Don Winslow wraps up a crime trilogy and writing career with ‘City In Ruins’ – Orange County Register

For three decades, crime novelist Don Winslow followed a simple routine: he rose every day at dawn to start writing at 5:30 a.m.

Twenty-five books later, mostly detective novels, many of them acclaimed, Winslow announced he was finished. “City In Ruins,” the just-released final book in his trilogy with Danny Ryan, is his last book, period.

Not that old habits changed overnight.

“Well, it was strange, I’ll tell you that,” Winslow says, laughing, when asked about the first few weeks after turning in his final draft about a year and a half ago.

“Because I’ve been a full-time writer for probably 25 years, I guess,” he says. “It was my routine. I was just in this harness.

“I tried not to get up at five in the morning – without much success,” says Winslow. “The other morning, I forget, it was a Sunday or something, I slept until 7:30. My wife said, ‘Yeah, congratulations. I’m so proud of you.’

But she probably shouldn’t get used to it. The 70-year-old writer – or former writer, it seems – still has work he plans to do as an activist, speaking out and producing films and videos about the fragile state of the democracy in the United States and the threat that Winslow sees there. at Donald Trump and the MAGA movement.

“I get up early now to read the newspapers; I read at least five newspapers a day,” says Winslow. “I want to start early. And then, you know, these days I’m going back to newspapers, probably more than when I was a writer.

“But yeah, it was weird, you know,” he said. “I mean, I spent 30 years with damn Danny Ryan. There’s another character of mine, Art Keller. I did these three big books on drugs, and he’s in all of them. And between him and Danny, I’ve spent more time with people who don’t exist than with people who do.

Winslow has a little more time to spend with Danny Ryan, the protagonist of the trilogy that began with “City On Fire”, continued in “City Of Dreams” and now concludes with “City In Ruins”. (The first book is being developed as a film with Austin Butler hired to play Danny.)

The novels grew out of Winslow’s longtime dream of writing modern detective stories inspired by classic works such as Roman poet Virgil’s “Aeneid” and Greek playwright Aeschylus’ “Oresteia” trilogy. Danny Ryan, like Aeneas in the original, moves from foot soldier to leader in the books, with plots and characters drawn from their backgrounds. The themes of power, betrayal, revenge and heartbreak are also clearly reflected across the centuries.

Winslow’s book tour for “City in Ruins” brings him to Costa Mesa on Tuesday, April 9 and Santa Monica on Thursday, April 11. It debuted in New York on April 1, where we caught up with him between his appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” and a bookstore event later that day.

In an interview edited for clarity and length, Winslow spoke about the classical parallels between “City In Ruins” and the works of Aeschylus and Virgil, the political work he is involved in today and why he doesn’t believe feelings matter when democracy is threatened.

Q: How satisfying was it to take your contemporary detective story and prove to yourself and your readers that it could work drawing inspiration from the classics and things like power, revenge? and betrayal – all that good stuff.

A: All that good stuff, yeah. Look, man, it took me 30 years to figure this out. I wrote the first sentence of the first book – which has not changed – almost 30 years ago. So it was a challenge to find these modern equivalents. Because what I really wanted was a book that you could read like a modern detective novel, you know, without any reference to the classics, but still be inspired by these characters and these themes and these stories .

I really wanted to follow their lives, all of these characters, not just Danny – although Danny, of course, is the backbone of the story. But I also wanted to follow up on these classic characters. “The Iliad” leaves you right in the middle of everything, you know, it starts in the middle and it ends in the middle. And so it was satisfying to go through and find out what happened to these people afterwards.

And that’s covered, as you mentioned, in “Eumenides” and the Furies and mythology and “The Odyssey” and all those things. I wanted to connect all these characters, both modern and classic.

So yeah, finishing it was, frankly, really satisfying. And I would be the last person to judge whether I succeeded or not. It depends on the reader. But yes, it was satisfying to finally understand.

Q: As for the characters in this one, we have the casino world and we have this really bad gangster Allie Boy from Detroit. We learn more about some of the Rhode Island characters. How do you decide how to add new people into an ongoing story?

A: I know exactly. I mean, Danny’s channel in this novel follows the Aeneid very closely. There’s a really nasty character, Turnus, in “The Aeneid,” who does some of the things that Allie Boy does in that book. The characters of Josh and Abe, as you know, are very closely inspired by the Aeneid.

So I was just looking at these characters and trying to figure out: OK, what are the modern equivalents? And it’s always tricky. You don’t want to create caricatured characters to pad the plot, do you? So the problem is to make them real, no matter how nasty they are, to give them a unique point of view so that they become real to the reader and not just substitutes.

Q: So now that it’s been a year and a half, do your characters still come up in your mind from time to time?

A: From time to time. The art (Keller, from “The Cartel” series) not so much, because it’s been a while since I wrote a book called “The Border.” But yes, every time there is a headline or a newspaper article about the Mexican drug world, it all comes up. In fact, sometimes these are characters who were prototypes of the characters in my books.

the guy who went to jail in San Diego. And, you know, I knew his story intimately. “)

Danny keeps coming back because, look, the book just came out and I’m talking about it a lot. But then again, I’ve known the real Dannys my whole life, those guys that I played hockey with, that I surfed with, that hung out in bars. So Danny is still with me.

Q: So let’s talk about your new job. I see videos of you on Twitter, or on X. I saw a new one about Donald Trump.

A: Well, first of all, this is nothing new. I’ve been doing this since 2015. What’s new is that I’m not writing a novel, so that’s the difference. But yeah, I mean, my kind of daily routine, I follow the news to do the – well, I guess it’s not tweets anymore – and then I work on these videos. That’s my kind of day.

Q: When you write a book, you might meet people on a book tour or look at sales figures to see how it’s doing. How do you judge the impact of your activism?

A: It is complicated. It is difficult. There are several aspects to this. We’ve had over 300 million views on these videos, which is mind-boggling. Fifteen million just for the last three of them. We hear from a lot of people, you know, who support it, and we hear from people who are pretty angry about it. We hear from candidates that these videos and tweets have had a positive effect. And in fact, some of them have been very honest in telling us that our videos often get more views than the campaign materials themselves. So I think yes, we had an effect.