Don Winslow on New England Roots, Greek Poetry, and Clams in Broth

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Over the last ten years or so there’s been a growing recognition that Don Winslow is after something epic with his crime fiction. Take that word, epic, however you like, and it pretty much applies, whether you’re talking about his sweeping indictment of the War on Drugs (The Power of the Dog, The Cartel, The Border, among others), his look at corruption and abuse inside the NYPD (The Force), or the old surf noirs (The Dawn Patrol, The Gentleman’s Hour). Now you can add the more classical variation to that list, as Winslow brings out a new novel charting the clashes of New England organized crime in the 1980s and beyond, while mirroring the movements of Greek epic poetry, most immediately The Iliad.

In City on Fire, we’re dropped into coastal Rhode Island in the days leading up to Pasco Ferri’s clambake, an end-of-summer ritual that ordinarily unites the Italians and Irish, who’ve been enjoying decades of peaceful crime when a new generation – with new ambitions, new drugs, new lusts – emerges. And a woman emerges, too: Winslow’s Helen of Troy, in a two-piece. City on Fire is the start of a new trilogy inspired by Greek classics, and Winslow speaks of the project with an infectious energy. In the weeks before the novel’s release, I had a chance to talk with him about his New England roots, organized crime in the northeast, and clam chowder the way God intended.

Dwyer Murphy: I suspect most people outside New England don’t know a lot about Providence and its place in the greater organized crime structures of America. Maybe we should start there.

Don Winslow: Providence has a big crime history. The Italian mafia was there from the turn of the century and was fairly powerful until, say, the mid-80s. It’s lost a lot of swag now, but famously Raymond Patriarca was the godfather of New England and had his offices up Atwells Avenue on Federal Hill. Where you can still go to get great Italian food — not his offices, but Federal Hill. The Coin-O-Matic (where Patriarca kept his office) is just across the street from Angelo’s. I grew up outside Providence, in a little fishing town. You were very aware of the mob presence.

Murphy: Especially on the shore, I’ll bet. Anywhere that had docks, unions, a fishing fleet once. You felt it more in those towns.

Winslow: You did, and in the era I was growing up, in bars and restaurants.

Murphy: Some people assume New England organized crime would be dominated by Boston. Providence catches them off guard.

Winslow: It went back and forth. In terms of the Italian mobs, it was really located more in Providence and some in Connecticut. Western Connecticut was more aligned with the New York families. Then you had the Irish gangs from Southie and Charlestown. And it was always a point of tension, who was going to dominate, was it going to be Boston, Providence, or New Haven? It was always a conflict.

Murphy: Why set the novel in the 1980s? That choice felt very deliberate.

Winslow: This is the first of a trilogy and there were things I wanted to cover in the next two books, which go respectively to Hollywood and Las Vegas. So it was kind of a matter of math, but also it was an era that hadn’t been done a lot.

Murphy: You also get into the expanded use of RICO, how that was changing the mobs.

Winslow: I wanted to write about the end of something, about these systems falling apart, given the rise of RICO and virtually everyone becoming a rat. The only person who never ratted out was John Gotti and that’s because he had no one left to rat out on. You get to the top of the pyramid and there’s no-one left to trade. I wanted a story set in the waning days of power, not in the heyday.

Murphy: Was the research for this one different from your earlier novels?

Winslow: You know, with the drug trilogy (The Power of the Dog, The Cartel, The Border) the research was so specific, I felt at times like I was virtually writing a nonfiction book. With The Force, obviously I spent a lot of time with New York cops, and again it was very specific. Coming into this trilogy, I didn’t need all that research because I grew up with it. My research was walking out the door. It was more a process of memory, and of reconnecting. I had to learn the language again—the dialect—to get back into the rhythm of it.

The other very different thing is that in these next three books, the general storylines and characters are drawn from Greek classics. So the research was mostly in reading those, reading about them, listening to lectures about them, becoming conversant with Roman and Greek literature, classics, mythology.

Murphy: Let’s get into the Greek lineage. Why that storytelling structure?

Winslow: I had this idea about thirty years ago. When I looked at some of the real life events that sparked the New England crime conflicts, they struck me as very reminiscent of events in The Iliad, in the fall of Troy. One of the major conflicts started over a woman in a very Helen of Troy-like incident. I mean all this has been done before. Famously with James Joyce. It’s not a terribly original idea. But I wondered if I could write a series of crime novels that would stand on their own as crime novels but also hit these themes.

Back in the 90s I realized how ignorant I was about literature. I had this narrow collegiate education in African history and military history, but I wasn’t very well read beyond those subjects, and outside the crime genre. So I got some of those great books. It took me about seven years, but I read the classics. Early on in that came The Iliad, The Aeneid, the Greek tragic dramas, and I was thinking, all the themes we deal with in crime fiction are already there. If you read Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy, about the aftermath of the fall of Troy, it reads like a noir novel. A woman who hates her husband and blames her daughter’s death on him. He comes home from the war. She and her lover murder him. The son comes back for revenge. And in the third play, you get the first murder trial in western literature.

