Hi. My name is Don Winslow, and I'm a writing addict

By John Wilkens
San Diego Union-Tribune
http://www.signonsandiego.com/
June 8, 2008

There's no ocean in Julian, but Don Winslow surfed there almost every day for about 18 months – surfed in his mind.

He was working on his latest crime novel, “The Dawn Patrol,” which is set largely in Pacific Beach. The hero, Boone Daniels, is a former cop turned private eye who would rather catch waves than catch crooks.

Winslow surfs, too. He keeps a wet suit in the trunk of his car. So writing about surfing came naturally to him, even if he does live on a 30-acre ranch out in apple country, some 40 miles from the water.

But that's not why he made surfing a central part of the new novel, his 10th.

“The book is in a lot of ways about perpetual childhood,” Winslow said on a recent weekday morning as he stood on the Crystal Pier, watching surfers. “It's kind of the Peter Pan syndrome that exists in surfing, where you're doing this when you're 11 and you're doing it when you're 50 and a lot of times you don't grow up. But then you're forced to.”

And in his literary hands, waves become metaphors, too. “What's a wave? It's a disturbance, right? You're riding energy, and maybe that carries the characters through the story. All crime stories are about a disturbance.”

There are many disturbances in “Dawn Patrol,” starting with a stripper tossed to her death from a motel balcony. Child prostitution. A Harvard-educated drug dealer with hair the color of traffic cones.

All of it's told with a healthy dose of San Diego locales and history, and in the Winslow style: fast-paced (there are 155 chapters in the book, roughly one every two pages), funny and full of colorful characters, including a surfer called Hang 12 because he has an extra toe on each foot.

Winslow, 54, has his own colorful history. Born on Halloween in New York City, he was a child actor, majored in African history at the University of Nebraska, worked as a safari guide in Kenya, herded cattle. He's also been a private investigator.

He grew up surrounded by stories – stories told by his dad's military buddies, and stories brought home by his mother, a librarian – so it's not surprising that eventually he would want to tell some, too.

His first book, “A Cool Breeze on the Underground,” came out in 1991 and led to another; before Winslow knew it, he was writing a series involving an investigator named Neal Carey. Five books into it, he got bored.

“I thought I just can't keep writing the same books with just a different set of facts in them,” Winslow said.

He still had his day job then, as an investigator, and was taking the train from Dana Point, his home at the time, to Los Angeles to work on a case.

“Just to amuse myself, I'd write a chapter going up on the train,” he said. “When I heard the conductor say, 'Union Station, 10 minutes,' I'd wrap the chapter up, just come up with an ending and be done with it. Same thing on the way home. And pretty soon I had a book.”

Short chapters would become something of a trademark for him, but the real breakthrough on “The Death and Life of Bobby Z” was writing in the present tense. It opened up the language for him, he said, gave his writing more energy and urgency.

“Bobby Z” led to a long-term book contract with Knopf. Warner Bros. bought the movie rights. “And life changed literally overnight,” Winslow said.



Now, he writes full-time, out on the Julian ranch he shares with Jean, his wife of 23 years, and their 18-year-old son, Thomas. (For a while, his writing literally was done out on the ranch, in a tent set up among oak trees. But a storm shredded the tent.)

He usually has two or three books going at a time, not just crime novels, but also historical fiction. He's co-authoring a book on the Crow Indian tribe now, and planning a retelling of Virgil's “Aeneid,” set in a New England crime war.

There's also the occasional TV screenplay, for shows like “Close to Home.” Another San Diego-based novel of his, “The Winter of Frankie Machine,” is set to become a movie starring Robert De Niro.

“Writing is a job, and it's an addiction,” he said. “I can't not do it. Sometimes I think there should be a 12-step program for writers: 'I'm thinking of starting a novel.' And your friends would say, 'No, don't do it! I'm calling a meeting!' ”

It helps that he's never had trouble coming up with ideas. For him, he said, “It's more like, 'Which horse do I ride today?' I've got the attention span of a gerbil on crack. Dangle any shiny thing in front of me and I'll follow it.”

He doesn't write erotica, even though there is another author named Don Winslow out there who does. “That's really become painful, because of the Internet. People look me up on Amazon.com or something, and there it is. I did not write 'Slave Girls of Rome.' I swear. But people ask me about it all the time.”

It's gotten to the point where he starts every public appearance – like the one scheduled for tomorrow at the library in downtown San Diego – with a disclaimer: “I'm not the guy.”

