk about themselves. They love it. And if you don't attack them, if you're not judgmental, if you're just father Dowling Mysteries with Tom Boswell, the guy who started in Happy Days, they all had the same structure, an elderly, older detective with two assistants, one of an amateur and one a professional, and they would solve crimes.
[00:17:42] And they would regenerate stories between those series.
[00:17:46] And before I was on Diagnosis Murder, there create a new voice that was neither Janet nor me. So I said, if I could write like you Janet, I would be you and I'd have your success and I don't want to try to imitate you. So I would come up with a story, run a pastor, she'd give me her ideas, I'd write up a pitch. She'd run the pitch past the publisher, the publisher liked it, then I'd flesh out a pretty
[00:19:01] detailed outline, which I would send to Janet and she'd give me her thoughts on the outline.
[00:20:02] I don't want to give it away, it's a great episode of Monk. It's called Mr. Monk Goes to Mexico, I'm not going to reveal it.
[00:20:05] If you want to read Malibu Burning, and I know you'll enjoy it, there will be a link
[00:20:09] in the show notes.
[00:20:11] There will also be a link to Lee's website and a list of his works.
[00:20:16] By the time you hear this, a new Lee Goldberg book will be out.
[00:20:20] It's called Dream Town, and I'll put a link to that as well.
[00:20:25] Our next episode marks the start of season 6.