FORGOTTEN BOOK: MY GUN HAS BULLETS

 My Gun Has Bullets by Lee Goldberg  (1995)

Lee Goldberg knows many things, among them are 1) how to write entertaining, suspenseful novels, and 2)  television.  As a writer and/or producer, his credits include Spenser:  For Hire, The Highwayman, Murphy's Law, Hunter, Baywatch, She-Wolf of London, Likely Suspects, Cobra, The Cosby Maysteries, Sliders, Deadly Games, Stick with Me, Kid, SeaQuest 2032, Flipper, Diagnosis Murder, Martial Law, The Nightmare Room, A Nero Wolfe Mystery, She Spies, 1-800-Missing, Monk, Psych, Fast Track:  No Limits, The Glades, Galip Dervis, and Mystery 101.  Among his many books are eight original television tie-in novels in the Diagnosis Murder and fifteen original tie-in novles in the Monk series, as well as the best-selling Successful Television Writing and a number of non-fiction books about television history.  With Max Allan Collins, Goldberg founded the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers.  Goldberg has also launched two publishing ventures:  Brash Books (with Joel Goodman) and Cutting Edge Books.  Goldberg's first foray into novels was with the .357 Vigilante paperback series published under the name "Ian Ludlow."  (This original series has been rebranded the Jury series and has been republished under Goldberg's name.  Goldberg has taken the "Ian Ludlow" name and used it for the main character in another series of novels.)

Would you be surprised that Goldberg used his television background for My Gun Has Bullets, the first suspense novel published under his own name?  No, I didn't think you would.

Charlie Willis was an L.A. cop who had the misfortune of seeing a wildly erratic driver speeding in a Rolls Royce, swerving down the highway, forcing other cars off the road and crashing.  He managed to stop the car by pulling front of it.  Expecting some drug-addled or boozed-up driver, he was surprised to see that the car was driven by a sweet-looking old lady.  Except she was not so sweet.  She cursed Charlie out for stopping her and demanded he move so she could get on her way.  (She had been running late and wanted to make it to Neiman Marcus before they closed because the the store was having its fantastic annual one-day sale.)  Charlie demanded she get out of the car, so she reached into the back seat, pulled out a gun, blew him away, the sped on her way yo the sale; she made it to the store in time and ended up spending $11,000 there.

When Charlie woke up in the hospital, he was surrounded by a gaggle of network executives.  It turns out the sweet little old lady was Esther Radcliffe, the star of the hit series Miss Agatha, about a kindly lady who served tea, baked cookies, and solved murders.  Miss Agatha was the network's cash cow and they were not going to lose it because its star was in reality an evil harridan with a trigger finger.  On exchange for completely forgetting who had shot him, the network offered Charlie a twelve-week series deal, a cop show titled My Gun Has Bullets.

Eddie Planet (pronounced Plan-A) was a washed-up actor whose hit series Saddlesore ended ten years before.  Six failed searies later, Eddie despaired of being a star again.  He bagan pitching ideas for television series, but nothing came of it,  Then he met investor  Daddy Crofoot, who decided to back Eddie's latest project, Frankencop (about a cop whose body was created from body parts from twelve dead cops).  What Eddie did not realize was that Crofoot was tied to the mob and needed to launder money.  Crofoot would not be happy if he lost money on the deal and when Crofoot was not ahpy, people tended to die.  He also insisted that the star of Frankencop be Crofoot's cousin Flint Westwood, a dim-bulb porn actor whose one saving grace was that he out-Holmesed John Holmes and out Jeremy-ed Ron Jeremy.

Sabina Bishop considered herself a legitiamate actress because the films she was working on were erotic thrillers and not porn.  (Porn did not have a slender thread of plot running it the way that an erotic thriller did.)  Durng filming one day, and despite the best efforts of cast and crew, Sabina's nipples did not get erect enough to satisfied the director.  In disgust, Sabina walked out of the set and out of her career as a "legitimate" actress.  Meanwhile, the producer of Aunt Agatha was concerned.  Despite being a solid hit, the show's demographic was aging out -- in a few years they might all be dead.  Something had to be done.  So the show was revamped to bring in a new character -- Agatha's niece, a leather-wearing, cleavage-exposing martial arts expert.  Who to cast in that role?  Sabina Bishop, of course.  This did not go over well with Esther Radcliffe, who immediately began plotting ways to kill Sabina.

