He was educated at Hutchesons' Boys Grammar School and graduated with a law degree from Glasgow University in 1973.

He has been a partner with an Edinburgh law firm, a cotton farmer on Kibbutz Ashdot Ya'akov Ichud in Israel, a charity administrator for the Cyrenians in West London, a university lecturer[2] at Keio University, Japan, and a journalist for multi-national publishing house Informa.

Apart from his fiction writing, Simons is also an editor with the Blue Pencil literary agency and a media journalist with the global technology consultancy firm, Omdia (formerly Ovum).

Simons goes on to tackle issues of socialism, feminism and birth control in Glasgow during the 1920s in his second novel in this trilogy, The Liberation of Celia Kahn,[5] which was published by Five Leaves Publications in February 2011, along with a re-print of The Credit Draper.

His third novel, An Exquisite Sense of What is Beautiful, set in Japan, was published by Saraband in March 2013, and examines the theme of denial, especially in regard to the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States.