What sparked the idea for Mr. Monk in Trouble?
I always try to do things in the books that they either haven’t done in the TV series, can’t do, or are unlikely to do. I also try to challenge myself. In this case, I was able to do all of that with this one idea. I’ve always wanted to write a western… so I decided to give it a shot using Monk as a springboard. The story bounces between the 1850s and present-day, between Monk’s ancestor Artemis Monk (an assayer in a California Gold Rush town) and the Adrian Monk that we know and love. I did a lot more research for this one than I usually do for a Monk book. I took a week-long road trip through some California gold rush towns, took a bunch of pictures, then read a lot of books on the Gold Rush and frontier life in general, and mining techniques in specific. Once I got down to the actual writing, I imposed on the kindness of novelist Richard S. Wheeler, who has written some of the best westerns ever, to read some early drafts of the western sections to make sure that I wasn’t embarras