I thought I’d love to try to merge this tradition with a modern crime story. That’s what this book is about. The first book basically covers The Iliad, but seen through the eyes of one of the minor players, Aeneas, who I call Danny Ryan. Then in later books, Hollywood stands in for Carthage. When Aeneas is ship wrecked in Carthage he goes into a cave and sees a mural with depictions from the fall of Troy—of himself, his dead friends. What would be the modern equivalent of that? It would be a movie set.

Murphy: There’s something particularly well-suited between the Greek epic poems, which are essentially mythology with some debated historical reference points, and mob history, which is always that as well. Within the crime genre, mob history is laced with mythology – self mythology, counter mythology, all these competing legends and narratives.

Winslow: That’s exactly it. You get that great mythology, so beautifully depicted in The Godfather, more realistically in The Sopranos and Goodfellas, but it’s still mythology. You’re following the Odysseus character over the course of twenty years. He goes from an Italian gangster wandering around the country to getting bewitched by a woman and staying with her for seven years. This was great stuff to write. Odysseus comes home and kills the suitors. All that’s in these three books.

Murphy: I’m curious about the Danny Ryan character, your protagonist here. Was there a detail that first brought him to life for you?

Winslow: It’s the opening scene on the page, which I wrote twenty-something years ago. I just had this image of a guy who’s vaguely discontented with his life but isn’t sure why. He’s kind of an outsider. He marries into the royal family but he’s not fully accepted. And this beautiful woman emerges from the ocean and changes everything.

Murphy: How did you decide to come back to this project? I was wondering if turning to novellas (Broken) helped. In some ways, for me, these characters felt more connected to that work than to the drug trilogy.

Winslow: The drug trilogy was twenty-three years of my life. I spent over a third of my existence on this earth with Art Keller. Maybe the novellas were a palate cleanser, something that freed me to come back to this. But I also think it was just a matter of time. You need time and space to write about your home. I left there when I was seventeen wanting to travel the world and I did, and eventually my wife and I started to go back more, mostly to take care of my mom as she aged, and during that time I rediscovered a fondness for the place. I started to get the excitement I feel when I’m driving down the PCH here, which I never get tired of doing. I have similar feelings now for the Rhode Island coastline.

Murphy: You mentioned before about the research for this novel mostly involving walking out the door, talking to people, connecting. That’s not always easy in New England. Do you feel like you have a bond with people in Rhode Island? Some rapport?

Winslow: I do now, but it’s taken over ten years to get there, going back and spending more and more time.

Murphy: New England is pretty cloistered. When you leave you don’t get to just come back into it.

Winslow: New England’s famously parochial. I live in a village where there are still houses from the 1760s and the same families still living in them. My family’s been there since the 1690s. Unfortunately one of my ancestors fought the battle of the Great Samp, wiping out the native Narragansett.

Murphy: Were they religious dissidents? How did they end up in Rhode Island?

Winslow: They were Pilgrims. They came in on the Mayflower, then they were whalers in Nantucket. One of the Mayflower cats was a military leader who came down during what’s known as King Philip’s War. I’m boring you to tears, aren’t I?

Murphy: You’re right in my wheelhouse, believe it or not.

Winslow: Well, okay, so he fought the Great Swamp Fight. I can go on a ten minute drive from my house to that old battlefield. So to be perfectly honest about it, the Winslow surname has been around New England since it was New England. And that has sort of helped. We moved to that little village in 1964, and my parents lived the rest of their lives there. So we’re pretty connected. But I reconnected with old high school friends and teachers. One of my dearest friends in the world is my old high school biology teacher, who also taught jazz, which was a passion that he gave me that still burns. So I feel pretty connected there. But your point pertains, it took a while to not be considered the guy who comes back in the summers.

Murphy: Important question: do you have firm opinions on clams? Every southern New Englander I know does.

Winslow: My strong feelings about clams—and I do have very strong feelings about clams—have more to do with the chowder. You ask me about steamers and all that, no, I eat my little necks raw, thank you very much. But I am a fanatic on the subject of clam chowder. The only proper clam chowder is with clear clam broth, not cream like that baby food many of them serve and for God’s sake not with tomato juice as in the ultra vile Manhattan crime chowder. All those variations are abominations on the Lord.

Murphy: I caught that chowder detail in City on Fire. The moment I knew I was in a Don Winslow book was the characters started passionately discussing chowder.

Winslow: My beloved Jim’s Dock, which I think I called Dave’s Dock in the book, they still serve it. A few other places, too, but it’s harder and harder to find.

Murphy: My Mom likes to text now and again to let me know the price of lobsters and clams. It’s important.

Winslow: I was on the phone with my sister the other day and she went off on ordering a lobster roll that cost forty three dollars.

Murphy: That’s the thing that unites us as New Englanders – our complete disgust with any lobster roll that costs more than ten dollars.

Winslow: You can’t believe it. The lobsters are right there. Jump in the water and get one.

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