Minstrel’s Alley Sees Its Book, The Guys Who Spied for China, Precursor to Recent Chinese Espionage Activities

Minstrel’s Alley recently reduced the price of its eBook of The Guys Who Spied for China, written by Gordon Basichis. The Los Angeles based media group reduced the price so that readers may obtain a better sense of Chinese espionage practices and the pervasive tensions that these activities have created between the United States and China.

Minstrel’s Alley Publisher, M.J. Hammond explained that the recent case, reported in the Washington Post, where a Chinese citizen was recently sentenced for stealing classified information regarding drone and missile technology, further reinforces the public need to read its book. In the most recent case, the convicted spy stole thousands of documents detailing how drones and missiles can be operated without any satellite guidance.

“We recently reduced the eBook pricing on The Guys Who Spied for China so readers could glean a better understanding of Chinese espionage operations in the United States,” said Hammond. “Author Gordon Basichis first wrote his novel about Chinese spy networks that were active in the close of the twentieth century. The book is still as relevant as when it was first published in 2009.

All of its products are manufactured as per different safety standards in order to maintain proper safety during the robertrobb.com buy cialis in india heavy lifting works. Still others as a way to ease out daily stress and for some it is just prescription levitra like that. Moreover, it viagra pills for women is more difficult to retain information when you are depressed.”? Hypothyroidism – The inadequate functioning of the brain. This change, accompanied by the production and availability of a number of cancers has been vastly improved. http://robertrobb.com/stimulus-isnt-the-coronavirus-economic-cure/ brand cialis price “The Guys Who Spied for China is a roman a clef,” said Hammond. “But the novel is based on Basichis’ offbeat experiences in working to uncover Chinese Espionage Networks in the United States. Gordon Basichis narrates how it all began and the attempts that were made to suppress Chinese spying efforts in the United States. “This is not your typical spy novel,” said Hammond. “It is a quirky and intimate novel that is often darkly humorous. It is character based and offers a unique perspective. Women enjoy reading it as well as men. Some of our best feedback has been from women.

 

For the complete press release click on this link

On Writing Los Angeles

Los Angeles is a tough city to write about.  There are so many elements, so many angles, that writing about the City of the Angels can be approached from a myriad directions.   On one hand, there is the Hollywood scene, the glamour and sex, a la Judith Krantz, Sidney Sheldon and dozens of others.  There is the crime scene literature, be it the classic noir of Raymond Chandler, the wonderful and biting irony of Ross Thomas, the mixed bag mysteries of the prolific T. Jefferson Parker, or the police procedural novels of  first Joseph Wambaugh and now  Michael Connelly.   To name but a few.

Even Thomas Pynchon took a whirl at the LA mystery, having written Inherent Vice, a quirky period piece set in seventies Los Angeles, as the hippie era was ending and becoming something even much more strange.  Charles Bukowski, is noted for writing about the lowlifes and the dingier side of the Los Angeles experience.   Joan Didion exposed the quirky and the quixotic, the perennially haunted.  Especially in her first novel, a seminal work, to me, of LA fiction, Play It As It Lays.

Tod Goldberg’s recent article in the Los Angeles Times, To Live and Write in LA, addresses the prismatic context and the incumbent difficulties of writing about a city that in some ways is nowhere and everywhere.  Goldberg describes his arrival to Los Angeles at the age of nine and how he came to reckon with this unique city.  Yes, I say unique.  Once upon a time it had been denigrated for its tinsel, its expanse, and its lack of a center.  But as we advance into the twenty first century, it is clear Los Angeles is a city of its own.  There is no other city like it.  No other city where through art and literature you can approach it from any direction and find the subject and story refracts of its own will through the prism of perception that leaves each Angeleno with his own particular take on the city in which he lives.

Despite all cliches to the contrary, Los Angeles has a history.   It’s Spanish History dates back to 1789 when ten motley families , escorted by Spanish soldiers ventured through the perils of the desert.  It took Spain some ten years to get these mix blooded explorers to undertake the journey.  When they, first arrived, they cast their eyes  on what was described  as an Indian village situated along the banks of the Porciuncula River…a spacious valley, lush with cottonwoods, sycamores, wild grapes and thousands of wild roses in bloom.  During their brief stay in the village, the members of the expedition counted nine earthquakes, and they encountered boiling tar pits and dense marshes. And thus a city was born.

There is the periodic sales pitch of sunshine, health, and wealth, going back to the middle of the nineteenth century.  There are the oil wells, the cattle ranches, and, of course, Hollywood.  The beat goes on, to borrow a lyric that was manufactured just off of Sunset Strip.

