On My eReader - Lee Goldberg

Photo courtesy of Homeland Security

This week's On My eReader features  Lee Goldberg, an ex-Navy SEAL, freelance Sexual Surrogate and a professional Daniel Craig impersonator. OK, not all of that may be true (though Lee) reckons it  is.

What can be verified is that - Lee Goldberg writes books and television shows. With an impressive list of credits - Goldberg broke into television with a freelance script sale to Spenser: For Hire. Since then, his TV writing & producing credits have covered a wide variety of genres, including sci-fi (seaQuest), cop shows (Hunter, The Glades), martial arts (Martial Law), whodunits (Diagnosis Murder, Nero Wolfe), the occult (She-Wolf of London), kid’s shows (R.L. Stine’s The Nightmare Room), T&A (Baywatch, She Spies), comedy (Monk) clip shows (The Best TV Shows That Never Were) and total crap (The Highwayman, The New Adventures of Flipper).

Lee  published his first book .357 Vigilante (as “Ian Ludlow,” so he’d be on the shelf next to Robert Ludlum) while he was still a UCLA student. The West Coast Review of Books called his debut “as stunning as the report of a .357 Magnum, a dynamic premiere effort,” singling the book out as “The Best New Paperback Series” of the year. Naturally, the publisher promptly went bankrupt and he never saw a dime in royalties.

His many subsequent books include the non-fiction Successful Television Writing and Unsold Television Pilots as well as the novels My Gun Has Bullets, The Walk, King City, McGrave, Dead Space, and Watch Me Die, which was nominated for a Shamus Award for Best Novel from the “Private Eye Writers of America.” He’s also the writer/co-creator of The Dead Man, the monthly series of original novels published by Amazon’s 47North imprint, and co-author with Janet Evanovich of the five international bestselling Fox & O’Hare novels (The Heist, The Chase, The Job, The Scam and The Pursuit) and two New York Times bestselling prequel novellas (The Shell Game and Pros & Cons).

Despite all that success Lee claims, again unverified,  that he is perhaps best known for his pioneering work mapping the human genome and negotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement.

OK stop all that, let's tear Lee away from his covert operations and get him to explain the contents of his eReader..

And so it's over to LEE GOLDBERG



My Kindle is always near-bursting with books I've yet to read -- and books I'm currently reading. I can't read two novels at once, but I can balance a novel and a non-fiction book. I recently finished Anthony Horowitz's wonderful MAGPIE MURDERS, which is an incredibly clever homage to Agatha Christie-style mysteries while, at the same time, working as truly contemporary whodunit while also skillfully deconstructing, and ruminating upon, the genre. If that sounds like a magic trick, it is. Pure briliance.

I followed that up with Hannah Tinti's Edgar-nominated THE TWELVE LIVES OF SAMUEL HAWLEY which is a remarkable book about the relationship between a young girl and her widowed, fugitive father...a man covered with bullet wounds that chart his violence-plagued life.  

While reading those, I skipped between two terrific TV reference books by Richard Irvin -- FILM STARS' TELEVISION PROJECTS and THE EARLY SHOW, which covers series from 1944-1949. Both books are brilliant and red meat for TV history junkies like me.

Next up are SHE RIDES SHOTGUN by Jordan Harper and WONDER VALLEY by Ivy Pochoda. In between, I have upcoming books by Dave Putnam and Simon Gervaise to read and likely blurb.

On the non-fiction front, I've just started reading MR. NOVAK, by Chuck Harter, a reference book about the classic early TV series that starred James Franciscus. Pretty soon I'll also have to start reading a stack of books as research for my next novel...but I'm keeping those titles a secret (I don't want to tip what I'm writing about!).  


Find Lee at by clicking on - TOP SECRET COVERT OPERATIVES. COM

On My eReader - Paul Bishop

This week's On My eReader section, in which writers talk about the books currently on their eReader features  American author, Paul Bishop, or as he is known amongst his friends, The Bish.

Paul is a novelist, screenwriter and television personality....we only feature the best at the Archive.

Paul is a 35 year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department, Paul Bishop’s career has included a three-year tour with his department's Anti-Terrorist Division and over twenty-five years’ experience in the investigation of sex crimes. His Special Assaults Units regularly produced the highest number of detective initiated arrests and highest crime clearance rates in the city. Twice honored as Detective of the Year, Paul also received the Quality and Productivity Commission Award from the City of Los Angeles.

As a nationally recognized interrogator, Paul starred as the lead interrogator and driving force behind the ABC reality show Take The Money and Run from producer Jerry Bruckheimer. Based on his expertise in deception detection, he currently conducts interrogation seminars for law enforcement, military, and human resource organizations.