Esther, meanwhile has been having an affair with the much younger Flint Westwood.  Westwood has been videotaping their encounters and using these to blackmail Esther ate $50,000 a pop.  Esther does not realize that Flint is behind the blackmail and believes that Charlie is the culprit, so she plans to kill him before she kills Sabina.  She gets a gun with real bullets and uses an elderly propman to get it on set.

     "Itchy Matthews, the withered old propman, rushed up and handed Charlie the massive gun that was Derek Thorne's trademake.  Rumor had it Itchy had worked props on Birth of a Nation.  It didn't matter that half the time Itchy handed Charlie his colostomy bag instead of his props.  The man worked cheap."

Itchy screws up and hands the deadly gun to Charlie, instead to the actor with whom Charlie was to engage in a gunfight.  The scene is shot, bullets fly, and the other actor is dead, shot three times in the chest by Charlie.  Because Charlie's gun had bullets.

In the meantime, the ratings for Frankencop are tanking.  In response, Crofoot does what any good mob boss would do -- he calls in an expert.  Delbert Skaggs was the most most experienced hit man in the mob.  Skaggs enjoyed his job but he wanted more.  Skaggs felt he should leave the ranks of the employed and move up to the executive level.  The call from Crofoot would give him that chance.  Skaggs was put in charge of Frankencop above Eddie.  It didn't take Skaggs long to figure out what the problem was:  The networks ran the show.  They determined what programs would air when, and against whom.  That may be the way to run a network but it wasn't the way to run a criminal enterprise.  A criminal enterprise did not just lay back and accept what was handed to it; it blasted its way through the competition to the top.  Skaggs knew what had to be done -- eliminate the competition.

Among the sbow in the linewup of the three networks were such offerings as Johnny Wildlife, Dedicated Doctors, Boo Boo's Dilemma, Rappy Scrappy, Broad Squad, Smart Alec, Adopted Family, My Wife Next Door, Young Hudson Hawk, Blacke and Whyte, Honeymooners:  The Next Generarion, Sheriff of Mars, Sleepwalker, and Red Highway, and (of course) Miss Agatha, My Gun Has Bullets, and Frankencop.  In development were such shows as Matt Jacob (with Don Knotts as a sustance-abusing P.I.), Soft Shoe (with James Arness as a retired song-and-dance man moving in with his Broadway chorus line gay son), Energizer Bunny, The Anson Williams Show, The Two Dicks, It's All Relative!, Socially Relevant, and Sunn of a Gunn (starring Erik Estrada and Chad Everett).

What was needed was to eliminate those shows competing in Frankencop's timeslot, as well as those shows on other networks strong enough to carry their ratings over to other shows on the night that Frnikencop aired.  Easy peasy -- especially for a trained and enthusiastic killer like Delbert Skaggs.  And so the bodies begin to pile up, and Frankencop's rating soared.

One of the most popular characters on television was Boo Boo, a genuinely ugly dog featured in a heart-warming comedy.  Unfortunately, Boo was, in real life, a homicidal rapist animal with a taste for human flessh and a severe attitude problem.  Boo Boo could only get rhrough his scenes without killing someone through a constant barrage of tranquilizers darts.  Assigned by Skaggs to kill Boo Boo, Eddie hires two moronic stuntmen, Burt and Otto, to do the job.  As stuntmen, Burt and Otto did not wear seatbelts because they could not figure out how to operate them.  But that didn't matter because both had a genetic condition that left them impervious to pain.  On all their killing assignments, Burt and Otto manage to screw up royally.

All the above is just a slight glimpse at the frentic action and many plot lines woven throughout My Gun Has Bullets, a throughly enjoyable, grin-inducing, suspense romp that makes one wonder how close Goldberg's fictional Hollywood is to the real thing.

Highly recomended, as are all of Goldberg's other books.

Charlie Willis came back for an encore performance in 1997's Beyond the Beyond (also published as Dead Space).  Goldberg's latest novel, Malibu Burnig, the first in his Sharpe & Walker series, was released this month. -- be there or be square.