My Gun Has Bullets

My Gun Has Bullets is Lee Goldberg’s 1995 Hollywood satire, his first solo novel and the one that established the comic-insider voice he would later put to work on the Monk and Fox & O’Hare tie-ins. Charlie Willis is a marginal LAPD officer who has the bad luck to be near a celebrity carjacking. The footage looks heroic. A network development executive decides Willis is the face of the next prime-time cop show. He becomes a TV detective for three years. Then his old beat starts turning up actual bodies that look uncomfortably like the cases his fake character solves.

This one works because Goldberg commits to both sides of the genre split. The Hollywood satire is sharp (the network development meeting at the front, the cancellation-bid politics, the way Willis’s contract makes him valuable as a corpse), and the murder plot is properly constructed: the killer is fair-play, the motive plays off the satire instead of competing with it, and the final-act resolution earns its laughs and its gut-punches. The supporting cast (Willis’s manager, the actress playing his fake partner, his ex-LAPD friends) is unusually rich for a 240-page comic thriller.

Recommended for fans of Hollywood satire (Joe Eszterhas’s Hollywood Animal as nonfiction comparison, Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg’s Fox & O’Hare for the comic-procedural register) and for readers looking for books like My Gun Has Bullets in the cop-show meta tradition. Solid four stars and the best of Goldberg’s early solo novels.