Howard Michael Gould Books in Order

Howard Michael Gould was born in New York City and found his way into writing by a slightly roundabout route. Before he thought of himself as a writer, he was a teenager running programming at his high school's tiny radio station and writing sketch comedy for a monthly show.

The shift came at an arts camp the summer before college. A fellow counselor heard Gould's radio material, suggested that he try a play, and helped arrange a reading of the one-act Gould wrote on a day off.

The play hooked him.

Gould went on to Amherst College, where he studied with English professors who stayed important to the way he thought about stories and writing. He continued writing and directing plays, then started his working life in advertising. He spent five years on Madison Avenue, earning three Clio Awards along the way, before moving to Los Angeles.

Hollywood gave him room to work in several forms at once. Gould became an executive producer and head writer on television, including Cybill, Instant Mom, and The Jeff Foxworthy Show. During his time on Cybill, the series won the Golden Globe for Best Comedy Series. His screen credits also include Mr. 3000 and Shrek the Third, and he wrote and directed the film The Six Wives of Henry Lefay.

The stage never entirely left the picture. His play Diva premiered at the Williamstown Theatre Festival and La Jolla Playhouse, then was published and produced around the country. Across television, film, and theater, Gould built a career around comedy, sharp dialogue, and characters who can make a mess of a room simply by walking into it.

Fiction came later.

A detective screenplay Gould loved kept nearly becoming a movie, then falling apart. Rather than let the story disappear, he regained the rights and turned it into a novel. Unsure how his first attempt at fiction would go, he initially wrote under a pseudonym. The book quickly found an agent and a publisher, and the pseudonym did not last.

That novel became Last Looks, the first Charlie Waldo mystery. It introduced a former LAPD detective living in self-imposed isolation, trying to make amends for an old professional failure while owning no more than one hundred things. Gould continued Waldo's story in Below the Line, Pay or Play, and the short mystery Carbuncle's Breakfast. The novels combine crime plots with Hollywood satire, Southern California settings, difficult clients, and Waldo's very rigid ideas about waste, guilt, and doing the right thing.

Gould also wrote the film adaptation of Last Looks, starring Charlie Hunnam and Mel Gibson. He lives in Los Angeles, still moving between novels and screen work.