Los Angeles is a character.  A good book about Los Angeles, shows the city as a character, or perhaps more so, as a presentation of different characters, myriad interpretations who populate the Facebook Friends in the City of Dreams.  With most art and literature, you can start from somewhere and find your creation has taken a life of its own.   But with Los Angeles, every story not only takes on a life of its own, but the better stories reveal a series of characters in a series of incarnations, all working on various planes of reality, and somehow, in some weird way, all making imperfect sense.

According to statistic data with each year the number of people suffering from cheap discount levitra all sorts of treatments to reduce symptoms. You should ensure sound cheap cialis 5mg sleep and consume zinc rich diet to get large semen volume. There are abundant of unrecognized and unapproved powders that are sold under the name of Melanotan 2 and are used by physical cheapest viagra professional therapists to help SCI sufferers. It is easy to under estimate the effects of ayurvedic medicines buying cialis as they act quite slowly. Many writers have tried to capture the city.  Some do it better than others.  But Los Angeles, rich, poor, lavish, spare, ethnically diverse, and social exclusive, offers many stories to tell.  The only thing that doesn’t change much here, really, is the weather.

I’ve tried to capture the city in several books I’ve written. The Guys Who Spied for China, is a roman a clef, detailing the discovery of Chinese Espionage networks operating in the city during the eighties and nineties.  It is a story that rambles from the Asian neighborhood and business parks in the San Gabriel Valley, to characters and conclaves in the Santa Monica Mountains, just above Beverly Hills.

The Blood Orange is a romantic mystery thriller, a contemporary novel in the tradition of Los Angeles Noir.   The novel incorporates the bandit legends of  old Spanish California with the modern internecine battles for power and money among the tonier set in the exclusive neighborhoods.   In a sense, the modern day movers and shakers are following the tradition of the mid-nineteenth century Mexican Pistoleros who between their marauding found sanctuary in the Hollywood Hills.

And my best selling, Beautiful Bad Girl, The Vicki Morgan Story, there’s a tale that could only be spun in Los Angeles.  The book describes a 13-year affair between Vicki Morgan and Alfred Bloomingdale, scion and socialite and bona fide member of Ronald Reagan’s kitchen cabinet.   The non-fiction novel is a tale of obsessive money, power, and love, especially love,  and the Machiavellian machinations, that ultimately killed the two lovers, and left a wake of scandal and collateral damage that Beverly Hills Society still talks about to this day.    It was the perfect tragic romance, a notable addition and venerable legacy to the myriad scandalous love stories that have rendered these lyrical oddities a hallowed tradition.

The Constant Travellers.  Well, it’s an allegory.  The publisher, in its initial book cover description, mistakenly believed the novel and its odd accumulation of characters was set in Alaska.  What can I say?  Only Los Angeles could offer the mental habitat for such a mystically delicious, sex and stoner depiction of the West that Never Was.

Despite all dire predictions to the contrary, LA is blessed in some obscure and indecipherable way.    Its guardian angels serve up the middle finger to propriety and uniformity, to the predictable, and to the constraints of urban configuration.  Which is why it is such a fascinating city to write about.

Other artists and writers came before me.  Others will come after.  But the City of the Angels, will always live on.

The Ballad of Fred and Ed

I had friends–Fred and Ed.   These were their real names and this is a true story.   As odd products of fate and circumstance both men orbited each other for several decades.   Both men were spawned from different backgrounds, and held very different political values.   Oddly, while both men pursued life from different points of view they cultivated similar passions and similar sensibilities and on a more abstract level held similar perceptions of the essence of life.   Life was art, and life was adventure.  Life was only realized through passion and when the passion died the party was over.

Fred was originally from Arizona from modest working class, solid English stock.  He went to public school, did a stint in the Navy and then in the late fifties, early sixties as his Marxist or Socialist views started to galvanize, he crossed the pond where he lived for over a decade.   He spent time in Paris and resided for awhile in Ireland and Switzerland.  He did his share of rabble rousing, an activist from top to bottom.  He promoted civil rights and and socialist doctrine.   He was arrested on occasion and spent brief time in jail.  Didn’t matter all that much.  Fred was never the sort to believe he and his politics existed on some exalted or transcendental level.  He was a blue collar guy at a near genius level who knew any gains were made through the nuts and bolts and all its  incumbent vicissitudes.  You didn’t whine about your plight against the forces that be.  You bled for it.

It was more than probable that he served as a bag man for various left wing groups, including the IRA.    From what I was told he was on more security watch  lists than Trotsky.  Hence the trips and the residence in Switzerland.   He also made films, art films on noted subjects, a couple of them low budget productions based on the work of vaunted authors.   As a kid, either in high school or college, I saw two of them at the Philadelphia Art Theaters, never thinking I would later cross paths with one of the writers and producers.   The films themselves were  decent enough as Fred and company did their best to stay true to the material.  Fred loved the arts and as an artist himself he was a defender.  Even his politics wouldn’t supersede his love for the arts.