Winslow said he enjoys setting stories in San Diego because of the juxtaposition of the area's natural splendor with the ugly things people sometimes do to each other.

“For me, that's a fantastic challenge and an interesting thing to do,” he said. “I like to write about all of it: what's really beautiful and maybe what's not so beautiful. And how sometimes the things that are pretty are paid for by things that aren't.”

He also has a fondness for blue-collar people and underdogs.

“I gotta tell you, I don't like the beautiful people,” he said. “I just find them really boring and there's too much writing about them – too many movies and too much TV. Southern California is associated with them too much. I'd rather write about people who have to struggle.”

Boone Daniels and his friends struggle mightily in “Dawn Patrol.” They follow an unspoken code of honor – another regular theme of Winslow's work – and some cross lines they shouldn't. But their bonds are strong.

Winslow's already at work on a sequel. “I like the characters,” he said, glancing in the direction of the ocean again. “And I like the setting.”


A Surfer Shamus in Don Winslow's 'Dawn Patrol'

The novelist's new work hugs the Southern California cost but embraces a wider world.

By Scott Timberg,
Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/
June 9, 2008



Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times
Author Don Winslow's former jobs include working as a private investigator in New York. He came to California to work as an investigator in arson cases and picked up technical knowledge along the way. After penning several books, he saw his novel "The Death and Life of Bobby Z" take off in 1997.

Waves breaking just a few feet away, the detective novelist Don Winslow was sitting on the patio of a Laguna Beach cafe with a view of the ocean below, looking like a private eye trying to avoid detection. A compact, wiry man whose intense green eyes flashed under a baseball cap, Winslow, 54, was talking about the strip of the coast that runs from San Diego through southern Orange County.

"What I think is emerging is a different kind of society," said Winslow, "based on the amazing ethnic variety. San Diego County no longer has any ethnic majority. Look around you," he said, pointing across the diners, most of them digging into fish tacos, who included a mix of Asian, Pacific Islander, Latino and Caucasian.

"It's also developing its own language, with little bits of Hawaiian and Filipino and Spanish, especially when you mix the language of surf culture, which has always been fun to me," he continued. "I wanted to write in that new language, about that new scene."

Winslow's new novel, "The Dawn Patrol," is set in that milieu, with a Japanese cop nicknamed Johnny Banzai, a Hawaiian drug mogul named Red Eddie, a collection of migrant workers from Mexico and a cast of Anglos that includes the macho strip-club owner Dan Silver and the uptight lawyer Petra Hall. Although the story never gets more than a few miles from the ocean, it spans a wide world, indeed.

The book's core is a collection of five friends who, despite working jobs that sometimes bring them into conflict with each other, meet at sunrise each morning to take the early waves as the Dawn Patrol. Among them is Boone Daniels, an ex-cop with a beat-up van who runs a private-investigation office above a surf shop.

Echoes of McGee

Besides the setting, the book has little in common with the often brooding "surf-noir" novels of Kem Nunn. A cult figure for years, Nunn became nationally known after his novel "John From Cincinnati" was turned into a (short-lived) HBO series, directed by David Milch. Daniels is more a West Coast equivalent of John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee, the beach-bum P.I. who lived on a Fort Lauderdale houseboat.

[CORRECTION: While Nunn was a co-creator, co-executive producer and a writer on the HBO television series "John From Cincinnati," none of his novels has that title or was adapted for the series. —]

"The Dawn Patrol" -- which could be a breakthrough for Winslow, who has garnered praise from James Ellroy and Ian Rankin without becoming well known -- seems an inevitable step for the journeyman writer who's about a decade into a career setting noir novels in Southern California. And though he's lived for the last few years in the ranch country an hour inland from San Diego, the book was a way for this swamp Yankee to get back to his love of surfing and the sea.

With its short chapters, comic characters, hairpin plot turns and snappy dialogue, the novel can feel at times lighter than air. But it includes a considerable amount of violence, a heartbreaking subplot and its share of sleazy characters.

"One reason I find SoCal so interesting is that there's so much beauty -- and that's real," Winslow said. "But there's another layer underneath it that's not so pretty. One thing I wanted to do was run those two tracks simultaneously -- without backing off of either."

Making of a storyteller

Winslow's hometown, next to the Rhode Island fishing village of Matunuck, was the kind of place where poverty was close -- if you don't study hard, parents used to tell their kids, you'll be sweeping fish guts off the plant floor.

