How brothers Lee and Tod Goldberg turned crime fiction into a family business
As light streams through the tree canopy at Descanso Gardens, brothers Lee and Tod Goldberg pause to survey the lush, sun-dappled landscape.
“This,” says Tod as he takes in the idyllic view, “would be a great place to bury a body.”
The brothers Goldberg agreed to meet on a July morning at the La Cañada Flintridge botanical garden, not to stash a corpse, but to discuss the new crime novels each will be publishing in the next few weeks.
Lee Goldberg’s “Malibu Burning,” which lands Sept. 1, tracks a high-stakes heist going down during a massive Southern California wildfire, and Tod Goldberg’s “Gangsters Don’t Die,” in stores Sept. 12, is the final installment in a trilogy more than a decade in the making about a Chicago hitman who hides out in Las Vegas posing as a rabbi.
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Over nearly two hours, the brothers, who are hilarious and quotable (as well as hilariously unquotable), walked the grounds, posed for photos at the historic Boddy House (and in its bathtub), and sat down to talk about their books, relationship and contrasting styles of work — and answer the obvious question: When will they write a novel together? Read on to find out. (And full disclosure, I first met Tod years ago while editing some of his freelance work.)
Origin stories
Almost as soon as we get started, Lee asks Tod a question about becoming a writer.
“Tod says that I went off to college and dumped a bunch of Robert B. Parker novels in his bedroom and that inspired him to be a writer,” says Lee, who put himself through college as a journalist writing for The Los Angeles Times Syndicate, Newsweek, Starlog and “anybody who would pay me.” It was a way to learn, he says. “If I admired an author or a screenwriter or a producer, I’d just call them and do a story about them.
“But what I don’t get is, you saw how hard I was struggling to make a living as a writer,” says Lee. “Why would you still want to be a writer when you saw how hard it was for me to make it?”
Tod credits their mother, Jan Curran, a society columnist for the Contra Costa Times and later The Desert Sun, for her example while growing up in the Bay Area. (They also have two sisters — a lawyer and an artist — who have also, unsurprisingly, collaborated on books together.)
“I would fall asleep at night to the sound of her on her Olivetti,” Tod says, referring to his mother’s typewriter. “I can hear that click-click-clack.”
Tod recalls reading Lee’s magazine stories at the local B. Dalton bookstore and, bursting with pride, wishing someone, anyone, would ask if he knew the author of the piece. “There was something about seeing your name in print that I found really appealing,” says Tod, but the desire to tell stories had always been there.
“I was profoundly dyslexic as a kid, and when I could finally read and write the stories were just ready to come,” he says. “I was telling stories with toys, you know, Star Wars action figures and Star Trek dolls and stuff. And so when I could finally read and write, all I wanted to do was tell these stories that were mine. So there wasn’t a choice.”
Lee, 61, is 9 years older than his brother and has a somewhat less romantic view of their mother’s work — largely because he says he was often called upon to do it for her.
“She went off for the weekend to Santa Barbara and there was a storm and she got stuck there,” recalls Lee. “She called me, ‘Lee, you have to go down to the newspaper and file my column for me. You can’t let anybody see you. Go down at midnight — my reporter’s notebooks are in the drawer — write my column and file it.’
“And I went down there and I did it,” says Lee, who suggests that his mother liked the arrangement. “She started going on vacations and leaving me all her notebooks, saying, ‘Here’s the column,’ and I really resented the hell out of her because she was getting paid for my work.
“She actually did me an enormous favor. I learned how to write for someone else’s voice. I could write just like my mom, so nobody knew she was away and I made deadlines — better than she did, actually.”
After his early start, Lee figured it would be simple to begin working as a novelist and TV writer. “How hard could it be? All I have to do is go to L.A. and it’ll happen. And it did. But it did because you have to make your own luck.”
After enrolling at UCLA, Lee befriended a professor who wrote thrillers on the side. Offered the opportunity to write an action-adventure novel aimed at men, the professor, Lee says, declined, but told publishers he knew someone who was “hungry enough, stupid enough or desperate enough” to do it.
