I can’t claim to’ve watched swathes of the TV series Monk — starring the wonderfully talented Tony Shalhoub as the eponymous consultant to the San Francisco Police Department — but I always enjoyed its creativity when I did catch it (an episode in which a musical birthday card contributes to the solving of a crime stands out in my memory).
When the show ended in 2009 a series of follow-on tie-in novels had already been commissioned, Lee Goldberg writing fifteen of them between 2006 and 2013, and Hy Conrad a further four between 2013 and 2015. With conversation recently turning to these books over at TomCat’s place, we’ve each take it upon ourselves to check out a (thankfully different) entry and see what it has to offer. TomCat’s review of Mr Monk is Miserable (2008) can be found here, and I’ve gone for the above title, published two years later. Naturally, our interest is stirred by the inclusion of some classic-sounding impossible crimes, and we get to things early herein as a witness in a trial based around financial fraud is found dead in his car, garotted with piano wire while the police were tailing him to court.
“Everything was fine until we hit the red light at this intersection. When the light turned green, he didn’t move. People started honking their horns. So we got out to see what was wrong … He was all alone. We walked him from his house to his car, so I know there was nobody in it then. We didn’t see anybody enter or leave the vehicle from the moment we left the house until now. And we haven’t moved from this spot since it happened.”
The solution to this is pretty banal, and suggests itself rather soon after Monk reaches and leaves the scene, but interestingly it’s all cleared up by the 25% mark — the culprit caught by a piece of poor planning and good luck rather than intelligent deduction. Honestly, there’s an oversight here that just screams of poor plotting in the setup, but at least things move pretty quickly and Goldberg’s style remains light and easy to read.
From here, the book is essentially a series of vignettes in which Monk and his assistant Natalie Teeger take a succession of jobs — the police no longer having the funds to hire him — and, in each setting, Monk proving incapable of working a ‘normal’ job while also preventing a crime that only he is able to anticipate. The ‘detecting murder via groceries’ is pretty neat, and the ‘anticipating a robbery’ perhaps a little forced, but each is very enjoyable in its own way, and makes me wonder what a short story collection with these characters might have been like (it would seem, too, that other novels are constructed along similar lines, since Goldberg’s website lists excerpts from some of his novels as having been published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine). There’s a general theme of the failing economy behind all these crimes — as Natalie says at the start, “The state of California itself was now just like me — a free-spirited liberal with a mostly sunny disposition teetering on the edge of financial ruin” — and Monk himself is deprived of his finances and his flat due to the shady dealings of his own financial advisor, providing the plot that all these events decorate.
This gives us our second impossible crime: Bob Sebes is under house arrest for essentially running a Bernie Madoff-style Ponzi scheme, and two of the people who could give evidence that would convict him are found murdered. Monk is convinced the man is guilty of the murders, but…
“There’s a major flaw in your theory, Adrian.”
“What’s that?” Monk asked.
“Bob Sebes couldn’t have committed the murders,” Ambrose replied.
Monk dismissed the argument with a wave of his hand. “You’re just saying that because he’s wearing a GPS monitoring unit and his house is surrounded by reporters and police officers.”
Indeed, with 24/7 surveillance by “the police, the FBI, the sheriff, and the national news media”, a top-of-the range tamper-proof GPS tracker on his leg, and his assets frozen there is no way that Sebes could have gotten out of his house, and no way he could have paid anyone else to commit the crimes for him. Monk, of course, is unmoved, pointing out that alibis such as being in space and being in a coma (both, I understand, from the TV show) provided no sanctuary for the people accused of those crimes, and that Sebes must be guilty of the murders in an attempt to avoid jail for his crimes.
Naturally, this is only an impossible crime if Sebes is in fact the murderer, but since no other suspect is even attempted, it becomes pretty clear that Sebes will be the murderer…so it’s just a question of howdunnit. And the answer offered up is…well, it’s difficult to judge. I mean, there’s not really sufficient information to say that the method proposed either would or would not work, so you have to accept that it would because you’re told it does in the confines of this narrative. To be honest, this is part of my difficulty with modern impossible crime novels relying on electronics and gizmos for their impossibility — the rules are never really that clear. Consider Fatal Descent/Drop to His Death (1939) by John Rhode and Carter Dickson, which tells you early on that electrical circuits impose certain limitations on the system as a whole…and then still comes up with two brilliant solutions that work inside of that perfectly understood setup. Here, Goldberg explains enough for you to appreciate how impossible the situation must be, but then glosses over the explanation because you’re sort of playing around with the rules previously established. It’s…fine, but not something that commends itself as a brilliant and rigorous example of the impossible crime.