But he retains an affection for those years as well: Winslow calls a "khaki-collar" upbringing -- he's the son of a Navy noncom father who was "a great raconteur" and a librarian mother who encouraged him to read widely -- the best possible preparation to become a writer.

His parents would rent a lakeside cottage for a month each summer, inviting his dad's Navy friends to come visit as long as they would toss aside any privilege of rank.

"You'd wake up and there would be five sailors on the floor, and there were scuba divers and Marines and Navy nurses. So you had these storytellers around you. I learned very early that if I was quiet and kind of hid, they'd pretend not to know I was there. So I had these stories from around the world -- and I always thought it would be the best thing in the world to be, if I could, to be a storyteller. But it was a bit of a long and winding road to get there."

Winslow moved to New York in the late '70s to help a friend manage a series of movie theaters as a way to finance his literary ambitions.

When the theater job fell through, he turned to something that offered, at least, a steady paycheck. He became a private investigator, working in the back alleys off Times Square -- "you'd think you were walking on seashells, but they were crack vials" -- and busting pickpockets in movie theaters. That, he said, was fun, but it didn't seem to be leading anywhere.

That was followed by a master's degree in military history, itinerant years leading safaris in Kenya and hiking trips in China's Sichuan province and, eventually, gigs as a consultant and investigator who made frequent trips to the West Coast. He was writing novels, starting with "A Cool Breeze on the Underground" in 1991, set amid London's punk scene and written in tents and buses all over the world, but wasn't making much money.

"I started to come out here because of arson," Winslow recalled. "This was in the '90s and everything that people had bought on margin, when things were fat and happy, they were burning down."

Working as an investigator meant picking up some technical knowledge -- an accidental fire has one point of origin, but a building burned to the ground will have several -- as well as a lot of paperwork and fact checking.

"The really fun stuff was finding ways to explain the science to a jury in a way they could understand. That's really what they wanted me for -- as much as a storyteller as an investigator."

That narrative became important, since the visual evidence of an arson case was usually a black, ashy photograph. "It's hard to photograph a burned structure. If you're trained to look at it, you can see a certain burn pattern that tells you one thing but not another. But how do you communicate it?"

By the mid-'90s, fascinated and inspired by views of the Pacific, he moved out here with his wife, Jean, and infant son. "We lived in hotels and residence inns, in Orange County and San Diego, for close to three years, and it was great." He wrote and surfed -- not well -- at beaches like San Onofre and Laguna.

Along the way, he kept writing until, in 1997, his novel "The Death and Life of Bobby Z" -- a thriller written on the Metrolink train between San Juan Capistrano and downtown L.A. -- took off. Warner Bros. bought the rights to it one day, and Knopf a few days later. "And my life changed, literally, overnight."

Finally, after six books, he could quit his day job.

Film in the works

He has also spent some time writing screenplays, and his 2006 novel, "The Winter of Frankie Machine," is currently in pre-production, with Michael Mann directing and Robert De Niro in the lead.

"I like his brevity, I like the way he can cover a lot of time in a few pages," said Southland novelist T. Jefferson Parker, a friend and admirer. "He's so light and so nimble with the storytelling. He gets this high-velocity storytelling going, seemingly effortless, though I know there's a lot of effort involved in writing that perfectly. He knows what to leave out and when to get offstage."

So far, it's been a fruitful season for surf books.

Spring has seen David Rensin's "All for a Few Perfect Waves," about surfer Miki Dora; Bob Greene's "When We Get to Surf City"; and "Breath," a coming-of-age novel by Tim Winton, one of Australia's most decorated novelists.

As he drove and walked past some of SoCal's legendary surf spots -- Salt Creek, Dana Point Harbor, once home to the fearsome "Killer Dana" wave that crashed into a wall of rocks and took surfers with it -- Winslow talked about surf lore, about how shape is often more important than a wave's size, about how angry he gets to see construction and development at his old favorite spots. He was so into this history that he offered a "stop me when you've had enough" before one of his miniature lessons.

But it's clear that Winslow is more interested in the characters and their argot than the technical or even physical side of surfing. His larger-than-life characters are among his novel's pleasures.

Winslow's P.I., Daniels, seems like the kind of laid-back dude whose most deeply held principle is that everything tastes better on a tortilla. Over the course of the book, he shows himself to be tormented, heroic and complicated.

"I wanted a lead character who embodied the ocean," Winslow said. "So in the sense that if you look out there at it now, it looks very placid, but that can change in a heartbeat. There's something going on underneath."

scott.timberg@latimes.com