‘Cowards and Sycophants’: Don Winslow Rails Against Republicans, Talks Gangster Novel ‘City on Fire’
Don Winslow has had many careers: private investigator, safari guide, best-selling crime novelist, Hollywood screenwriter, and, in the last few years, political activist. On his social media feeds, Winslow regularly drops videos like #JoeManchinSenatorForSale or Trump is Lying to You. The videos — which Winslow writes and produces with his longtime agent, Shane Salerno, under the banner Don Winslow Films — aren’t subtle, but they are Hollywood-slick and extremely effective in their messaging. According to Winslow, they have been viewed by some 250 million people.
Somehow, in between all the social media activity, Winslow, 68, still finds time to write big, fat books. He’s so good at crime fiction that Stephen King called Winslow “America’s greatest storyteller” and the novelist James Ellroy dubbed him the “The dope-war king.” Winslow’s latest crime novel, City on Fire, the first in a trilogy, is a gritty gangster saga set in his hometown of Providence and based on two of the oldest narratives in history: the Iliad and the Aeneid. It’s the tale of a bloody mob war between Italian and Irish gangsters. The conflict is set off at a New England clambake by two rivals for a beautiful woman and rips the city apart. Half the fun is figuring out who is who from the epic poems, the other half is Winslow’s live-wire prose and gift for plot and character. He’s said he’s retiring after these books, which is too bad, because he’s still at the top of his game.
“We can look back to these classics and see how timeless they are,” Winslow tells Rolling Stone. “They were writing about themes that apply now: loss, tragedy, death, revenge, compassion, love, lust — everything we write about in contemporary crime fiction.”
How did you get through the pandemic?
Writing this book, basically. Let’s be honest, for a writer, in terms of work situation, social isolation is a work tactic for us. But my mom died during the pandemic. She was 3,000 miles away and we couldn’t do a funeral. But to answer your question, I wrote this trilogy.
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What inspired you to write a gangster saga based on the Iliad?
I remember years ago, Xenophon’s March of the Ten Thousand became the movie The Warriors. And of course James Joyce and Ulysses, one my favorite books, but I’m not comparing myself to Joyce.
Are you a little worried about angering the Sons of Columbus by making Aeneas, the founder of Rome, an Irish person?
Not yet. Maybe they haven’t realized it yet, I don’t know. Founder of Rome an Irish guy. [Laughs.] I chose Aeneas very deliberately because he has a slightly outsider’s view. He’s a minor player in the Iliad. He married into the royal family, but he wasn’t really of it, and I like that slant. This soulful guy who’d lost everything and with the remnants of the Trojans wanders the earth. And that, to me, was really evocative.
You set it in the Eighties. Is it easier to write these crime stories about a time before everybody had smartphones and computers?
I did. Because I live for the day that I’m going to frisbee this phone into the ocean. I can imagine there’s zing and it bounces a couple of times. And then I’ll go get it. So as not to pollute. But yeah, listen, technology has changed crime writing because everyone can be in touch all the time. But really, I set this in the Eighties because it’s been underdone as an era, and also I’m projecting 20 years into the future with these people.
Is it hard to make a gangster story fresh nowadays?
It is. Look, you always know that you’re always following, from The Godfather to Goodfellas, Casino, to The Sopranos. You’re always going to be in their wake. And I’m not running from that at all. I love all those works for different reasons. But the reason that I did this classical thing was because I went back and I started to read the classics. Around the mid-Nineties, I realized how ignorant I was. I had this really narrow education in African history, which I specialized in [in] college, and took almost nothing but courses involving Africa. Which was great, still love it; but then I realized, shit, I don’t know anything. I mean, I’ve always read Shakespeare. I’ve been reading Shakespeare since I was a kid, but other than that I was pretty dumb. And so as an adult, I picked up one of those great reading lists, dozens, and I said, “I’m going to read it from beginning to end.” And I did. It took seven years.
Some of the works from 3,000 years ago are just as meaningful today.
Yes. Early on, you get to the Iliad, the Odyssey, and especially the Greek tragedies. And man, look, you read Aeschylus, right, and the Orestes cycle, that’s a war novel. That’s a gangster novel. Guy comes home from the war with a mistress and is killed by his wife and her lover. Then the son comes back and he kills them. And then you have these prosecutors, the Furies, who relentlessly track him down and bring him to the first trial in Western literature. I read that, it just blew my fucking mind. It’s like, “Wow. I’ve seen this in print and in real life.”
Did you base any of this on real life?
There was an incident that happened in real life in New England, where the Italians and Irish were at a party — a beach party, like in the book. And one of the Irish guys gets drunk — I knew that’s a punchline on its own, but — he feels the breast of one of the Italian guy’s girlfriends, and that they beat him up so badly, it starts a war. And I went, “Shit, Helen of Troy.” But of course, these things are just pretext to fight over money and power. It was up near where I grew up in Rhode Island.