of a contradiction in those days.
“Couldn’t you do something more Rolling Stone?” he asked me. If only I could, I thought. At that moment I was pretty close to broke. No Hollywood jobs. No novel. Two little kids and a wife, and no prospects. My father’s warnings about going to medical school as a backup were sounding all too accurate. But then something came out of me in a rush, something I’d never thought of before. “Y’know,” I said, “I’ve been reading a lot of detective novels lately … Ross Macdonald, Raymond Chandler … maybe I could do a detective for our generation … Left-wing, hippie-ish … smokes hash instead of drinks booze…”
Alan’s eyes lit up. “Wow, that’s great!” he said, “How fast can you do it…? And what do you want to call your dick?” “Moses Wine,” I said, equally impetuously. That was the name of the protagonist in an autobiographical novel I’d been playing with, for lack of anything better to do.
“Perfect,” Alan said. Then he added, “Make him divorced, with kids,” already identifying with the character.
About six weeks later I had written The Big Fix, which became a best-seller. It has been published in a half dozen editions in the U.S. since and in over a dozen languages. It also jump-started my Hollywood career and was made into a movie starring Richard Dreyfuss, for which I did the script. I wrote seven more “Moses Wine” books, which won awards in the U.S. and abroad, and made me friends in many countries.
In other words, it changed my life. Now I was the guy who wrote the radical hippie detective. Sometimes I liked the idea. Sometimes I wished I did something else, something with more apparent gravitas. Why not make films à la Antonioni, perhaps, or write fat, impenetrable novels in the style of Gaddis—or anyone else whose books appeared on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, not on the back pages under “Crime.” But Moses Wine was what I was most identified with for many years, and it wasn’t so bad. I’m not going to go on here about the ever-shifting line between popular and serious fiction, or about whether Edmund Wilson was correct in his attack on the mystery genre in “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” It was never an argument that interested me, except in the areas of pride and ego. I didn’t like being in the back of the bus. But intellectually I was and am bored by the question. If Wilson didn’t like mysteries, that’s fine with me. I’ve always preferred Graham Greene to Edmund Wilson anyway.
My strategy for writing The Big Fix, and the Moses Wine novels in general, was a simple one. I just selected a crime I thought relevant, put myself in the role of detective, and used as much of myself as possible, pulling in as many details from my personal life and times as I could. I never really outlined the books, just made them up as I went along, “taught myself the story,” as Gore Vidal described his own process. I didn’t even always know “whodunit” in advance. In first person detective fiction, I told myself, this was a superior technique, since it put the author in the emotional and psychological position of the detective, baffled by the crime and trying to figure it out until the end. It would also add spontaneity. Privately, however, I was embarrassed and insecure about my casual approach until, a few years on, while appearing on a panel for aspiring writers with Tony Hillerman—then considered a master of the genre for his books starring Navajo detective Jim Chee—I was asked the question of questions: “Do you outline your stories or do you make them up as you go along?” On the spot in front of an audience of perhaps two hundred with a tape recorder going, I could not tell a lie. “I make them up as I go along,” I admitted. The unexpected sigh of relief next to me came from the multiple-award-winning Hillerman. He did, too, he told the audience, who appeared confused by these surprise admissions from supposed professionals in the form. This was not what they had learned in school.
Of course, the secret to my thrillers was that I stayed as close as possible to the zeitgeist. Indeed, that was easy, because the impulse to make an impact on the affairs of the day was what propelled my desire to do the Moses Wine series in the first place. In a way, it was my first, bizarre entry into blogging—blogging with a plot, you might call it. The Big Fix, as an example, was written at the height of the McGovern campaign of 1972, for which I was walking precinct. I simply turned the bland peacenik McGovern into the bland peacenik Miles Hawthorne and changed the background from a presidential to a California senatorial campaign. (Ah, fiction!) For the mystery premise, I had Hawthorne (McGovern) being smeared, his campaign endangered, by the backing of Howard Eppis—an Abbie Hoffman-style renegade who was making statements to the effect that Hawthorne was the man finally to bring the dreamedof revolution to capitalist America.
Moses Wine was brought into the case to find this Eppis, if indeed it really was Eppis, by his old Berkeley girlfriend Lila Shea, now a Hawthorne campaign worker. (“The last time I saw Lila Shea,” it began, “we were making love in the back of a Chevy hearse across from the Oakland Induction Center. Tear gas was going off in our ears…. etc.”) My Moses doesn’t care much for Hawthorne (too middle-of-the-road), but Lila is killed not long after they see each other again and he takes the case to avenge her death. Classic detective stuff, with a Sixties spin.
I had no idea how well it was going to work. I was just having fun. Partly for that reason, I brought in the character of Aunt Sonya—a wiseacre Jewish great aunt with a socialist-anarchist background straight out of the Yiddishe bund—as a kind of sidekick and conscience to Moses not to stray from the radical line. (In the movie version, she joked about her romantic relations with Bakunin. “He was a very good dancer,” she said.) I never had such an aunt, but in those days I think I wished I had. I came from that Jewish-WASP background and to me the old socialists, closer to my wife Dyanne’s family but still distant even from them, were warmer, more authentic people, haymishe in the Yiddish expression.
When I look at this from a contemporary perspective, my move toward neoconservative politics stems, in part, anyway, from a similar impulse. I wanted to join those former Trotskyites—the Podhoretzes and the Kristols—in what I imagined to be their haymishe pro-democracy world. Of course, I never would have conceived of this odyssey when writing The Big Fix. In those days I worried whether I was radical enough. Was I a sell-out, taking advantage of my lefty friends and connections? Ironically, years later, when I became a friend of John Podhoretz, the scion of the neocon family and his father’s successor as the editor of Commentary, he told me that the Moses Wine books were the only left-wing literature of our generation that he could stand. He identified with the character, and with his humor, in spite of himself.
Even before it was published, The Big Fix was given a boost by Ross Macdonald (the pen name of Kenneth Millar) who was then the dean of American detective fiction and on the cover of Newsweek. Phillip Handler, a professor of mine at Dartmouth, had passed the manuscript to a friend of his who was friends with Millar/Macdonald. I was in awe of Macdonald, preferring his work even to Chandler and Hammett’s for its more intellectually complex Freudian underpinnings. I assumed that he wouldn’t be impressed with my pastiche. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Not only did he admire my work, he gave it the most extraordinary send-off imaginable, calling it a revolution in the field. I haven’t had a comparable experience in my professional life to when I first opened that letter from Ken, not even the day I found out I was nominated for an Academy Award for the screenplay of Enemies: A Love Story. The Big Fix, after all, was all mine; Moses Wine was all mine. And I knew that, with his backing, it would be noticed.
Several weeks later I drove up to meet Millar at his home in Santa Barbara. When I arrived, he was waiting in the courtyard of the El Patio Mexican Restaurant wearing a black Borsalino. I was wearing a similar hat, signature apparel for detective writers, as if we’d modeled ourselves on film noir characters and belonged to the famous LAPD Hat Squad circa 1940. Millar greeted me like an old friend. Of all the writers I’ve ever met, Ken was the most generous with his colleagues. Unlike the many authors who denigrate their competition, sometimes viciously, he made an effort to encourage young talent and even to buck up older veterans after years of failure.
I
