The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/public/page/news-books-best-sellers.html
March 4, 2011
Following the 1979 publication of "Shibumi," publishers and readers alike hoped that its author, Trevanian (the pen name of Rodney Whitaker), would write a sequel. In Nicholai Hel, the book's hero, the novelist had created one of the singular figures of 20th-century espionage fiction. An assassin so stealthily lethal that he could dispatch a team of Palestinian terrorists with only a pocket comb and a rolled-up magazine, Hel was also a mystic and an aesthete. He sought understated perfection in everything from his Japanese garden to his chateau in the Pyrenees.
Don Winslow filled in some of the gaps in Trevanian's 'Shibumi.' (Getty Images)With the March 7 publication of "Satori," Nicholai Hel will finally be at large again, practicing hoda korosu (naked kill) and pursuing Eastern wisdom. Trevanian, however, had nothing to do with it (he passed away in 2005 at 74), and the novel, for which Grand Central Publishing has announced a first press run of 100,000 copies, is not a sequel.
"I've written a prequel," says Don Winslow, the darkly comic Southern California crime novelist ("Savages," "The Power of the Dog") chosen to pick up the tale. "When you meet Hel at the start of 'Satori,' he is not a practiced assassin. He's killed only one person, and he has no experience in espionage. He's been sitting in a jail cell for three years."
For Mr. Winslow, 57, the road to "Satori" began in 2008 with an email from his then-agent, Richard Pine, asking: "How would you like to be the next Trevanian?" Mr. Pine's business partner, Michael Carlisle, had represented Mr. Whitaker. Mr. Winslow was intrigued. During his 20s, he'd read "Shibumi" and started playing Go, the Japanese board game Hel regards as a template for life.
Mr. Winslow was, however, wary. "This was intimidating on several levels," he says. "Rodney Whitaker was like Le Carré, but more tongue in cheek. I wanted to respect the content and the style. But I didn't want to do an imitation: only bad things could happen."
Rereading "Shibumi," Mr. Winslow found his point of departure. Although Trevanian's novel devotes considerable space to Hel's pre-World War II childhood in Shanghai, where his mother, a White Russian, fled following the fall of the czar, it offers almost no details about his early adulthood. It jumps from Hel's post-war imprisonment to the Middle East conflicts of the 1970s. "All Trevanian says about what happened to Hel is that in 1951 he went on a mission to Beijing and was found by the French Foreign Legion three months later wandering through Indochina," says Mr. Winslow. Just how his hero evolved into the world's most feared assassin is left to the imagination. "I thought: 'He's given me the corners to write to.' "
Mr. Winslow drafted the first 100 pages of "Satori," fleshing out Hel's activities in Beijing. Set against the backdrop of the Korean War, they focus on a CIA plot to assassinate the Soviet commissioner to China. Alexandra Whitaker, her father's executor, approved.
Mr. Winslow is talking at one of his favorite hangouts, the Coyote Grill in Laguna Beach, on the stretch of coast from Orange County to San Diego which, in the author's fiction, is rampant with burned-out surfers, drug dealers and DEA agents. Oliver Stone hopes to start filming "Savages" in June using locations nearby.
For fans of "Shibumi," the choice of a contemporary California noir novelist to flesh out the saga of the worldly Nicholai Hel raises the sort of questions that might have confronted Ross MacDonald if he'd been recruited to channel Graham Greene.
"I knew what some people would think," says Mr. Winslow. "But I have an affinity for the Asian culture that produced Hel. There's a part of my personality that is contemplative. I'm a Buddhist, albeit not a very good one."
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