Moses Wine series The Big Fix Roger L. Simon began to develop the idea for Moses Wine when Alan Rinzler, who was working as an editor at
Straight Arrow Books, a venture by
Rolling Stone, suggested that a book Simon had written about a veteran of the
Bay of Pigs Invasion who goes crazy and kidnaps the son of a radical lawyer, had poor commercial prospects. Rinzler suggested that Simon do something "more Rolling Stone". Responding to speculation that he had uncovered information related to the killing of
Alex Odeh, a regional director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination League who had spoken out regarding the takeover of an Italian cruise-ship by Palestinians, Simon said that while he had visited Israel twice and talked to Jews and Arabs in the
West Bank, he had not made any inquiries about the case. Simon said, "This is not fact, this is fiction. If I had accidentally uncovered any information, I would have gone right to the FBI. It's a capital case."
California Roll At the start of
California Roll, Wine is feeling his age and recovering from a
mid-life crisis when he is invited to
Silicon Valley by Alex Wiznitsky, a young genius known as the Wiz, who wants him to become head of security for Tulip, a computer company that rose from backstreet obscurity into the
Fortune 500 in only three years. Soon after, one of the Wiz's collaborators, another genius known as the Last Nerd, has disappeared. Wine eventually follows the case to Japan where roughly half the story takes place.
The Straight Man In "The Straight Man" Wine has quit his posh job in corporate security and is back in West Los Angeles where he is half-heartedly doing private detective work from his apartment while trying to cure his mental angst with regular visits to a psychiatrist. This psychiatrist, himself disabled and using a wheelchair, asks Wine to investigate a possible murder. The dead man, Mike Ptak, was the husband of a patient being treated by the psychiatrist.
Moses Wine as autobiography Simon says that the books are partially autobiographical. He said, "the series reflects where I was and where I am. It's my diary. I have to have some new thing happening in my life that engages me. I wrap a mystery around that. That's why there aren't more books. I've always been told that I should be doing one every year-and-a-half. I can't. I can't treat it like a television series, every week a new mystery." Simon published eight books about Wine over a 30-year period, from 1974 to 2003. No new Moses Wine volumes have appeared since then.
Non-fiction books Turning Right at Hollywood and Vine: The Perils of Coming Out Conservative in Tinseltown First published as "Blacklisting Myself", this short memoir was Simon's first book-length work of non-fiction. It describes his gradual political turn from left to right as well as many personal adventures in movie business working with such well known figures as Richard Dreyfuss, Richard Pryor, Woody Allen and Paul Mazursky.
''I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn't Already'' This book argues that moral narcissism is a threat to democracy in the United States. Unlike the conventional narcissism of a Greek youth transfixed by his handsome reflection in a pool, this is a narcissism of ideology. What you proclaim are your ideas and values, Simon warns, not their results are what makes you "good". The first chapter of this book was reprinted in Commentary magazine. == Screenplays ==