The Anger of Compassion

All right, this guy can use "alright..."

...and he does, with impunity, in his latest book. And I'll still bust him for it, but...but...but damn, Roger L. Simon's stuff is good. Good.

The premise of his first book, The Big Fix, is that early Sixties Berkeley radical Moses Wine is a licensed private detective in L.A. Not so farfetched when you think about it: the classic hardboiled private eyes were all more than a bit outside the mainstream, from the iconic Sam Spade through L.A.'s own Philip Marlowe and New York's Mike Hammer all the way to Fort Lauderdale's "salvage consultant," Travis McGee. Or, if not entirely outside the mainstream, they at least view it caustically. So Moses Wine fits in with this literary tradition and The Big Fix is a pretty wild read, and as one who is both a Berkeley radical and pot smoker (not to mention Clue player), Wine is definitely not mainstream. But Marlowe's creator, Raymond Chandler, argued seriously in his essay "The Simple Art of Murder" that the private investigator must be a singular man indeed, that a worthwhile fictional detective "must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor--by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it," and that he "talks as the man of his age talks--that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness."

The story is this man's adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.

The new Simon book is Director's Cut, and the Moses Wine of 2003 is not ashamed of the Moses Wine of 1973 or of 1963. But he is also divorced, the father of grown children, and the husband of a former FBI agent twenty years his junior. As he tells you at the beginning of his story

I knew I was in trouble when I was starting to agree with John Ashcroft--me a lifelong card-carrying left/liberal and graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, who had espoused every so-called progressive cause from anti-nuke to pro-choice to saving the West Indian manatee, arrested at a half dozen demonstrations and bashed over the head by at least as many cops, nodding approvingly at the utterances of our Attorney General, a man who, a mere decade or two earlier, would have delighted in locking me in the slammer and throwing away the proverbial key. And I wasn't even embarrassed by it.

He goes on to say "Of course I wasn't the only one." Wine is living in the post-911 world and thinks he has a pretty good idea what that means. And when he ends up in Prague to provide security for a movie set, and the Islamic militants...

But no: this is a mystery story, and mystery there must remain. So, no spoilers. I'll just say that Wine doesn't join the FBI, nor hook up with the Islamists or the Earth Liberation Front, and at no point does he become a vegan or a Marine.

Or a blogger. But his creator, Roger L. Simon, has done so, and he's a fine blogger indeed. His take on the new editor at The New York Times? Hey, it's a liberal paper, it's going to have a liberal editor. Get over it. He calls Arianna Huffington's television appearances as political commentator a "form of media pollution." More like that at his blog.

In the essay I quoted above, Chandler writes, "Hemingway says somewhere that the good writer competes only with the dead." Maybe so. Does Moses Wine live up to the ideals Raymond Chandler established for fictional detectives? Is he another McGee, another Marlowe? Only one way for you to find out. But as for competing with the dead, I've put Simon on a list of mine which includes Peter Dickinson, John Dickson Carr, Eric Ambler, and Alan Furst: they are writers of mystery and suspense, I want to read more of them, and only some of them are dead. Perhaps he'd regard this as undue praise, but as he urges conservative readers of The New York Times: Roger, get over it.

Roger L. Simon writes good stuff. He's not dead. But he owes me for that "alright."

Posted by Craig Ceely at August 15, 2003 10:33 PM