Lee Goldberg met with me and MFP staff photographer Seth Williams for an in depth interview at a chinese restaurant in San Mateo, before his book signing at the M is for Mystery bookstore across the street. Having been a regular reader of Lee's blog and having read a few of his books and having received this note from him just prior to our meeting: I'll see you there at noon. I'll be the Pierce Brosnan look-alike with the growling stomach, I was expecting... a Pierce Brosnan look-alike. Luckily, Seth recognized him from his picture in the back of the Diagnosis: Murder novel. We chatted a little before the official interview about the bay area, he's from Walnut Creek originally; his terrible accident which left him with an arm full of titanium and the resulting reputation with Airport Security as the only Jewish member of Al-Quaeda; the Atkins Diet, which he's on; how boring he thinks Doctor Who is; our charming anti-artificial sweetner waitress, whom Seth compared to a gestapo officer; *cough*fanfic*cough*; New York City; and the possibility of a book signing tour with Tony Shalhoub after the first Monk novel is released. About that Lee says, "The plans for the joint signings... tentatively to be held at Barnes & Noble stores in LA and NY... are dependant on Tony's schedule. Nothing has been set yet." What follows is everything Lee had to say on the record, pretty much word for word. I'm MFP and Seth is MFP Photographer. Lee is just Lee. Bracketed comments are mine. All the photos of Lee are Seth's. If you click on Seth's photos, you'll see larger photos.