“My first novel was published when I was 18 years old,” says Lee, who describes its genre as being about tough guys, big guns, beautiful women and plenty of explosions. “They were like the male equivalent of the Harlequin romance. … You could find them at your finer 7-11s and Safeways around the country.”
But “.357 Vigilante,” which he wrote under a pen name, was the break he needed. After the movie rights got picked up, Lee was drafted to write the screenplay which led to a career writing and producing for TV and film on projects that include “Spenser for Hire,” “Diagnosis: Murder” and “Baywatch.” He also wrote eight novels based on “Diagnosis: Murder” and 15 more based on the TV series “Monk,” which he also worked on.
“My screenwriting and novel careers erupted at the same time,” says Lee. “I’ve been doing it nonstop ever since.”
The Work
Despite operating in the same genre, the brothers’ novels are decidedly different, both agree.
Lee, who’s written nearly 40 novels, is the author of the Eve Ronin mysteries, more than 20 TV tie-ins, and five books co-written with Janet Evanovich. “Malibu Burning” is a lean thriller that follows a team of thieves as well as the two investigators on their trail.
“Tod and I write with obviously very similar senses of humor, very similar attitudes about the world, about politics about everything. But we write very differently,” says Lee, who sees his conmen and thieves are generally good people — which is true of “Malibu Burning” thief Danny Cole. “Tod is a far more dense, literary writer than I am. I’m more of a fast-food, mainstream writer. I want my writing to disappear.”
Tod, who is director of UC Riverside’s low-residency MFA program and co-host of the popular podcast Literary Disco as well as the author of 16 books including “Living Dead Girl,” “The House of Secrets” (co-written with Brad Meltzer) and the short story collection “The Low Desert,” contrasts their approaches differently.
“I think the thing that’s unusual about us working in the same field is that you write about heroes and I write about villains,” Tod says. “I’ve never written a hero before in my life. I’m always writing about a bad guy who’s trying to get good.”
Tod credits his editor, Dan Smetanka, for giving him the freedom to explore the story. The trilogy, which includes the novels “Gangsterland” and “Gangster Nation,” follows hitman Sal Cupertine as he hides out from the feds and the mob under the assumed identity of Rabbi David Cohen, a man of wisdom and faith known to quote from both the Talmud and the gospel of Bruce Springsteen. Running a flourishing synagogue as well as criminal side hustles, Cupertine/Cohen manages to be both a source of comfort to his flock and a stone-cold killer when he deems it necessary.
During our conversation, it’s clear they know the other’s work well and each gently resists the other’s attempts to describe the work. They are, after all, siblings.
“I was always trying to establish order amidst the chaos. And I think if you look at the protagonists of my books, they’re doing the same thing,” says Lee. “My books are cathartic.”
Tod replies, “In your books, you want to bring order to chaos, where when I’m writing, I want to write about someone getting away with it. Whatever ‘it’ is, I want to see someone get away with it.”
They both agree, however, about the use of violence in their books.
“That’s one thing that you and I share is that we don’t tend to have violence just for the sake of violence,” says Tod, who describes an epiphany he had while watching a violent cable show during the writing of “Gangsterland,” the first book in the trilogy.
“I started to count how many people had died in the first 20 minutes of an episode … what is the ripple that comes out from something like that? I just started to think about like, ‘What’s our role as writers of crime fiction in society – what are we putting out there?’” says Tod.
“So I decided if I’m going to kill someone in my books, there’s going to be a consequence. There’s always going to be a consequence for a bad thing someone does,” says Tod, who says he’s become more connected to his Jewish roots after spending years reading the Bible, the Torah and the Talmud in order to bring authenticity to his fiction.
