The American crime writer on the inspiration for his new book about warring gangs, his sudden thirst for poetry and why reading Jane Austen wears him out
Over Zoom from his Rhode Island home, Don Winslow is straight from central casting for a 68-year-old former private investigator turned crime writer who works in the morning and goes hiking in the afternoon. He’s lean and tanned – he splits his time between California and Rhode Island – with a bald dome of a head and owlish spectacles. Winslow has written 22 novels, a collection of stories, and numerous film and TV scripts, most notably the adaptation of his novel Savages, which was directed by Oliver Stone. He has become a prominent figure in US politics, producing a series of films in the lead-up to the 2020 US elections that were highly critical of Donald Trump and were viewed 250m times. His latest novel, City on Fire, is published on 26 April.
Your new book retells the Iliad against the backdrop of warring gangs in 1980s Rhode Island. Where did the idea come from?
Other people have obviously done this – you immediately think of Joyce’s Ulysses – but there was an incident in real crime history where a war was touched off between two syndicates and it was an argument over a woman at a beach party. It happened not far from here. That struck me at the time – going back some 20-odd years – as being a Helen of Troy incident. Just like Troy, the woman was the pretext, but the real reasons were what they have always been: money, power and turf. I have taken the major beats of the Iliad, and this is the first book in a trilogy, so later books are going to draw on the Aeneid and the Odyssey and work in other Greek dramas, the Oresteia, for instance. I read those texts looking for contemporary parallels. Where could the poetry of my beloved crime genre meet the poetry of the Greek classics?
