True Fiction

By Lee Goldberg, Thomas and Mercer, 2018, 248 pages
Reviewed by Ted Streuli, June 28, 2021

The thing you have to know about Lee Goldberg is that he’s a television writer. He’s a machine. He cranks out books and scripts at a pace that would make Usain Bolt envious, and it shows. I don’t mean that in a bad way; after all, Hemingway wrote “The Old Man and the Sea” in eight weeks and won the Pulitzer Prize for literature.

To compare Goldberg to Hemingway, though, would be like comparing Will Farrell to Laurence Olivier. Goldberg is a workhorse, a copy machine, a prodigious producer who will never win a Pulitzer Prize in literature much less a Nobel, but by gosh you’ll buy his book at the Kindle store for $1.99 and enjoy every page.

Reading the Ian Ludlow suspense series, of which “True Fiction” is the first, is a bit like watching theater of the absurd. That’s his genius; the series is ridiculous in a Janet Evanovich/Stephanie Plum sort of way, but the humor is a tad less slapstick, a bit more of the multi-level, self-effacing variety.

The hero, Ian Ludlow, is a suspense writer who is asked by the CIA to attend a retreat with a few of his peers to brainstorm potential plots that would threaten national security. The rub is that it’s not exactly the CIA and that Ludlow’s plot turns into reality, putting him on the run.

“True Fiction” requires the suspension of disbelief, by which I mean you have to be willing to believe the sun comes up in the west and the lunar landing was an elaborate hoax. Ludlow meets his sidekick, Margo French, in Seattle. She’s a dog walker and author escort who sings in local nightclubs hoping to kickstart a music career. It makes sense, then, that a novelist with a broken arm and his dog-walker sidekick are able to out-run, out-think, out-maneuver, and out-fight all of the highly skilled, professionally trained assassins the pseudo-CIA sends after them, despite the organization having more access to technology than Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook combined.

The duo flees from Seattle to enlist the help of an actor turned professional paranoia nut Ludlow worked with when he was writing scripts for a detective show called “Hollywood and the Vine,” in which — stay with me now — Hollywood is a regular detective and his partner is half man, half plant.

Therein lies Goldberg’s genius. One of Hollywood’s traditions, and, really, it could be its own genre, is the show-within-a-show formula that worked in everything from “White Christmas” to “Singin’ in the Rain” and at least a trio of Busby Berkeley musicals. Goldberg just gives it a twist; he’s a TV writer and thriller author writing about a TV writer and thriller author who becomes the lead character in his own story.

Got that? Let’s double down. Ian Ludlow, the hero, was also Goldberg’s pen name for his first three mystery novels, which he wrote as a project while studying at UCLA. He picked the name so his books would be on the shelf next to Robert Ludlum’s. It’s a little like sitting in the barber’s chair looking into the mirror across from you that’s facing the mirror behind you. It makes your head spin, but it’s kind of fun.

Goldberg sums it up in the series’ third book, “Fake Truth,” when a conversation at the security agency of another country goes like this:

“Ian Ludlow is a famous author. He writes spy novels, but he’s definitely not a spy himself.”

“How can you be sure?” He was afraid that he’d heard a squeal in his voice, that he was already a soprano.

“It’s clear from the idiotic shit that he writes.”

Also from “Fake Truth,” Ludlow and French referring to Ludlow’s hero, Clint Straker:

“What about telling our story and revealing China’s plot to assassinate the president?”

“I tried using it but every time I added Straker into the mix, it became ridiculous.”

“Straker has always been ridiculous,” she said.

“Yes,” Ian said. “But now I know it.”

“That’s a shame.”

If you missed it, that makes Clint Straker Lee Goldberg’s alter ego’s alter ego.

Goldberg keeps his tongue so firmly planted in his cheek it’s astonishing he hasn’t poked a hole through it. If you want an edge-of-you-seat realistic spy thriller, skip right on by “True Fiction” and the rest of Lee Goldberg’s Ian Ludlow series. But if you can suspend disbelief in a big way, you might just appreciate the Rube Goldberg (no relation, probably) level complexity with which the books take jabs at television, spy novels and, well, the people who write them.

At $1.99 and 248 pages for the Kindle edition you’ll invest neither the time nor money required for disappointment, so give it a whirl. By the time you get to the end, you just might find that you’ve fallen for the absurdity’s charm as much as I did.