With the release of Oliver Stone’s new film Savages, a broader audience is set to discover the wondrous fiction of source author Don Winslow.

Winslow has already received much critical praise and royalties for a series of books framed around the notorious drug-dealing past of Laguna Beach. Before Savages and the just-released prequel The Kings of Cool, there was the author’s debut 1997 effort. As Winslow explains in today’s must-read OC Weekly cover story by Nick Schou, he cranked out that work from a very unusual perch:

Everything changed with The Death and Life of Bobby Z, which led to a three-book deal that allowed him to become a full-time writer. Winslow wrote the book on the train between San Juan Capistrano and downtown LA’s Union Station, during his commute to and from his day job.

Each leg of the journey took just more than an hour, and Winslow wrote one chapter per trip, two per day. “When I’d hear the conductor say, ‘Union Station, 10 minutes,’ whatever was happening in that chapter, I’d wrap it up,” he recalls. “It worked miracles.”

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According to a profile piece in the Long Beach Post, one of the top Google search results for OC Weekly journalist Nick Schou (pictured) is a page titled “Nick Schou liar.” The personal attack was put up by a group of 9/11 conspiracy theorists, the Citizen Investigation Team, after a related 2008 Schou write-up.

Then there are all those who continue to believe that the focus of Schou’s 2006 book, Kill the Messenger: How the CIA’s Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb, did not actually commit suicide. Despite the author-reporter’s thorough evidence to the contrary, he says some people will never be swayed:

In the course of researching his own stories, Schou became friendly with [San Jose Mercury News reporter] Webb, consulting Webb via fax and even providing Webb new information…

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This week marked the beginning of an Orange County trial relating to John Chamberlain, a Theo Lacy Facility (pictured) inmate who was brutally murdered in October 2006 by five other prisoners. Nick Schou, a reporter with the OC Weekly, has followed the case closely and finds it strange that in their most recent coverage, both the Los Angeles Times and AP omitted a key aspect of the accusations.

Only the Orange County Register, Schou says, mentioned the fact that a former Sheriff’s Deputy, Kevin Taylor, is said to have ordered the violence and told prisoners that Chamberlain was a child molester. Chamberlain, a Rancho Santa Margarita software developer, was in fact only charged with possession of child pornography, a critical difference within the walls of a violent jail. Writes Schou:

Despite the fact that several of the defendants have consistently claimed that Deputy Taylor, who they say routinely ordered jailhouse beatings and rewarded inmates who carried them out, told them Chamberlain was a child molester, Taylor’s name doesn’t appear even once in the Times story.

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