Does he believe his character is a good rabbi? “Yes, I think he really is. And the reason is that he takes his job seriously. You know, he’s pretended for so long that he becomes a good rabbi,” says Tod. “But it also makes him a person who is finding the decency in the world. I don’t believe necessarily that decency is typically tied to religion, but I think decency is tied to empathy. And so what you have is a character who has begun to develop empathy.”
Though he says he doesn’t write heroes, Tod created the character Kristy Levine, an FBI agent fighting cancer, to honor a devoted reader with whom he’d been corresponding online for more than two decades; after being diagnosed with cancer, the reader, Kristy Cade, had asked if he’d write a character fighting the disease — and, crucially, was bald from chemo. Tod did, introducing the character in the short story “Mazel.”
Tod told the real-life Kristy he was going to continue the character in “Gangsters Don’t Die,” and he recalls at one point not hearing from her for a few weeks. “I got an email from one of her friends saying, I know that you were friends … she had a relapse of cancer and died suddenly.”
Still clearly feeling the loss, Tod went all-in to honor her memory with this “badass bald FBI agent.”
“I wrote one hero,” he says.
Location, location, location
Los Angeles has something of a history with crime fiction, and the city’s mean streets are overpopulated with detectives, P.I.’s, gumshoes and … you get the picture. So for the Goldbergs, it’s been essential to dig up fresh territory in Southern California.
“I think you should write a place you know; you want the place to become a character. Los Angeles has been written about to death,” says Lee, who honed in on the Lost Hills jurisdiction of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department in recent books. “That’s not even talking about all the TV shows that have been set in Los Angeles.”
Tod also has turned his own stomping grounds into a fertile landscape for fiction.
“Both of us write about places we’re familiar with, obviously. I live in the desert; Lee lives in Calabasas,” says Tod. “But I think writing about Southern California that’s not the L.A. of Raymond Chandler brings with it some challenges and some real benefits … because we’ve chosen to write about worlds that have never really been examined very deeply.”
“I’ve been burying a lot of bodies in the desert for a long time, and I know the next book that I’m going to write takes place in the Salton Sea in the 1960s. That whole region that I write about is going to play a larger role,” says Tod. “The desert’s a weird place.”
For Lee, Calabasas’ potential for criminal activity got a little too real recently when an attempted robbery of his home made headlines after he posted video of the masked robbers creeping toward his home. I messaged him about it and he said he and his family were safe.
I asked him whether this would be the kind of thing that might end up in one of his books.
“It already is!” he said. “I have a book coming out in January” — “Dream Town” — about Chilean burglary tourists hitting homes on hillsides … in Calabasas, Porter Ranch, etc. The last thing I ever expected is that it would happen to me.
“Even more surreal, is that I wrote a novel called ‘True Fiction’ about a writer whose books start coming true.”
The big question
Will the brothers, who have had successful collaborations with other writers, work on a book together?
“No,” they say in unison and burst into laughter.
“We rely on each other,” says Lee, who reels off all the ways he depends upon his brother, from testing out plots to emailing him at two in the morning to ask about a sentence. “I don’t think it’d be right for the two of us.”
While they don’t want to collaborate on the writing, they know they have a connection that works remarkably well.
“Lee and I have never been in a fight with each other, physical or emotional, in our lives,” says Tod.
“You’re right,” says Lee. “You and I have never fought.”
“It’s great to know you have the biggest fan who will support you through success or failure, and I think Lee and I working together, if it went bad, it would be so depressing for both of us,” says Tod.
Because they both really love doing what they do.
“I write books that make me excited to get back to the computer,” says Lee. “I can’t wait to write them.”
“Finding that joy in writing is something I’ve tried to impart to my students: Don’t do this for fame or money or anything. Do it because it gives you happiness,” says Tod. “I’m a crime writer. I write crime fiction. This is what I’m going to do for the rest of my life.”
Tod and Lee Goldberg on SCNG’s Bookish virtual event
When: 5 p.m. Sept. 15
Where: https://scng.zoom.us/webinar/register/5316920339729/WN_PeNI32YQTqOWomJc2wVvVA#/registration