Paul has published fourteen novels, including four in his L.A.P.D. Detective Fey Croaker series, and one collection of short stories which includes a novelette featuring Croaker. He has also written numerous scripts for episodic television and feature films. He is the co-creator and editor of the Fight Card series of hardboiled boxing novels, which includes over forty titles, published under the pseudonym Jack Tunney. Paul’s own entries in the series are Fight Card: Felony Fists and Fight Card: Swamp Walloper, both featuring the two-fisted cop turned fighter, Patrick ‘Felony’ Flynn.

You can find Paul HERE

And so it's over to Paul -


My Kindle is completely overstocked, but that doesn’t mean I stop grabbing new books whenever something strikes my fancy. I’m a bit of an attention deficit fiend, so I always have three or four books going at the same time—two or three on my Kindle and at least one physical paperback to sniff and fondle—I mean to have and hold.

Currently on my Kindle, I’m halfway through the second book in the Charlotte Holmes series, The Last of August by Brittany Cavallaro. Jamie Watson and Charlotte Holmes—young adult descendants of their famous forbearers—are in a chase across Europe to untangle a web of shocking truths about the Holmes and Moriarty families. Like the first book in the series, it’s good fun and Cavallaro gets the voices and the Holmesian rhythms right. A cut above the normal pastiche efforts.

I’m a bit bogged down in The Fair Fight by Anna Freeman, a highly praised novel of female Victorian pugilists. The first few chapters kept my interest and raced along, but I’m now five chapters in and waiting for something more to happen. If it doesn’t pick up steam quickly, I’m out before the ten count. 

True Fiction by my friend Lee Goldberg has kept me chuckling as the electronic pages zip past—think Three Days of the Condor lite in a mashup with a Hitchcockian innocent-man-on-the-run film. His character, writer Ian Ludlow (the name an in-joke referring to a pseudonym Goldberg once used) is constantly out of his depth, surviving by whims of fate more than skill or luck. Humor is a hard thing to pull off, but Goldberg is a master at this type of light touch.

Finally, I finished reading True Grit for the third time (in preparation for a presentation) and needed to jump into another western. I chose Forty Guns West from the William W. Johnstone fiction factory. This is a hunted-turns-hunter tale in The First Mountain Man series. If I had to guess, based on the writing, I’d say the super-secret identity behind the Johnstone byline on this effort is James Reasoner   

ON MY eReader with Ben Bridges AKA David Whitehead

This is the first in a regular section in which the Archive quizzes writers about the contents of their eReaders. First up we have David Whitehead -

David Whitehead is a prolific English writer and arguably (hey, there's no argument about it) one of the most influential British western writers of the past thirty years. Born in London in 1958, he sold his first book, THE SILVER TRAIL, in 1984. It marked not only the first appearance of his popular continuing character, freelance fighting man Carter O'Brien, but also the first time he used his best-known pseudonym, Ben Bridges. Since then David has written more than seventy books; westerns as Ben Bridges, Glenn Lockwood, Matt Logan, Doug Thorne, Carter West and ten under his own name. In addition to this he writes romantic fiction as Janet Whitehead and has co-authored nine thrillers with Hollywood screenwriter Steve Hayes. David's entire back-catalogue is now available on Kindle, where all of his westerns are now being reissued under the Ben Bridges byline. For more details about David's work, please go to www.benbridges.co.uk.


Of course David is no stranger to the digital format and he is one of the men responsible for the wonderful Piccadilly Publishing House, a digital publisher that has for several years been bringing new and classic adventure fiction into digital print. Find them HERE but be warned, take a few pennies because while you are there you will buy.


OK so - So Drum Roll please.
and it's over to David Whitehead:

Last night I finished reading WAR CLOUD’S BRIDE by Sundown McCabe, whose real name is Roger Norris-Green. I’ve always been a sucker for Australia’s Cleveland westerns and now that they’ve finally started appearing in digital form, I’ve started getting enthusiastic about them all over again.

WAR CLOUD’S BRIDE tells the story of a drifter named Steve Brand, who gets involved in a manhunt – or more accurately a woman-hunt – when rancher’s daughter Alison Carter is abducted by a Cheyenne war party. But there’s more to the story than just that, of course. Long-buried secrets come to light as the pursuit unfolds, and the plot climaxes with a thrilling river-chase and of course, the obligatory final reckoning with the bad guys.

Overall, this is a fast-moving western, and certainly among the best Cleveland westerns I’ve read in a while (my favourite still remains BELFREY JUAREZ by Clint McCall – check it out if you can find a copy). Characterisation is sketchy but adequate and the author builds a neat sense of location. I doubt the wisdom of naming one character Brand and another one the very similar Brandy, but that’s only a minor technical quibble. WAR CLOUD’S BRIDE is well worth reading and I’m glad to see more Sundown McCabe titles finding a new readership in digital print.