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The Big Fix - Afterword to iBooks Edition (64K PDF
file)
"The Big Fix" was an accident.
The year was 1972. I was nearly broke, living in a rickety house in L. A.'s Echo
Park District with my then-wife and two baby boys and I had just
written a "serious" novel. Called "The Return," it was a grim affair about a
Cuban veteran of the Bay of Pigs who, on the tenth anniversary of that failed
invasion, kidnapped the son of the radical lawyer who lived across the street
and then proceeded to have a nervous breakdown for the next one hundred and fifty
pages. ...
Wild
Turkey - Preface to iBooks Edition (82K PDF file)
After the publication of The Big Fix, it felt
as if half the human race had a quarrel with me. Not all women, mind you,
but that substantial and growing subset called the
Women’s Movement. According to them, Moses Wine may have been a cool, anti-war
activist longhair, but, at heart, he was the same old macho bastard as his predecessors
Spade, Marlowe, and Hammer. He may have been able to roll a decent joint or identify
a Jimi Hendrix solo, but he never did the dishes or the laundry and, disgraceful
as it may sound,
frequently looked at women as sex objects. ...
Peking
Duck - Preface to iBooks Edition (52K PDF file)
Sometimes I wonder if I was a Communist dupe.
The visit I made to the People’s Republic of China in 1978 to research Peking
Duck was highly romantic and exciting (although hardly as exciting as the one
in the book). Kind of like certain L.A. nightclubs in the Eighties, it was very
difficult to get into Red China then, and you felt exclusive just to be there,
even if the “in” crowd was a couple of social workers and an unemployed political
organizer from the Valley. Once I was there, as far as I could tell, there was
only one other tour group in the entire country, an Ethiopian volley ball team.
We just happened to run into them at the Great Wall, and days later at a fishing
commune in
Manchuria. ...
California
Roll - Preface to iBooks Edition (61K PDF file)
At the beginning of the eighties, I was determined
to be what the hightech
industry now fondly refers to as an "Early Adaptor." My father was a radiologist
surrounded by giant, complicated machines and I suppose, subconsciously, I thought
that was what men did. Besides, I couldn't stand fussing with white-out and scribbling
on a yellow pad seemed hopelessly Nineteenth Century, so I was one of the first
of my writer friends to get into word-processing. ...
The Lost Coast - Preface to iBooks Edition (56K PDF file)
Of all my books, my mother thinks "The Lost Coast" is
the best. I don't know if she's right or not, but the publisher certainly
didn't feel the same way. HarperCollins dumped the book unceremoniously,
giving it far less attention than any of my previous publishers gave any
of the other Wine novels. Not only did they not advertise or promote the
book in any way, they printed it on paper so cheap the pages started to
brown around the edges before the books even got out of the stores. Then
they canceled my contract for the sequel before I had a chance to tell
them my next idea, let alone to write it. ...
The Celluloid Archipelago (from
the Los Angeles Times - 53K PDF file)
"I am telling everyone it is their chance to go to
Siberia and to come back," said
the Russian-accented voice on the phone. I was standing in my kitchen with my
ear cocked to the receiver while trying to get my four-year old daughter
to eat her broccoli.
The person on the other end was my old friend Masha Zereva, once president of
the
Soviet Screenwriter’s Union and now a hustling capitalist scribe like the rest
of us. ...
Spy Games (a profile of thriller writer Ross Thomas from the LA Weekly - 40K PDF file)
"Back in 1986, I found myself at a midnight meeting in the baronial hall of a Mexican hacienda, ostensibly to form the first
writers’ organization with members on both sides of the then Iron Curtain—the International Association of Crime Writers.
Around the table with me were Soviet “Robert Ludlum” Julian Semionov (a reputed KGB colonel),
Spanish novelist and chief theorist of euro-communism Vazquez Montalban and Mexican mystery writer Paco Taibo,
himself rumored to have been personal friends with Ché Guevara. ...
To Be a Hebrew in Hollywood (from Jewsweek - 82K PDA file)
"Making quality Jewish movies in Hollywood isn't easy. I should know. I've done it. ...
My Terrorism Problem and Yours (from
the Third Degree - 35K PDF file)
Every one of us has their September 11 stories and I am
sharing mine with you because I think it is, although unique to me, not uncommon
to writers. Earlier this
summer I was hard at work on what was to be my eighth Moses Wine detective novel,
a comeback book of sorts after having become somewhat lax with the series
while chasing the white rabbit of Hollywood down various movie business holes. ...
Wine and His Times (Kevin Burton
Smith's review of The Lost Coast - 101K PDF file)
What a long, strange trip it's been. Almost 30 years have
passed since Roger L. Simon first started gleefully poking a
stick at the soft white underbelly of the myths of the 1960s,
when he introduced Moses Wine, his cynical Los Angeles
hippie dick, in the classic novel The Big Fix (1973). For a
country still reeling from that fractious decade and its fallout, it
was a courageous move, a brave slap in the face that
acknowledged that the times hadn't changed quite as much as
or necessarily in the ways that everyone had expected. Or
hoped. ... Quotes and Reviews (119K PDF file)
[Wild Turkey] includes most of the ingredients necessary
for good, hardboiled fiction -- realism, a sense of locale, social criticism,
a hint of literary pretentiousness and a bluntly
humorous conclusion that even Raymond Chandler might have applauded. Wine is
the latest in an unbroken line of popular private eyes -- molded by Dashiell
Hammett in the
20's, psychoanalyzed by Ross Macdonald in the '50s and '60s and now dragged kicking
and screaming into the '70s by Simon to face a new decade's cultural crunch...
Here, obviously, is a mystery writer to reckon with. And a private eye Los
Angeles can be proud
to call its very own. -- Dick Lochte, Los Angeles Times Book Review ...
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