Welcome! Ready to ride?
You know it,
brother!
GR: Tell us about your latest
release...
This month, I self-pubbed three funny
novels: McCall
& Company: Workman’s Complication and McCall
& Company: Swollen Identity and Juggler,
Porn Star, Monkey Wrench on Laugh
Riot Press, the social media marketing and
self-publishing company I created to promote and market my books and
the books of other funny indie authors.
McCall & Company is a PI series set
in New York City. The first two books are funny, yes, but they’re
also rocking mysteries—most everyone that’s read them has had no
idea whodunit until the very end. Juggler, Porn Star, Monkey Wrench
is a standalone novel about a LA screenwriter at the end of his
personal and professional ropes who comes to terms with the three
women in his life (the juggler, the porn star, and the monkey wrench)
while he adapts the phone book into a movie. It’s a romantic
Hollywood sex comedy and is more or less the story of my improbable
life as a screenwriter in Los Angeles. Some of it is exactly true,
some of it is inexactly true, but all of it is true enough.
GR: What inspired you to start your
writing journey?
I’ve been a working professional
writer for 25 years. But I’ve been writing for far longer than
that. I wrote a variety comedy show—a Laugh-In clone—that my
friends and I performed in my garage for the neighborhood kids and
parents when I was nine years old. My army men had backstories,
nicknames, families at home. I don’t know what inspired me to be
this way. My mother says I haven’t changed a bit since birth.
That last sentence makes my wife roll her eyes.
GR: Who have been some authors that
have inspired you along the way?
Oh man, Richard Ford, John Irving,
Phillip Roth, Donald Westlake, Carl Hiaasen, Sue Grafton, Janet
Evanovich, Sophie Littlefield, John D. MacDonald, Stephen King,
Elmore Leonard, Sinclair Lewis, Frank Herbert, Ray Bradbury. That’s
a start...
GR: What is one piece of marketing
advice you can give to new authors?
Get out there and stay out there. It
doesn’t matter where, just somewhere in the digital sphere,
somewhere in the global village of readers. It’s a matter of time
before folks find you. Yes, I know, I’m a glass-half-full kind of
guy.
I started Laugh Riot Press because I’m
terrible at social media marketing and yet I know how important it is
to have a consistent, wide-reaching, year-round online presence. LRP
is everywhere readers are every week of the year. That’s the kind
of exposure I wanted but knew I couldn’t do myself.
GR: If we went on the ride of our
life, where is one place you'd like to be sure to stop along the way?
Mount Rushmore. I want to see the
presidents carved into the cliff. I’ve never been there.
GR: Would you be afraid to ride on the
back of my bike?
Come on, Burt. Are you kidding? Where
are we going and when do we leave?
GR: What can we expect from you in the
future? Any new projects?
I’m almost done with another
standalone. It’s called Let There Be Linda. It’s a dark comedy
that tells the story of two estranged brothers living in the San
Fernando Valley who bring their dead mother back to life so she can
clean up the mess they’ve made of things. As you might imagine,
that can’t be a good idea. Quentin Tarantino meets Monty Python.
Thank you so much for chatting with me
today. I wish you the best of success and to always leave your hair
blowing in the wind!
You’re welcome, Burt. Thanks for hosting me.
Author Bio:
Rich Leder
Screenwriter—Novelist—Publisher
Rich Leder has been a
working writer for more than two decades. His
screen credits include 18 produced television films for CBS, NBC,
Lifetime, and Hallmark and feature films for Paramount
Pictures, Tri-Star Pictures, and Left Bank Films.
He has written four funny
novels to be released in 2014: McCall & Company: Workman’s
Complication, McCall & Company: Swollen Identity,
Juggler, Porn Star, Monkey Wrench, and Let There Be Linda.
He has been the lead
singer in a Detroit rock band, a restaurateur, a Little League coach,
a literacy tutor, a magazine editor, a screenwriting coach, a
commercial real estate agent, an indie film director, and a
visiting artist for the University of North Carolina Wilmington Film
Studies Department, among other things, all of which, it turns
out, were grist for the mill. He resides on the North Carolina coast
with his awesome wife, Lulu, and is sustained by the visits home of
their three college kids.
Rich loves to hear from
readers and writers. Please don’t be shy.
You can write him directly
at rich@laughriotpress.com
Or you can visit him at
www.laughriotpress.com/richleder
Author Links -
Website:
laughriotpress.com/richleder
Blog:
laughriotpress.com/blog
Facebook:
facebook.com/laughriotpress
Twitter:
twitter.com/laughriotpress
Pinterest:
pinterest.com/laughriotpress
Book Genre: FUNNY MYSTERY // FUNNY
FICTION
Publisher: LAUGH RIOT PRESS
Release Date: AUGUST 2014
Buy Link(s): Amazon
Book Description:
MCCALL & COMPANY: WORKMAN’S
COMPLICATION
WAY-OFF BROADWAY
ACTRESS. MURDERED PI FATHER. NEW DAY JOB.
Off-off-off-off Broadway actress
Kate McCall inherits her father’s New York private investigation
business after he’s a whole lot of murdered in a life insurance
company elevator.
A concrete-carrying,
ballroom-dancing construction mule says he fell off the scaffolding
and can never work—or dance—again, and then sues the contractor
for a whole lot of money.