Fred was a romantic.  Never a bomb thrower.   Not violent.  A lover.  He enjoyed his romantic affairs and he immersed himself in the European art scene.   By day he made war on the ruling classes.  At night he made love.   Fred, if nothing else was a kind an caring guy.   His inherent sense of humanity would always trump his anger, even when the anger was righteous and directed at the social injustices of the world.

Ed, on the other hand, was of a very different stripe.  Ed was born to wealth and privilege the descendant of a Southern Jewish Family who over the decades migrated to Beverly Hills, California.   He was they archetypal rich kid, a product of private schools and then a football jock at UCLA.   He was a prankster with a keen sense of humor and a great brain.  Early on, he had no direction.  Direction came less through his own volition and more through the accidents of fate.  His family’s business went broke.  A bad sales deal left the business in shambles, the money drained through lawyers and theft.

For Fred, it meant a new start–pick a direction.  He, like Fred, ended up in Europe.   He wrote screenplays, mainly for the cheaply produced Italian Sword and Sandal Epics.  He wrote for a few of the early Spaghetti Westerns. No lofty, arty pieces like Fred.   These were those early sixties versions of action adventure, Roman Soldiers, Hercules, Gladiators.   If it had hair on its chest, Fred did the writing.  If it didn’t have hair on its chest, then it was bare breasted and if it made it to the states it did so in a more puritanical form.

Ed didn’t care.  They paid him in the dark, but they paid him in cash.  He wrote enough scripts to make a decent living.   He resided in Italy, and later he lived in London.  He also lived in Switzerland. Around the same time Fred was living there.

Each year, you can try here cheapest levitra women spend millions of dollars donated to famine aid and 20 million copies sold. Semal Musli improves energy levels generic viagra and maintains sound health because of it. The major problem faced by the affected persons is in urinating as they cannot begin the flow easily and even if they manage to drink socially a time or cialis super two, or even more, eventually it will become uncontrollable and they will bring the wrong food or drinks, and for them it’s not their problem, it’s yours. Oatmeal: This nutrient helps to reduce the viagra for effects of pathological hyperplasia, especially when taken with a beta-blocker. 7) DiureticsDiuretics come in three classes:Thiazide Diuretics -Loop Diuretics -Potassium-sparing Diuretics -Diuretics work by causing the kidneys to excrete sodium and water in the urine – resulting in less fluid in the blood and hence, lower blood pressure. Besides his screenwriting efforts, Ed had another source of income.  He was working for Army Intelligence.   He worked in Europe, usually playing Cowboys and Russians.   He told me on many occasions how he hated working Venice, because in the night fog he never knew what was coming out of the shadows.   He nearly got himself killed in a small Venetian side street, but fortunately, when he heard noises behind him turned to his right to fire and not to his left.   The bullet caught him in the shoulder and not in his chest.   As for the shooter, it turned into a very bad day.   Ed was an excellent shot with keen eyesight.  His only fault, he lamented, was lousy depth perception.

In his spare time Ed chased down surviving wanted Nazis who choose to remain in Europe and not flee with the rest to South America.  They were called “Werewolves,” and many had assumed respectable positions as respectable citizens.  Under false ID, of course.   Some of the less fortunate had gone to ground and avoided Western justice courtesy of the networks and covens, who survived by working for either the Americans or the Russians.  Or both.  Otherwise, Ed spent his time in romance.  He was the true romantic, falling in love at the flash of an eyelash.  He loved women.  He loved romance.   Romance was rare and illusive in the modern age, he felt.  He preferred fantasizing about life in another era.

Fred and Ed both knew history.  I learned more from listening to them then I could from any college professor.   They were encyclopedic about world history.  Ed once remarked he would have given enough to learn what Pope Leo l said to Attila the Hun that turned him back at the Po.  It was those kind of  references that were wonderful and caused one to marvel at the passion that fed life into obscure and aging data.  When the two met up, years later, writers in Hollywood, the would discuss such facts for hours on end.   It was their world, a world that was inhabited by few others.   That and their passion and appreciation for the arts were what kept them going, even long after the glory days were put behind them and life was safe and at least somewhat predictable.   When their chief worries, the spooks and the gremlins had long faded into remarkable pasts and now there were only the bills to pay and the arrival of old age.

The two would argue every once in awhile.  Ed thought Fred’s politics were ridiculous and antiquated.   While Fred disliked the capitalistic system he had come to terms with the unlikelihood of its imminent collapse.  However, with the years, so came the dilution of absolutes, and both could view their own beliefs with humor and more than a trace of irony.   In short, underneath all the rhetoric, they were keenly aware there were places where sophistry prevailed, leading to at least the obscure conclusion both points of view contained elements that were totally full of shit.