MFP: I’ll just start with the Monk novel. How long did it take you to write? When did they ask you to start? Lee: Eight weeks. It actually started months earlier. I finally got the call on April Fool's Day when I was getting in the car to go across country with my wife and daughter for spring break. We were going to Sante Fe on a road trip. They had offered me the Monk books earlier and I passed, because they were offering me a deal substantially less than what I was getting for my Diagnosis: Murder books. I said, "I’m not going to do it for less than I’m already doing my other books for you. MFP: Is that because Diagnosis: Murder is network and this is cable? Lee: It doesn’t matter that it’s cable. Diagnosis: Murder is being done for Penguin Putnam, the books. Penguin Putnam had won the license to the Monk books and immediately thought of me to write them, because I’d done the Monk show. They knew I’d written novels. We got along great. And I was thrilled to do it, but then they offered me substantially less than what I was getting for the Diagnosis: Murders and I said, “Sorry” and I forgot about it. You know, they went to other writers, and I guess things didn’t work out. So April 1st I was literally packing the car up to go on this trip and I get a call saying, “Okay, you win, I’ll give you what you want. We want you to write the Monk books.” I said, “Great, wonderful. I’ll get started as soon as I get back.” “Well one little condition, if you do the book we must have it in eight weeks.” They had wasted so much time trying to get writers and work things out, that they’d run out of time. So they had to have the book in eight weeks, which was actually seven for me, because there was no way I was going to write on my road trip if I wanted to keep my marriage. So, on the trip, while we were driving, I thought of a plot and I called Andy [Breckman] up and I said here’s my idea for the plot and in the hotel room I wrote a quick couple pages and he said, “I love it.” And that was that. MFP: So do you know anything about, for a while Amazon had up a book…? Lee: Yes, Mr. Monk and the Fatal Lie? MFP: Yes. [Actually, it was Mr. Monk and the Bad Lie, but it never got written, so who cares?] Lee: That was a couple of years ago. I was actually in New Jersey when Andy found out about it. I don’t know the legal details, but apparently MCA had licensed a book to somebody, and had commissioned a book, without getting Andy’s approval and without realizing Andy had control. So that ended up getting dropped. It didn’t happen. I guess they finally made a deal with Andy and all the other profit participants. Because when you write a licensed book there are a lot of people who get a piece of the pie: Andy, of course, Universal, Penguin Putnam Publishers, me. I imagine Tony Shalhoub gets some because his face is on the cover of the book. So there are a lot of people who have to get a piece of it. MFP: But they couldn’t actually license it without Andy Breckman’s approval? Lee: Right. That’s my understanding. You can double check with Andy, but that’s right. MFP: They tried, but they couldn’t Lee: Yes. So, Andy never heard of that writer. He didn’t know anything about the plot. He didn’t find out until literally while I was in New Jersey, they looked on Amazon and found it. I think it was Hy Conrad who discovered it and Andy was quite upset. MFP Photographer: Did Amazon say who the publisher was on it? Lee: No, I don’t know who the publisher was. MFP Photographer: Because a lot of times Amazon puts up stuff from one of these, you know, self publishing people. Just posting things. Lee: This was actually a real publisher and the writer who was writing it, his name now escapes me [Dewey Graham]. He was a well known writer. MFP Photographer: Oh. Okay. So he wasn’t just a hack? Lee: Oh, he writes a lot of different novels under different names. Novelizations and stuff. But you know Andy wasn’t going to let somebody he never met and who he knew nothing about, write one of these books, you know. Andy and I get along great. He knows because I’ve written two episodes of the show that I get it and that we’re on the same wave length. And now that he’s read the first book, actually he’s read two books now, after he read the first book he was like, “Go with God. I have complete faith in you.” It’s important to me to have Andy’s approval and respect and involvement. So I make sure he knows exactly what I’m doing. I call him with progress reports and let him know what’s up and I eagerly await it when he reads the books. When he read Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse I was so nervous. I thought, oh god, he’s going to hate it, because I wrote it in Natalie’s voice, first person and in a book Andy Breckman it can’t be quite the same Monk. You’re dealing with 400 hundred manuscript pages and you have to have much more of a story and you’re spending more time with the character than you do in a forty minute TV show. By nature if it’s a book you have to go into more depth and detail. So, Andy called up and he spent an hour or so on the phone just telling me how much he loved the book. He said, “It was so weird at first. I felt like a singer/songwriter and someone else had covered my song. It was my song. I recognized it, but it was different. And I really like what you did.” MFP Photographer: Wow, that’s amazing. Lee: And he says, “This is my Monk.” He recognizes Monk, “but the Monk in your book is a little more sad, a little more melancholy. He’s funny, but he a little more pained and human.” He loved hearing it from Natalie’s voice. He really thought that I nailed Natalie. He got a whole sense that he hadn’t had before just from looking at the books. I tried to reference some things that happened in the series. One of the difficulties of writing these books is it takes me, and now I have three months to write each book, after that first one that took me eight weeks. MFP: That was a test, right? Lee: No, they had to have it because they wanted the book to come out the same week as the show premieres in January. Production schedules on books are so protracted, that in order to make that schedule I had to deliver the book on June 1st. MFP: Isn’t that a long time? Lee: Well. No. You have proofreading, galleys, covers, all this other stuff and then you have to schedule a time with the printing press and distribution. I don’t pretend to understand all the complications that go into a book, but that was as close as they could cut it. So I wrote that book in eight weeks and then I had three months to write the next one. It takes so long to write these books, they’ve already done four or five episodes of the TV series, so the danger is I’m going to write something that’s already been contradicted by the TV show . It actually happened to me in the second book. I was writing about details of Natalie’s life that suddenly changed right after I saw “Mr. Monk Goes to a Wedding.” There was another episode, “Mr. Monk and Mrs. Monk,” that changed something else I had in my book. So I get scripts ahead of time and I try to fashion the books so they can fit into the continuity of the series, but I can’t be 100 percent perfect, you know.

By the time my second book comes out, the second half of the fourth season will be out. I had to cover things that aren’t in the show. I had to say where Monk lives, where Natalie lives, where Dr. Kroger’s office is and that stuff. I’ve got a little more detail about their lives and I describe the city a lot more. I don’t get into Monk’s head because I do it from Natalie’s point of view, but I’m in her head. So I have to go into a lot more detail about how she feels about the world and about Monk and about life. What she’s doing when she’s not with Monk and her relationship with her daughter. MFP: Is she dating when she’s not with him?