“And I had such high hopes, too…”
However, I did very much enjoy reading this. The style is note-perfect, and as my first example of a tie-in novel to an existing universe I’m very impressed with how well Goldberg’s execution catches the nature of the characters and matches my memories of the show (whereas, for example, I imagine Jim Thompson’s drain-circling psychosexuality is probably a horrible mismatch for his Ironside novelisation, love the man’s writing though I do). One thing I especially enjoyed was how Goldberg used this book for a bit of retro-fitting to explain Monk’s sudden change of water brand from one series to the next; as back-compatibility goes, that was a really nice touch, and one many authors of prequels — be they films or TV shows or books or…concept albums? — could do well to pay attention to.
Overall, then, I’m not enamoured of the impossibilities herein, but quite to my own surprise I really enjoyed the episodic structure and would (and will) read another one in due course. I understand Goldberg wrote some Diagnosis: Murder tie-ins, too, so maybe they’ll be worth a look — anyone know if there’s an impossibility in any of those?
~
Finding a Modern Locked Room Mystery ‘for TomCat’ attempts:
The Botanist (2022) by M.W. Craven
Hard Tack (1991) by Barbara D’Amato
The Darker Arts (2019) by Oscar de Muriel
Mr. Monk is Cleaned Out (2010) by Lee Goldberg
Impolitic Corpses (2019) by Paul Johnston
The Secrets of Gaslight Lane (2016) by M.R.C. Kasasian
Murder at Black Oaks (2022) by Phillip Margolin
Angel Killer (2014) by Andrew Mayne
Now You See Me (2019) by Chris McGeorge
The Magic Bullet (2011) by Larry Millett
The Direction of Murder (2020) by John Nightingale
The Paris Librarian (2016) by Mark Pryor
Lost in Time (2022) by A.G. Riddle
The Real-Town Murders (2017) by Adam Roberts
By the Pricking of Her Thumb (2018) by Adam Roberts
Murder in the Oval Office (1989) by Elliott Roosevelt
Red Snow (2010) by Michael Slade
Ghost of the Bamboo Road (2019) by Susan Spann
The Invisible Event 
I read one of these Monk novels(Mr. Monk and the Two Assistants) a couple of weeks ago, after reading the review of TomCat and found myself being a bit nostalgic .
Though Goldberg certainly got Monk right(for Natalie I have my doubts…), I found the plot very thin and quite easy to see through.
I mean, I had fun, the novel was funny and all, but…
This seems to be more of the same…
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I wonder how the Diagnosis Murder ones stack up…
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I have to agree with Yannis that this seems to be more of the same. Right down to throwing away good ideas by turning them into mini-puzzles. So, I suppose we can say that the Monk TV tie-ins lack truly great plots, but are fun to read.
Oh, and I promise to try one of the books in this blog-series. Probably The Real-Town Murders.
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Well, at least it seems likely some fun reads are there waiting for us when we want a bit of a break from the Serious Business of Carr, Crofts, Fearn, Brand, Halter, honkaku, Vindry, Penny, Berrow, Sayers, Berkeley…etc, etc. Could be worse!
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I wonder how Impossibility #1 here compares with Edward D. Hoch’s “The Impossible Murder”, because that sounds like an almost exactly identical set-up…
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At present I can’t comment, because I’m still hilariously under-read in Hoch. But I’ll bear it in mind if/when I get to that one and report back…
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The first Diagnosis Murder book (The Silent Partner) has an A and a B plot. The B plot is something of an impossible crime: a man died during a transplant operation, but he may have been killed, and if so how did it happen right under the eyes of the nurses and doctors performing the operation without no one spotting anything or being spotted? I sort of figured out the general concept if not the specifics. But, like several other Goldberg DM books I recently read, it’s especially good at capturing and expanding the milieu of the characters familiar from the tv show. They’re more in the A plot/B plot style than the multiple vignettes you describe in the Monk book.
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I’m generally more of an A/B plot fan than I am of the A-B-C-A-D-B-A-D-C structure here, which is part of my delight at having enjoyed this so much. Really appreciate the clarity on the D:M books, and especially the impossible element on the first; I’ll keep an eye out and hopefully it’ll turn up on here at some future point.
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Let me pretend it was my recommendation that led you here. 😛
But yeah, the Monk books aren’t classically-plotted Golden Age novels, but still quite fun and well-written. Sadly after this one I feel that they drop in quality a bit (the ones after this are post series and the mystery plots are somewhat downplayed in favor of character development, and the Conrad ones are bleh.) but they’re all [i]readable[/i] which counts for a lot and I’m convinced is harder than most give it credit for.
