WINE-SOAKED WHODUNIT AS A SIGN OF THE TIMES

It is a way of rationalizing a pleasurable addiction, no doubt, but those of us who love detective stories argue with righteous fervor that the whodunits carry swatches of social history along with their clues and hot pursuits.

Even Agatha Christie, a puzzle-maker first and last, couldn’t help providing hints and tastes of an earlier England. Across the sea, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald (the founding fathers) are by now at least as interesting for the world they revealed (and for the heroes who reflected that world) as for their plots or even their vivid styles.

It was the possibilities of the detective story as a deliberate work of social history that led Roger Simon to commence his remarkable Moses Wine series. Wine, a battered but surviving idealist out of the ‘60s, is the reluctant private eye who went through several editions and then into film in “The Big Fix,” played on screen by Richard Dreyfuss and scripted by Simon himself. “Peking Duck” and “Wild Turkey” followed.

Wine is back this summer in “California Roll,” in which he is lured into the corporate world as head of security for a Silicon Valley computer firm run by an elusive whiz kid who is the apple of the industry’s eye. The adventures take Wine to Japan and leave him newly persuaded that the suited-up corporate life is unsuitable for a ‘60s radical who is not yet a burnt-out case.

Simon has also just finished the rough cut of his first venture as a director, “Inside Adam Swit,” from a script he wrote with his wife, Renee Missel, about a high school senior who fantasizes about being an anchorman and is led into adventures.

But Simon is also already deep into research for the next Wine, the fifth, which will involve the worlds of rock ‘n’ roll and expensive therapy, entwined. He intends the series to go on as long as the words flow.

He was at Dartmouth and the Yale Drama School, aiming to be a playwright and director, during the ‘60s. “People assume I was at Berkeley because Moses Wine was,” Simon says, “but I’m a later arrival.”

He’d written two novels. The second, when he was 21, was called “Heir” and became a film, “Jennifer on My Mind,” scripted by Erich Segal, in 1971. He didn’t like the results, but meanwhile the novels had brought him to Hollywood for some other scriptwriting assignments. When a third novel was rejected as too downbeat, a friend in publishing asked Simon if he had any slightly more commercial ideas.

“I’d written 30 pages of an autobiographical novel. I’d read Hammett, Chandler and Macdonald and I’d realized that they’d created the best record of this place in a certain time, because it was their place, and their time. It’s still the best record.”

He invented the name Moses Wine during the conversation with the publishing friend, he says, and the friend agreed to take the book, solely on the basis of their chat. “I’ve done four now, and I see that it’s the way for me to do a kind of diary of my generation.”

He researched “California Roll” in the Silicon Valley, and is still nervous about what experts will think of the book. “I’m not a scientist and what I know about computers is what anybody who runs a word processor knows--not much.”

Simon also did research in Japan, with the help of his Japanese publisher, and ran across the Maltese Falcon Society, a group of aficionados of film noir and private-eye literature. He addressed the society, as Moses Wine does in the novel.

He ventured forth as a director partly because of the familiar frustration of the writer at not finally having complete control of his material, partly because he is, as he says, “ever restless” and partly because “when you’re 40, it’s time to get out of the room, out from behind the typewriter or the word processor.”

It was, he adds, a tough transition. “It’s a big leap from the mentality of the writer to the mentality of the director. As a novelist, you’re the final product. Even if it’s never published, the creative process is completed.

“But the screenplay exists at several levels, including being the advertisement for the project. As Jay Presson Allen once told me, you’ve got to please everyone.”

The director is running a team, and Simon came away with new respect for what the director does and a new appreciation for a remark of Milos Forman’s, to the effect that the director’s most important work with an actor is before the actor gets the part, when director and actor come to an agreement on the nature of the character.

Simon also perceived a difference: “You can get better as a director. But you’re a good writer or you’re not; you’re born with it or you’re not.” He surrounded himself on “Inside Adam Swit” with very good people, including cinematographer Donald McAlpine, who did “Breaker Morant.” Thom Mount is the executive producer.

In a sense the new film continues his diary by other means. “There is an anti-yuppie bias detectable in it,” Simon says with a grin, “a critique of ‘80s materialism. The 17-year-old is our hero obligatoire of the moment. His parents (my generation, of course) are seen very darkly--from protest to BMWs.” Simon, self-observant to a fault, drives a BMW.

He is eager to direct again but in the meantime he returns to the keyboard refreshed. “I’ll end up doing Gray Panther detective stories,” he says.