For three decades, crime novelist Don Winslow followed a simple routine: He’d rise at dawn each day to begin writing by 5:30 a.m.
Twenty-five books later, most of them crime novels, many of them acclaimed, Winslow announced he was done. “City In Ruins,” the just-published final book in his Danny Ryan trilogy, is his final book, period.
Not that the old habits have changed overnight.
“Well, it was strange, I’ll tell you,” Winslow says, laughing, when asked about those first weeks after he turned in his final draft about a year and a half ago.
“Because I’ve been a full-time writer probably for the last 25 years, I guess,” he says. “That was my routine. I was just in that harness.
“I’ve tried not to get up at five in the morning – without a lot of success,” Winslow says. “The other morning, I forget, it was a Sunday or something, I slept till 7:30 a.m. My wife was like, ‘Yay, congratulations. I’m so proud of you.’
But she probably shouldn’t get used to that. 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 tender state of democracy in the United States and the threat to it that Winslow sees in Donald Trump and the MAGA movement.
“I’m up early reading the newspapers now; I read at least five newspapers a day,” Winslow says. “I want to get an early start on that. And then I’ll, you know, these days, I go back to the papers, probably more than I did when I was a writer.
“But yeah, it felt weird, you know,” he says. “I mean, I spent 30 years with freaking Danny Ryan. There’s another character of mine, Art Keller. I did these three big, fat, drug books, and he’s in all three of them. And between him and Danny, I have spent more time with people who don’t exist than people that do.”
Winslow’s got a bit 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 wraps with “City In Ruins.” (The first book is being developed as a movie with Austin Butler signed on to play Danny.)
The novels emerged from Winslow’s long-simmering dream of writing modern crime stories inspired by such classical works as the Roman poet Virgil’s “Aeneid” and the Greek playwright Aeschylus’s “Oresteia” trilogy. Danny Ryan, like Aeneas in the original, moves from foot soldier to leader in the books, with some plotlines and characters drawn from their antecedents. Themes of power, betrayal, revenge, and grief also reflect clearly back and forth 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 kicked off in New York City on April 1, where we caught up with him between his appearance on “Morning Joe” on MSNBC and a bookstore event later that day.
In an interview edited for clarity and length, Winslow talked about the classic parallels between “City In Ruins” and Aeschylus and Virgil’s works, the political work he’s involved in today, and why he doesn’t believe feelings matter when democracy is threatened.
Q: How satisfying was it to take your contemporary crime story and prove to yourself and readers that it could work using the inspiration of the classics and things like power, revenge and betrayal – all that good stuff.
A: All that good stuff, yeah. Listen, man, it took me 30 years to figure this out. I wrote the first sentence of the first book – which by the way, hasn’t changed – almost 30 years ago. So it was a challenge to find those modern equivalencies. Because what I really wanted was a book you could read as a modern crime novel, you know, with no reference to the classics at all, and yet still take from those characters and those themes and those stories.
I really wanted to follow through their lives, all those characters, not just Danny – although Danny, of course, is the spine of the story. But I also wanted to follow through on those classical characters. ‘The Iliad’ leaves you right in the middle of everything, you know, it starts in the middle and 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 alluded to, in ‘Eumenides’ and the Furies and mythology and ‘The Odyssey’ and all of these things. I wanted to tie all those characters together both the modern and the classical ones.
So yeah, to have finished it was, frankly, really satisfying. And I’d be the last person to be able to judge if I pulled it off or not. That’s up to the reader. But yeah, it was satisfying to finally figure it out.
Q: In terms of the characters in this one, we have the casino world and we have this really nasty mobster Allie Boy from Detroit. We get more on some of the Rhode Island characters. How do you decide how to add new people into an ongoing narrative?
A: I know exactly. I mean, the Danny string in that novel really very closely follows the Aeneid. There’s a really nasty character, Turnus, in the “Aeneid,” that does some of the things that Allie Boy does in that book. The characters of Josh and Abe, you know, are drawn very closely from the Aeneid.
So I was just looking at those characters and trying to figure out, OK, what are the modern equivalents? And that’s always tricky. You don’t want to create cartoonish characters to fill in the plot, right? And so the issue is to make them real, as nasty as they may be, to give them a unique point of view so that they become real to the reader and not just sort of stand-ins.
Q: So now that it’s been a year and a half, do your characters still turn up in your mind from time to time?
A: Every once in a while. Art [Keller, from ‘The Cartel’ series] not so much, because it’s been a bit since I wrote a book called ‘The Border.’ But yeah, anytime there’s like a headline or a newspaper article about the Mexican drug world all of that comes back. In fact, sometimes it’s about characters who were the prototypes for characters in my books.
the guy who went to prison in San Diego. And, you know, I knew his story intimately.”]
Danny keeps popping back up because, look, the book is just coming out, and I’m talking a lot about it. But again, I’ve known the real-life Dannys my whole life, those guys I played hockey with and surfed with, hung out in bars with. So Danny’s kind of always with me.
Q: So let’s talk about your new work. I see videos from you on Twitter, or X. There’s a new one about Donald Trump I saw there.
A: Well, first of all, it’s not 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 sort of daily routine, I follow the news to do the – well, I guess they’re not tweets anymore – and then work on these videos. That’s my kind of day.
Q: When you write a book, you can meet people on a book tour or see the sales figures to know how it’s doing. How do you judge the impact of the activism you’re doing?
A: It’s tricky. It’s difficult. There are a number of aspects to it. We’ve had over 300 million views on those videos, which is mind-boggling. Fifteen million just from the last three of them. We hear from a lot of people, you know, supporting it, and we hear from people who are pretty angry about it. We hear from candidates who have told us that these videos and the tweets have had a positive effect. And in fact, some of them have been quite honest about telling us that our videos quite often get more views than the actual campaign material. So I think, yeah, we have had an effect.
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Q: In a previous interview, you said you can’t allow yourself to be discouraged or pessimistic about the state of democracy and politics in the U.S. Talk a little about your feelings as this election year continues.
A: It’s absurd that a man who tried to overthrow the government of the United States is going to be the Republican nominee. That beggars belief, right? Of course, I’m concerned. This is closer than it should be. And there is a path to victory for Trump.
Optimism, pessimism, again, to me, it doesn’t matter. I guess this isn’t a terribly woke thing to say, but I’m gonna say that sometimes feelings don’t matter. I’m sorry. They don’t. What are we supposed to do? We feel bad, we’re supposed to lay down on the couch in the fetal position and let the country go to hell?
So, you know, depending on what’s happening, I feel more positive or more negative or whatever. But so what? Doesn’t matter. You just have to keep putting one foot in front of the other and do what you can do.
Q: What kind of reaction have you been getting to your decision to stop writing?
A: A lot of people don’t believe me. A lot of my close friends don’t believe me. I’m not sure my wife believes me. I should start taking bets. Start saying, ‘Lay 100 bucks down and we’ll talk in a year.’ Get your money. Do you want to put any money down, Peter?
Q: No. But maybe you can fund the videos with your winnings.
A: There you go. Good idea.
