Book Reviews: The Winter of Frankie Machine

A Novel by Don Winslow
Book review by Jules Brenner
Knopf, 9/26/06, 320 pp, $23.95

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Don Winslow can be trusted to infuse over-familiar subjects with a fresh perspective. What he did for the cross-border drug trade in "Power of the Dog" he does now for mob hitmen. And, it isn't just because he shows Frankie Machine's human face, his intelligence, awareness and heart. By the time you finish reading this character portrait you'll have an understanding of inside mob psychology and behavior you never had before.

After a career that spanned a couple of decades, in which Frank Macchiano exhibited skills of markmanship and assassination rare, even, for the Mafia, and after establishing a reputation as a guy whose word is currency, he actually quits. Motivated by a desire to be a father to his daughter Jill that he and his ex-wife Patty never thought they'd have, and no taste anymore to do the business of his crime bosses, he exchanges his assassination kit for a life of surfing with his FBI buddy, playing the sheriff on San Diego's Ocean Beach Pier, furnishing bait for fishermen and building up a real estate portfolio.

His main objective is being able to support Jill through medical school. As sidelines, he takes care of his ex-wife's plumbing problems and his girlfriend Donna's plumbing preferences.

It's a full life, full of memories. And then one day it all changes. With a hit out of "the Combination" mob in Detroit. On him. But, a failed one. In our first look at what he can do, he turns an ambush on a boat, set up by Mouse Junior, a kid striving to prove himself to daddy, the west coast boss, into a scene of carnage. 62 years may have tapped a little off Frankie's body strength but it hasn't tampered with his deadly superiority in a tangle, even with two heavy east coast guys.

"Who wants me dead?" he asks in his practical, analytic way. For the answer, he reaches back in time, to memories that remain vivid.

Which is a very clever device on the author's part for building a portrait of a mob assassin's life with a series of flashbacks starting in 1963, the time of the man's first job assignment. As he traces all the murderous episodes that follow, he realizes that the killing machine has become the target of a contract because of something he knows -- something he's witnessed in the past. Not that Frankie has ever been a rat. But just his knowing appears to be too great a risk to someone--someone willing to set bi-coastal savagery out his way and ruin his life as a law-abiding citizen. As for putting him into the ground, well this is smart Frankie Machine they're dealing with. He's just enough better than the hoodlums coming for him to make the contract a very hard one to fulfill.

After reading a lot of mystery fiction, it occurs to me that a handful of mystery writers get undeserved credit for what Don Winslow has naturally. He puts fearsome criminality together with an unbreakable code and deep character sensitivity and creates an anti-hero whose survival becomes a personal issue. His pace flows with clarity and freshness while detailed knowledge of his subject and very tough action resolves into a style that grips your attention in a superbly balanced, tightly wound thriller. The man's a class act and it's no wonder that Robert De Niro was so quick to glom onto the screen rights so that he can be Winslow's Frankie Machine. Soon, in a theatre near you. But don't wait. The book's worth picking up today.

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Jules Brenner's Critical Mystery Tour

"The Winter of Frankie Machine"
(Reviewed by Guy Savage MAR 16, 2008)
MostlyFiction.com.
(Jump to read a review of California Fire and Life)

“You could take the Crips, the Bloods, the Jamaican posses, the Mafia, the Russian mob, and the Mexican cartels, and all of them put together couldn’t rake in as much green in a good year as Congress does in a bad afternoon. You could take every gang banger selling crack on every corner in America, and they couldn’t generate as much ill-gotten cash as one senator rounding the back nine with a corporate CEO.”

I was only into a few pages of Don Winslow’s thriller The Winter of Frankie Machine when I realized that there must be several middle-aged Hollywood actors who would kill for the film rights to this novel. So it came as no surprise to learn that Robert De Niro bought the script, and that a film version is scheduled for release in 2008. I only hope that the film version does justice to the clever twists and turns of this excellent thriller. Another of Winslow’s novels The Life and Death of Bobby Z made it to the big screen with mixed results. So let’s hope that the screenplay for The Winter of Frankie Machine is handled correctly, and if so, Winslow may have a huge hit on his hands.

The novel’s protagonist, sixty-three year old Frank Machianno is a former hit man known as Frankie Machine who now lives in retirement from the mob. From his home in San Diego he runs a number of businesses—including a bait shop, a linen service and a property management business. The book begins with an average day for Frank as he juggles business responsibilities with his personal life, and this includes saving time for his demanding ex-wife and his luscious girlfriend, the lingerie-sporting Donna.
At a vigorous sixty-three Frankie seems to have it all: security, good health, a sex life most teens would envy, and plenty of free time to enjoy the good things in life. But one day all this comes to an abrupt end when two young punks approach Frank. It seems that these boys have been bootlegging their own company’s porn videos, and now “guys from Detroit” also known as the “Combination” want a piece of the action. The punks don’t want to share, and so they want to hire Frank to sort it out—one way or another.

While Frank’s first instinct is to tell the kids to get lost, one of them is the son of the “boss of what’s left of the L.A family.” With hints that he can’t turn down the job, Frankie accepts $50,000 in payment and goes to talk some sense to Vince Vena, a member of the “ruling council of the Combination.” Word is that “Detroit is positioning itself to move in on what’s left of the West Coast, and in one of the few profit centers left.” So Vince’s muscling into the West Coast porno action may not be an isolated incident but instead it may be the first step in a concerted effort to take over West Coast operations.

Frank anticipates a typical negotiation session with Vince, but instead a brutally violent encounter with Vince convinces Frank that someone has taken a hit out on him. But why?

At first Frank asks himself: “what have I done?” But before long he realizes that this is the wrong question. The right question is what does Frankie Machine know? And from this point the novel goes back and forth in time into the shady episodes of Frank’s bloody past to uncover why someone wants him dead now, years after he’s retired.

Frankie Machine proves that he still has what it takes as he leaves a trail of blood behind him. While mob hit men converge on his path, Frankie tries to buy time to uncover the truth, and this is a journey that takes him all the way to the top of the corruption power center of America.

Coming on the heels of California Fire and Life, The Winter of Frankie Machine, a quintessential mob story, is a complete change of pace. Although the protagonists of both novels fight alone, Jack Wade (California Fire and Life) is a boy scout next to Frankie Machine. Frankie Machine is a study in conflicting morality—a good father, a dependable ex-husband, but nonetheless his past is a bloody trail of executions conducted without remorse. Now, in his 60s, this is Frankie’s “winter” as the title suggests. Old age looms, but retribution is hot on his heels, and Frankie may not enjoy the old age that he’s so slickly taken away from other men with a bullet to their heads. What’s so interesting about this novel is that while Frank has managed (or so he thinks) to step away from his past, he really has done no such thing. His past is waiting for him, and he must confront it—whether he wants to or not:

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself, he thinks. After all, you’ve got it coming. You’ve done a lot of bad things in this world. You’ve taken life, and that’s the worst thing there is. You can justify it all you want, but when you look back at your life with your eyes open, you know what you were.”

Read a chapter excerpt from The Winter of Frankie Machine at author's website
Bibliography: (with links to Amazon.com)
The Death and Life Of Bobby Z (1997)
California Fire and Life (1999)
The Power Of The Dog (2005)
The Winter of Frankie of Machine (September 2007)
The Dawn Patrol (June 2008)