James C. Wilson

"I came of age reading the detective novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. I loved how these stories evoked a sense of place, especially Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles. Chandler's The Long Goodbye is stiil one of my favorite novels. I also loved how these novels could reveal the fractures in the societies they represented: that is, the cultural, ethnic, and class conflicts that divided people.
Living in Santa Fe during the 1970s provided me with much the same material and inspiration. During that turbulent decade the entrenched Hispanic social and political fabric of the city came under siege by an influx of wealthy Anglos from the East and West coasts and from a wide variety of activists and revolutionaries demanding change and seeking power. Among these groups were La Raza and Native American activists and the counterculture movement personified by Dennis Hopper and his followers who invaded Northern New Mexico. I sometimes refer to this decade as the "fighting seventies."
Peyote Wolf, the first of my Fernando Lopez Santa Fe mysteries, attempts to expose some of the social fractures that still exist in Santa Fe while telling a whopper of a tale."

A list of the eleven (11) books in the Fernando Lopez Santa Fe Mystery Series may be found HERE.

Peyote Wolf