Despite a truly heart-wrenching opening, in which an assassin remotely orchestrates the crash of a passenger jet into a Waikiki hotel, True Fiction quickly jumps into Elmore Leonard territory as a witty send-up of spy novels and the book industry.
In Lee Goldberg’s new series about bestselling writer Ian Ludlow (the pseudonym Goldberg used when he wrote his first novel, .357 Vigilante, in 1985), Goldberg delivers a character who seems, well, very much like the author himself.
On book tour, Ian is at a Seattle bookstore talking about his latest Clint Straker novel before a crowd of eight people. Despite the low turnout, he’s actually relieved to be on tour and living out of a suitcase, because he accidently blew up his house and, in the process, broke his arm. And Ian is also happy to be penning novels, even if not so successful, rather than the Hollywood & The Vine TV series he used to write about a “half man, half plant, all cop.”
But that doesn’t mean readers don’t arrive singing the show’s earworm of a song at his book signings:
Ooooh you heard about the cop Vine
A plant who can’t stand crime
You get caught, you’re gonna do time ...
Honey, honey yeah. . .
Oh, and it is sung to the chorus of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.”
Back at his hotel’s bar after the reading, Ian watches the news report about the commercial jet and is petrified. Years ago, Ian came up with the exact same scenario for the CIA, which had recruited him and a few other writers to imagine terrorist attack situations as part of a preparedness exercise. Someone has taken his fiction and made it a reality, and Ian believes he knows all too well who did the horrible deed.
Soon Ian, aided by his author escort Margo French (who is also a dog walker and a wannabe singer), is zigzagging through California and Las Vegas, followed by danger.
Goldberg, who like Ian has also written for television (Monk, Diagnosis: Murder, Baywatch, among others), keeps the spy thriller parody spritely, moving it along with bits of wry humor sprinkled throughout. Naturally, the assassin has the sexual prowess of James Bond. Alas, Ian lacks that skill. Goldberg has also written more than 30 books, many of them based on various TV series. This one, based on the author’s pseudonym, promises to be the first in what should be a most amusing series to follow.
