Turning Right at Hollywood and Vine: The Perils of Coming Out Conservative in Tinseltown (Large Print 16pt) by Roger L. Simon

Author:Roger L. Simon [Simon, Roger L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography
ISBN: 9781459610910
Google: Gn8vlfu-eo8C
Goodreads: 11393161
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant
Published: 2011-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

7

THE INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF CRIME WRITERS, THREE TRIPS TO RUSSIA, AND HOW I CAME TO BE RECRUITED BY THE KGB

In 1987, when I was still living with my second wife, Renee, in Malibu, I received a letter from Mexico City, which had an immense effect on my life for several years, sending me around the world several times and even leading to my being solicited by the KGB—how seriously and with what intent I will never know.

The letter was handwritten in English by someone named Paco Taibo II, evidently a Mexican history professor and mystery writer. It alluded to him and his friends enjoying the movie of The Big Fix in Mexico City and invited me to come to Mexico to help form a group called the International Association of Crime Writers. They would pay for my ticket and there would be writers from both sides of the Iron Curtain. Among those invited, it said, were John le Carré, Georges Simenon, and Graham Greene.

I looked twice at the letter to see if I had read it correctly. Was this for real? Had I died and gone to mystery writer heaven? Perhaps it was a practical joke, but it was a strange one if it was. The postmark really was Mexican. The letter also mentioned a fourth writer—Julian Semyonov of the Soviet Union—whose name I didn’t recognize. But that didn’t matter. The first three names were sufficiently august for a Nobel Prize shortlist. I RSVPed that I’d come. In a few days, I had a letter back with a ticket enclosed. If it was a joke, it had just become several degrees more elaborate.

I was met at the Mexico City airport a couple of weeks later by a driver from the Ministry of Culture who chauffeured me on a winding five-hour trip to the state of Queretaro, the altiplano of Central Mexico. We continued through the colonial city of Queretaro—by now it was after ten at night; I had left Los Angeles later than I’d wanted because of movie commitments—to the nearby pueblo of San Juan del Rio, pulling up at a hacienda illuminated with spotlights. Paco Taibo II, a squat Sancho Panza-like man, came forward the moment I got out of the car (how did he know I was there?). Speaking in rapid-fire English while sucking on a cigarette and swilling Coke from the bottle—two things I’d learn the Mexican mystery writer was never without—he helped me deposit my bags in a suite (apparently I was staying with him) and led me upstairs to the second floor.

There, the Don Quixote atmosphere persisted as we headed down a corridor lined with portraits of ruff-collared nobles interspersed with shields and halberds to a banquet room where ten or so men and one woman were assembled around a long table. I was apparently the last to arrive. I scanned the group for some sign of le Carré, Simenon, or Greene, when a white, bearded hulk of a man in a safari jacket, a

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