Kate assembles the eccentric tenants
of her brownstone and her histrionic acting troupe to help her crack
the cases, and they stir up a whole lot of trouble.
But not as much trouble as Kate, who
sticks her nose in the middle of the multi-million-dollar
life-insurance scam her father was investigating and gets a whole lot
of arrested for murdering a medical examiner.
Will Kate bust the insurance scam,
prove who really killed the examiner—and her father—and get out
of jail in time to pull off the ballroom sting of the decade? She
might, but it's going to be a whole lot of hilarious.
MCCALL & COMPANY: SWOLLEN IDENTITY
BEAUTIFUL BILLIONAIRE
SOCIALITE. COLD-BLOODED CORPORATE ASSASSIN. MCCALL & COMPANY
BACK IN BUSINESS.
Way-off Broadway actress and NYC PI
Kate McCall had promised the police and the Assistant DA—her
son—that she was all done investigating any damn thing in New
York...
Meaning beautiful billionaire
socialite Brooke Barrington says someone has stolen her identity and
the corporate assassin who murdered Kate’s father has shot the eyes
out of the CEO of Superior Press...
Meaning McCall & Company is back
in business...
Meaning Kate enlists the help of the
eccentric tenants of her brownstone—the House of Emotional Tics—and
her melodramatic acting troupe, the Schmidt and Parker Players...
Meaning things spiral hilariously
and dangerously out of control...
Meaning she is confronted by
Brooke's demonic identical twin, Bailey, accosted by international
counterfeiters, and arrested for impersonating a hooker.
Will Kate stop Bailey from murdering
Brooke? Or will she stop Brooke from murdering Bailey? Or will she
figure out how to tell one from the other in time to survive the
wrath of the Bulgarian mob men hired to protect the counterfeit cash?
And will she finally find her
father’s killer?
She might, but it's going to be a
fast, funny, furious ride.
JUGGLER, PORN STAR, MONKEY WRENCH
My name is Mark Manilow. I am a
Hollywood screenwriter. Here’s my recipe for a cocktail called
“Romantic Hollywood Sex Comedy.”
Start with my estranged wife, who
left me two years ago to become a juggler.
Pour in the ensuing emotional
tailspin conjoined with a brutal case of writer’s block.
Mix with my last-gasp writing job, a
ridiculous porn flick called Broken Boner.
Add in the Broken Boner porn star,
who seduces me into an ill-fated relationship.
Blend with the gun-toting producer
and eccentric Montecito billionaire, who hire me to adapt the
phonebook into a movie.
Toss in the return of my headaches
and a trip to an ancient Chinese healer, where I meet the healer’s
beguiling granddaughter—my monkey wrench.
Serve with wonderment as to
whether or not I’ll find a way to settle things with the juggler,
break it off with the porn star, and fall in love with the monkey
wrench...or if anyone will stop laughing long enough to notice.
Excerpt:
MCCALL & COMPANY: WORKMAN’S
COMPLICATION
“Your
father’s dead, Miss McCall. Got himself murdered.”
I
thought I might hear that sentence one day, but I was even less ready
for it than I imagined I would be. I blinked a few times, then
walked to one of the toilets, sat down, and gestured at his
cigarettes. “I’ll take one of those now.” Some bad news is
simply too big to process right away.
He
gave me a Camel, lit it, and moved back to the sink. “I work for
Mel Shavelson, your father’s attorney. I’m the bearer of bad
news. That’s my job.”
He
talked about how my father got himself murdered—something about
sticking his nose someplace it had no business being, something else
about the police finding him late last night (actually, at three
o’clock on Friday morning) tied to a chair in an elevator in an
office building, two big fat bullet holes where his eyes used to
be—but I wasn’t listening.
Instead,
I was thinking about the final curtain of the last performance of Bye
Bye Birdie. My father had given me flowers, handing them to me
on the stage while the audience applauded. They were roses from a
Korean market and smelled like ginger.
“Shavelson’s
going to read the will, and you’re supposed to be there,” Barnes
said. He put his cigarette out in the sink, tossed the butt in the
trash, and crossed to the toilet, where I sat watching the Camel burn
down to my fingers. (I don’t smoke). He handed me Mel Shavelson’s
business card and said, “Date and time’s on the back. Monday
morning, ten thirty.”
I
took the card, still smelling the ginger roses, grief growing inside
me, building, building, getting ready to bust through the wall of
shock that had been constructed in the same second the fire hydrant
had delivered the bad news, which, as he said, was his job.
“I
knew your old man,” Barnes said. “He was a hell of a PI.” And
then he left.
There
had been a voicemail for me from a Detective Harriman earlier in the
day, but it was just a general “Please call me as soon as possible”
sort of message. I had been busy, and usually the police only
contacted me to verify something or other about Jimmy getting into
trouble on the job. Jimmy always worked that kind of thing out for
himself and had told me, “Never cozy up to the cops unless you’re
impersonating one.” I deleted Harriman’s message and didn’t
call him back. Maybe that’s what he was going to tell me, that
Jimmy had been murdered. Anyway, now Barnes had told me.
I
dropped the Camel in the toilet, looked at the card, and wept like a
seventh-grade girl.
October 24 - Reviewed at BK Walker Books
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