Lee: She does have a sex life outside of Monk, which was hinted at the first time he met her when he found the birth control pills. She still deeply loves her husband but she’s not a monk, no pun intended. In the first book she dates. In the first book, Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse, his apartment is being termite sprayed. Of course, he isn’t going to stay there so he moves in with Natalie for a week. And completely ruins her life. So while they’re solving the case he’s actually living with her. Andy loved that, just loved that. In the second book, Mr. Monk Goes to Hawaii, she goes to Hawaii for her best friend’s wedding, and I won’t give away everything, but Monk comes too. I know a lot of fans are going to go, “Now wait a minute. How’s he going to go on an airplane for five hours? MFP: He’s been on an airplane for five hours before. Lee: Yeah, they didn’t say how he got to New York, but I have some fun with that. In fact, there is a teaser chapter at the end of Mr Monk Goes to the Firehouse, that is the chapter of Monk on the airplane, where you’ll discover how he gets to fly. You know putting him in that situation a completely different culture, a completely different way of life, it was so much fun.

The third book is tentatively titled Mr. Monk and the Blue Flu and in that one the police department goes on an unofficial strike. So the Mayor drafts Monk in the interim, basically reinstates him as a homicide detective while the police are on strike. So suddenly he’s got not only his old job back, but he’s got Stottlemeyer’s job. But the police resent it because he’s crossed the picket line.

He’s also got a rag tag team of unqualified and retired cops trying to solve crimes. That’s the next one I’m going to do. MFP: So Firehouse is going to be an episode? Lee: That’s the plan, now whether it will actually happen I don’t know because Andy said, “I would love to do it as an episode.”

And I said, “I’ll be glad to.” So the plan is for me to go out there in January or February, out to Summit and write the episode, with my partner William Rabkin, who I do all my TV work with, but it depends on whether or not I’m on another show. If I’m executive producing another series, I may not be able to do it. MFP: Is that in the wind? Lee: It may always be in the wind. The only reason I haven’t done more Monk episodes than I have is because I was executive producing Missing and I wasn’t able to do it. Andy would have had us do more than the two we’ve done, but we were tied up on another series. We love doing Monk. We love the whole gang there. It’s just a great group of people. It’s fun to go out to Summit, New Jersey to do the scripts. MFP: That’s an unusual set up, isn’t it? Lee: It’s a very unusual set up and it’s also very refreshing. They’re so outside the Hollywood system out there. They’re just a bunch of guys hanging out, making each other laugh. The walls are covered with index cards of Monk situations and phobic situations and funny bits and it’s a lot of fun. I mean, Andy is the heart and soul of Monk. I mean, he is Monk, he’s Monk’s voice. Without Andy there would be no Monk. He’s like Larry David on Seinfeld. He is the show. It’s Andy. You know all the other writers are very talented, they do brilliant stuff, but ultimately Andy takes a pass at every script and gives it that special something. He’ll take your joke and he’ll turn it and just…. He’s great. He didn’t do that with my book, which I was stunned, but he really liked the book. He thought it was very funny. He told me it sounded like Monk, so I was relieved. Hopefully, I’ll be writing these Monk books for a long time to come. Obviously, if they’re successful I’ll just keep doing them. The way it is now, I alternate between Diagnosis: Murder and Monk books on the side. MFP: You’re going to keep doing the Diagnosis: Murder books? Lee: Oh, yes. They’re very successful. So I’m writing number seven right now. When I turn number seven in, I write the third Monk and after I write the third Monk, I write the eighth Diagnosis: Murder. Then we renegotiate my Diagnosis: Murder contract. I’ll probably write four more Diagnosis: Murders. Before I finish the third Monk they’ll probably decide whether or not to do more. My guess is they will. They’ll probably give me a contract for three more Monks and I’ll just keep doing them. I mean I could write Monk novels for the rest of my life. I’d be thrilled to.

The only danger is that they’ll think of plots before I do, in the same arena. But it’s not that big a danger. We did 200 episodes of Diagnosis: Murder and I’m still finding new things to write about that we didn’t do on the series. So I’m sure I’ll be able to find things, like taking Monk to Hawaii, for instance. That’s something the series can’t do. They don’t have the money and resources to go to Hawaii. So I know that’s a story that will not end up as an episode of Monk. The Blue Flu could have been an episode of Monk, but even to do Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse, we’re going to have to trim a lot of stuff out. MFP Photographer: I was going to say, to take a novel and turn it into a script is difficult.