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Oh, no doubt, readability goes a long way — as I say, I’d check out more of Goldberg’s writing purely because of how quickly I tore through this and how much fun I had while doing so.
I almost feel that plotting is something you can learn, while style is something you (broadly) either have or you don’t. I’ve got through many a slog of a book because of how well it was out together, but I’ve equally flown through plenty of disappointing plots whose prose went dow very smoothly indeed (see Norman Berrow, my recent experiences with whom encapsulates this almost perfectly).
On to Diagnosis: Murder!
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Hey, JJ—
Whew, feels like a long time since I’ve chimed in here. Hope’s all well in the mystery blogosphere! 🙂
I championed Monk for a while around these parts, and I think it’s a pretty great show. The plots aren’t Chesterton-Christie-Queen-Carr-worthy, but then what is? For what they are, they’re usually quite clever and nearly always fair-play.
I’ve never read any of the tie-in novels, but in the introduction you mentioned Lee Goldberg and Hy Conrad; I recently read a solve-it-yourself/five-minute-mystery collection that Conrad wrote, Historical Whodunits, and it’s excellent. Too, Conrad wrote many of the best-plotted Monk episodes—so I wonder if any of the tie-ins he penned would be better. Not positive, but a possibility.
Again, hope all’s well for you and everyone…
Karl
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The impression I get (from, er, somewhere) is that the COnrad books move to a greater focus on chracter over plot. But, well, that’s not from direct experience, even if the creation of those five-minute mystery books would typically imply that someone is more likely to pepper their novel with nuggets of puzzle rather than create a larger, book-length stumper.
I can’t claim any conscious awareness of Conrad’s work on the show, but then I may turn out to’ve seen and enjoyed some of his episodes. Might be worth a look, and I intend to check out more of these tie-in novels after a bit of research, so thanks for the pointer.
Hope all’s good with you, too. How’d you get on with Harlan Coben?
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Heh—still haven’t read any Coben, but he’s on my list! Mystery/thriller-wise, I haven’t read all that much; just not that much time right now. I was able to pick up a copy of Doug Greene’s Carr biography, though; I’ve read it before, but a used book-store near me had it for only about $5—a steal! 😉
I’ve got to post on favorite Monk episodes some time—it’s a really very enjoyable show. Maybe we can all work on compiling a great (plot-wise) Monk-list?
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1) Godammit it, I can’t find one decent, affordable copy of Doug Greene’s Carr biography and you’ve got, like, seven of them?!
2) I’d would absolutely be up for a Monk good-plot list…but I’ll need to watch a helluva lot more of the series before I can contribute. I was hoping The Mentalist might turn out to warrant such an undertaking, but nope…
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I was wondering if this might qualify for your long-list – or even short-list – of possible recommendations to TomCat? I fairly certain he hasn’t read any of the entries in this series.
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Sounds like it could well do…and a magician to boot! Many thanks for letting me know about this, I’ll get round to it in 2054 😀
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As long as TomCat doesn’t get there first – otherwise you can’t recommend it to him! 😅
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The DIAGNOSIS: MURDER TV series was very much a mixed bag. I lost count of how times that a femme fatale was the villain or one of the regular cast members wound up being the prime suspect; a large number of them were inverteds, but still entertaining enough, I suppose; and a precious few were genuine whodunits, with even fewer of those being in the impossible crime category – but at least they gave it a shot. In one episode, Dr. Sloan, an incorrigible amateur detective with a medical career on the side, nails a bed-ridden killer who couldn’t possibly have done it since all of his medical charts were carefully updated throughout the night; Sloan’s “diagnosis” of murder could only have come from an experienced physician. I’m thinking that little bit of brilliance came from either Goldberg or Conrad; the show definitely improved when they came on board.
DIAGNOSIS: MURDER covered a few previously-established detective fiction conventions, especially the one involving father-son detectives like Ellery Queen, only this time the son is the father’s entrée into the crime scene; and, ask any Hollywood producer, stories set in and around hospitals usually attract viewers regardless of their quality.
Dr. Sloan was by no means the first M.D. detective on TV, with Dr. Daniel Webster Coffee getting there decades earlier:
https://carrdickson.blogspot.com/2016/06/deliberately-cleverly-and-diabolically.html
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Of course, I should have written “How MANY times.”
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I remember D:M fondly but not accurately — at the time it was on TV here, I wasn’t so concerned about plotting and rigour as I was about just enjoying it: the goofiness was 90% of its charm, something I miss about watching almost anything these days (damn you, my developing standards and expectations). I don’t know how I’d feel about it if I watched it now, but since I’m unlikely to get the chance I suppose it doesn’t matter.
I have just finished season 1 of Monk, however, and enjoyed that very much.
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