Don Winslow on the Aeneid, Hollywood and the end of his career as a novelist ‹ CrimeReads

Don Winslow has written his latest novel. That was the inevitable lesson of our last conversation, which took place in the weeks leading up to the release of The city of Dreams, the second installment of the Winslow trilogy following the life and times of Danny Ryan of Providence. The new book, picked up after a bloody gang war, takes Ryan and company west, orbiting a sizzling Hollywood adaptation of their recent exploits. The story follows a structure tied to Greek epic poetry, conveyed by Winslow’s savvy, streetwise prose, all with a relentless momentum towards the next tragedy in the sequence. Which brings me back to that first revelation. Winslow is on the record: he’s retiring as a novelist after the end of this final trilogy. While discussing with him, I discovered that the third novel was already written. Winslow exuded cool confidence as he discussed the decision to hang up and what’s next.

(You can read our conversation about City on Fire, the first novel in the trilogy, here.)

Murphy: With The city of Dreams, you still work in the idiom of epic poetry. Can you place me in the legend? Where do we pick up with this book, vis-à-vis the Greeks and the Romans?

Winslow: It is from the beginning to the middle of the Aeneid. When you talk about, for lack of a better term, the Trojan horse cycle, the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Aeneid, I always intended to follow Aeneas through his life cycle, but it starts in the Iliad, where he is a minor actor, which for me was volume 1, city ​​on fire.

We all think the end of the Trojan horse story is told in the Iliad, but it’s not. It is actually Aeneas who tells us this part of the story, when Dido asks him about his life. Aeneas says: Pain, unspeakable pain that you ask me to revive, my queen. Obviously, the guideline of the book is Danny, our Aeneas. He loses the war and must leave with his increasingly senile father and son and what remains of his crew and wander for years and years.

I was fascinated by what happened to certain characters after the Trojan War ended. It really is a thriller if you follow Agamemnon. He returns home and his wife blames him for the death of their daughter. She and her lover kill him in the bathtub.

Murphy: It’s a James M. Cain novel.

Winslow: Exactly, and it’s in the Greek dramas. Aeschylus’ Oresteia cycle. When I first read them, I thought, Jesus is, this is a James M. Cain novel.

Murphy: For a writer, there must be something liberating in knowing that you’re working with a classic structure: a story that has meant something to humans for thousands of years.

Winslow: There really are. That was the whole idea behind this trilogy. These stories, whether people are aware of their influence or not, are so pervasive. They are in our culture, our stories, our folklore, our very language. By tapping into that, you at least have a rough idea of ​​where you’re going.

The challenge, which was also fun, was to find plausible modern equivalents. What is a Trojan Horse in Providence? Who is Aphrodite? Who is the queen of Carthage?

At the start of the Aeneid, Aeneas washes up on the shores of Carthage and enters a cave. On the walls of the cave are murals of the story of the Trojan Horse: of Aeneas himself, of his friends, of his deceased wife. What is the modern equivalent of this? The answer is cinema. So they’re making a movie of the first book, and I thought it would be fascinating to have Danny on that set.

Murphy: The first parallel I thought of with Danny working his way into Hollywood was Get Shorty. It’s a very different approach, but whether it’s a comedy of manners or a detective epic, there’s something fundamentally satisfying to the reader about watching a gangster get involved in movies.

Winslow: It’s an old story: gangsters in Hollywood, the symbiotic relationship between them, and the rather amusing dynamic where producers and directors who make gangster movies suddenly think they’re gangsters. I was just having fun with it. I think I wrote these sequences twenty years ago. I’ve done a few laps in the Hollywood pool, with some success and notable failure. All of a sudden I was writing, and I asked these two guys, the Altar Boys, to come on set, because I thought only the craft service table would keep them there, they’re like raccoons. My books have been on option since 1991. I’ve been to these Hollywood meetings and on set and on location and had movies made and not made and watched it all go on. I was just kinda amused putting these two guys up and watching them slip into a production and suck it dry.

Murphy: You also have the opportunity to give readers a brief history of mob interference in the movie industry.

Winslow: The Mafia in Los Angeles has always been relatively weak compared to New York or Chicago. I forget the FBI official who called it the Mickey Mouse Mafia. But they have made several attempts to infiltrate trade unions associated with the film industry. They made a little progress, then they stopped pretty quickly.

Murphy: You mentioned that this is a story you’ve been working on, off and on, for decades. How has your relationship with Danny Ryan evolved?

Winslow: When I started writing Danny I had a five year old. He is now thirty-three years old. So by the time I started writing the third book, I saw fatherhood from a completely different angle. You gain a greater appreciation for the importance of family and what it means in your own life, and therefore what it would mean in Danny’s life.

Murphy: I was particularly interested in Danny on the run as the father of a toddler. You have to think about who is going to cook this meal, how the laundry will be done. You don’t see a lot of that in detective fiction.

Winslow: I really wanted to address this because you don’t see it much. There were practical considerations. If I follow Aenea’s way of life, that’s his problem, he’s there with an aging father and a baby, and he’s a single father and he’s a fugitive. And he has no more money. You have to hide, you have to find a job, you have to find a babysitter, you have to eat breakfast. This stuff has to be done.

Murphy: Do you still intend this trilogy to be for you? Are you retiring?

Winslow: Yeah.

Murphy: Why?

Winslow: A few reasons. One, I kind of got involved on social media with political people. There is not much time and energy. And second, I think I told the stories I wanted to tell. This trilogy is the work of a lifetime. After twenty-six years on the drug beat and writing three big books about it, now is the time.

Murphy: Will you really be able to give it up?

Winslow: Yeah.

Murphy: You seem confident.

Winslow: I took my decision. It was not an easy decision to make. I took my time with it. Once I’ve made decisions, I’m usually pretty firm with them. And watching the news, I think democracy is in an existential crisis here, and I don’t just want to write elegies for our democracy. So I think the time and energy at this point has to go elsewhere.

Murphy: You mentioned earlier that the third book is already finished. So, did you write your last novel?

Winslow: Yes I have. I know, it seems strange to me too.