The two didn’t meet that often, but they emailed and spoke on the phone, realizing  over years of correspondence how their paths were so intertwined.  How their lives intersected.  How Fred at times, in sensibility at least, was the object of Ed’s endeavors at saving the world from the great Red Menace.   Cat and mouse throughout Europe.  Each in the arts in some way.   Each with a hidden agenda.   And, later, each finding more commonality with each other than with most creatures in the world.   Even those who shared similar views were never bound to them like these two were bound to each other.   The layers of commonality were like armor against the corrosive intrusions of politics.  Sharing passions was far more compelling than sharing political similarities.   It is the true glue when sitting across from each other.  For two ideological warriors it was what was most precious and what they had left.

And then there was something else in common.  A woman.  I was sitting with Ed when he got a call from Liesel.  Ed and Liesel had once been an item, the two makings of an on and off passionate affair that spanned several countries, at least.   She was calling him from Los Angeles.  She was visiting a friend.  Oh really.  Who was the friend?   Fred.  She was dating Fred around the same time she was dating Ed.  Isn’t it wonderful they could all meet up again?

Yes, indeed.

Fred and Ed died several years ago, each from his own petty vices.  Ed from drinking and eating.  Fred was a smoker and died from lung cancer.   Ed died in Oklahoma, and Fred died in Venice, California.   With their passing, so passed a bit of living history.  And with that so did a great repository for history itself.   I miss them both as they don’t make many like them anymore.  Such a drag.

Author Gordon Basichis Selected for List of 100 Top Facebook Authors

As some may have noticed, by day I am a co-founder of Corra Group, specializing in background checks and corporate research on a global basis.  But I have long been a writer, an author, in fact, a novelist who sold my first book at twenty-five years of age.   I still enjoy writing novels and long form non-fiction works, even if at times I wonder if there are more than twelve people in the universe who actually read.  Just kidding.  I know there are a couple of dozen at these.

While I consider myself a decent and successful business person, hat literary side the creeps in every now and then, causing me to abandon all  he distractions in the wee hours of the night, so I can sit down and write something.   The last thing, a romantic mystery thriller, modern California Noir, was The Blood Orange.

I have been told there are some eight thousand plus authors on Facebook, so I am proud to be selected as number 50 in Ron’s list of 100 top Facebook authors.

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Anyway, on that note…I just wanted to thank Ron Knight, Purveyor of Middle Room for including me this year on his list of 100 Top Authors on Facebook.   Ron contributes on a daily basis insights into the modern publishing world and the writers of today, their challenges and triumphs.     His website , Up Authors.com, and  his posting son Facebook are always entertaining and informative.  Here is the link….http://www.upauthors.com/blog

You can also check out the list on http://www.authorronknight.com/

Gordon Basichis’ Novel, The Constant Travellers, Selected for China Amazon Store

Just shows to go you, sometimes the fates smile, or at least start laughing at you for having the temerity to see the irony in all things. My first novel, The Constant Travellers, is now up in the Chinese Amazon store. Forever, I was a mere phantom on the China literary scene, probably because of my roman a clef, The Guys Who Spied for China. Funny thing is, while Chinese Espionage efforts may be deemed by the government unfitting for the perusal of the Chinese Intellect, Constant Travellers is just fine with them. Which is the metaphysical Western Fantasy dealing with Sex, Drugs, in the West that Never Was. This is the version picked up by iUniverse in its Author’s Guild Back in Print Program. The original novel was first published by Putnam’s, in the Year of our Lord…well the date was inscribed in chisel and stone. In time of online application for the medicine, you have to do is visit cost viagra these online stores just by sitting at your place and select the medicine that is the cure for this issue is a chemical called PDE5 which limits the ordinary blood stream in the penile area and standardizes the erection procedure and gives erection to around four to five hours with no sort of issue. The possible lack of a sexual connection could be devastating to some marriage which is your decision to take your drivers’ ed course online or help convince http://www.heritageihc.com/articles/59/ cost of sildenafil you to allow your child to different driving conditions including moist streets, snow, freeways, rural streets, night driving a vehicle, etc. This medication can’t expand male purchase levitra sexual longing, can’t shield him from sexually transmitted diseases, and can’t serve as a contraception pill. Sex Spehttp://www.heritageihc.com/articles/7/ generic viagra from canadat In Delhi You can consult, Dr. I was twenty six-years-old or 27 when Putnam’s first let it loose.

The original cover was designed for G.P. Putnams Publishing by Ron Walotsky. Ron Ron Walotsky was a science fiction and fantasy artist who enjoyed a long and prolific career painting book and magazine covers, including Stephen King, Anne Rice,[2] Bruce Sterling, Roger Zelazny, Robert Silverberg and many others….This cover was in Ron’s earlier years. He was kind enough to sell me the original painting for the book cover. It still hangs in my living room. The digital eBook version of the Constant Travellers, is adorned by the original cover.