Auld Lang Syne (Simon and Simon zine)
You may also be looking for the Professionals zine For Auld Lang Syne.
| Zine | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Auld Lang Syne |
| Publisher: | Agent With Style |
| Editor: | |
| Author(s): | Christine Jeffords |
| Cover Artist(s): | |
| Illustrator(s): | |
| Date(s): | June 2003 (date on the editorial), May 2005 (publisher's date in the zine) |
| Medium: | |
| Size: | |
| Genre: | |
| Fandom: | Simon and Simon |
| Language: | English |
| External Links: | |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Auld Lang Syne is a gen Simon and Simon novel by Christine Jeffords.
Summary
From a distributor, Agent With Style, who (in 2005) calls it the first Simon and Simon zine from Jeffords in "over ten years":
Years ago in Vietnam, a buddy of Rick Simon's went MIA in a wild nighttime attack. Now his wife contacts Simon & Simon for help. Her oldest son has become involved in something she fears is a cult, and she seeks peace of mind. The brothers' investigation leads them to unexpected revelations, and Rick and Tamsin to what may be romance.
From the Editorial
Some of you who read this essay and the novel it precedes may well be comparative newcomers to Simon & Simon, though I hope that the sight of my name on the title page may attract some of my old readers from a dozen years ago. It surprises me a little that the show still has a fandom, fully fifteen years after its last original segment was broadcast, nine years after the premiere of the reunion movie In Trouble Again, and God knows how long since it last appeared in syndication. It wasn’t, after all, a really wild success like Star Trek, whose fandom is now approaching its fortieth birthday and is well into its second, if not third, generation of devotees. And yet, all these years later, we've recently seen original Gunsmoke paperback novels in the bookstores (though they failed of wild success, owing probably to the fact that the man who wrote them seems never to have watched the show!), so I guess anything is possible. And then, of course, there's the surprisingly good reaction engendered by Cinda Gillilan’s new Riptide zine, BOSS & BODACIOUS, which apparently was so well received as to almost force her into planning further issues—after swearing the thing was a one-shot! I wish Columbia House would add S&S to their Re-TV line; I suspect it might give a new injection of life to the fandom.
For those who are indeed unfamiliar with my work, AULD LANG SYNE is the latest in a long line of S&S adventures under my byline: as this is typed, over 30 published Missing Scenes, short stories, and novellas and seven full-length novels, the last of which were written a decade ago and published in 1992—the long time-out being a result chiefly of lack of money, which kept me out of contact with fandom as a whole, and my move to Pennsylvania, which completely disrupted my life. One Australian zined went so far as to name me "the definitive SiSi writer," and though I don't agree with her (in my own opinion Brenda Anders deserves the title more than I do), I think I was certainly one of the more prolific. (To this day, the only S&S fanwriter I know of who's turned out more stories than I have is Kenda Buxton, and I think I still have her beat in sheer word count.) And I also constructed an entire background Universe for Rick and A.J., partly from the information given in the series and partly out of my own research and imagination. (Rick's service as an advisor to the ARVN is an example of the latter, though his having done two tours in Nam is not—see "What's in a Gnome?," in which he first refers to them.)
MIA bracelets, if I remember correctly, were largely a phenomenon of the '70's, an outgrowth of the shift in grassroots opinion that began to lead so many members of mainstream society—the people who voted Richard Nixon into the Presidency on his promise that he had "a secret plan for peace," since at least half of college kids still couldn't legally take any part in doing so—to the conviction that U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War was a mistake. Some people who bought the bracelets no doubt did so to memorialize a friend or relative who was MIA, but others probably wanted to show their sympathy for the men risking their all 7000 miles from home in a war their commanders apparently didn't really want to win. You seldom see anyone wearing one nowadays (though one photo of Sonny Bono, published on the cover of TV Guide soon after his death in early '98, does show him with what appears to be one clinched around his wrist), perhaps in part because North Vietnam supposedly returned all its POWs in 1973, perhaps because of the ongoing surrender of physical remains, and perhaps because of the construction of the Wall in Washington, which provided a larger, more national focus for these sympathies.
When Rick first appeared with his bracelet on his wrist (broadcast-wise in "Almost Foolproof," fourth season; chronologically in "Simon Without Simon," which, though it was first aired during the January '85 sweeps, was in fact set a month or so earlier—see the date on Williams's deposition in Part II), I wondered why he had chosen to don one after so many years, even though he was still refusing, at the time, to discuss the war or his feelings about it in any depth (hence his breakdown in "I Thought the War Was Over," a couple of years later). It was his decision which led me to get my own bracelet, which I wear to this day — and believe me, it took some doing to find an organization that still offered them! I have presumed that Rick went to the same source for his.
From the beginning, it seemed clear to me that Rick wasn't so much expressing solidarity with his fellow troopers — any Vietvet would have that attitude, an outgrowth of the intense bonding that took place between Americans in a hostile, unfamiliar environment — as he was trying to articulate something very personal. Just whose name, I wondered, was on that little band of polished steel? And why had it taken Rick so long to get it?
AULD LANG SYNE was written, in part, to answer those questions, and in part because I had read from time to time about the religious-cult problem and wanted to address it as the core of an S&S mystery. (After all, the series itself ventured into some pretty serious subjects over the eight-season run — juvenile runaways ("Slither"), the rape of senior-age women ("Sudden Storm"), the Central American political situation ("Nuevo Salvador"), to say nothing of its ongoing occult angle ("Guessing Game," "Double Play," even "Play It Again, Simon").)
As I usually do, I started out with some basic parameters: the client was to be a woman Rick knew and liked — indeed, there was to be a romantic/sexual angle to their relationship; the cult was to be genuine in its beliefs, led by a charismatic young figure somewhat on the order of Marjoe Gortner; and someone on the inside was to be up to something underhanded. Not till I literally began to write the first scenes did I start fleshing out the leader's background, inventing an antiwar-activist father, for example. As for his break with his parents' church and the subsequent legal entanglements, that — like many other background bits in this and other fannish tales I've written — was adapted from something that really did happen in similar circumstances (in this case it happens to be the early career of David Koresh, Branch Davidian). I knew from the beginning that I wanted Nathaniel Faraday to be innocent of any wrongdoing or hidden agenda, but it wasn't till I was almost three-quarters of the way through the story that I realized how the conspiracy (or conspiracies) really worked. Stories act that way sometimes; that’s why a word-processing program is an author’s best friend — you can always go back, put new things in, change things around, to fit the way the plot is developing, without having to retype the whole MS. (Sometimes I wonder how I wrote as much as I did before I joined the Computer Age in 1999 — and bought my own e-Machine two years later.)
The framing story, as you'll see by the headings, is set just prior to the Big Break of "Simon Without Simon," while the case itself occurs about eighteen months before that, in March of '83. I've tried, through Janet and Father John, to present a balanced picture of what cults (which should perhaps more accurately be called alternative religions) are about, based on research in both anti-cult and tolerant literature. (The beliefs of the Soldiers of God are a synthesis of several actual cults and my own personal creed.) And, using that MIA bracelet as a springboard, I've also articulated some very personal thoughts of my own regarding the POW issue. But what I've tried above all to do — as the writers of S&S always did, regardless of the theme they might be addressing—is to turn out a plausible, suspenseful, true-to-the-original-concept tale of two brothers who are each other's best friends.
I would very much appreciate any LoCs you may care to address to tell me whether I succeeded.