Don Winslow tackles R.I. gang war in new ‘City on Fire’
Don Winslow is a celebrated, best-selling crime novelist whose “City on Fire” (Wm. Morrow), out this week, chronicles a vicious gangster rivalry in Rhode Island.
Best known perhaps for his “Cartel trilogy” about the brutal Mexican drug trade, Winslow at 68 is a hot prospect with an FX “Cartel” series in the works and the screen rights to “City” already sold to Sony.
“City” has the Irish Murphy gang in a lopsided battle with the Italian Morettis and their unstoppable enforcer Sal.
Winslow has written 22 books and developed his own method for deciding what subject merits commitment for a novel and what doesn’t.
“For me, it’s a matter of excitement. I have to be in love with a topic, a character in a setting, to write it. It has to almost demand to be written,” he explained.
With “City on Fire,” “I wrote the first chapter 27 years ago,” he said in a phone interview last week. “I’d pick it up and set it down and pick it up and set it down. Finally, I had both the physical and temporal and mental space to sit down and write. What tipped me off — I was still as excited about it, maybe more so, than I was 27 years ago.
“This is the first book I’ve written that’s set in my hometown, Rhode Island, New England. I think mentally, maybe emotionally, I needed that time and distance to get some objectivity about it. Feel that I had the skills to write about it.”
Perhaps the excitement came because there’s another layer to all of “City,” one that goes back millennia.
Wilson immersed himself in classic Greek and Roman mythology, specifically Homer’s “The Iliad” for both his characters and plot.
“Reading ‘The Iliad’ and mythology, the parallels between it and things that had happened in contemporary crime history was striking,” he discovered.
So here is a Helen of Troy, a beautiful woman named Pam who initiates the gang warfare. There is the great warrior Achilles with his vulnerable heel and his mighty opponent
Hector who, dead, will see his body dragged through the streets.
“Every character in the book has an analogous character in the classics. Now, having said that, I want to stress that you can read these books as crime fiction with no reference to the classics at all. That was the challenge I set for myself: Could I create a contemporary modern version of the classics?
“If you do know the classics, or you have an interest in it, then this is sort of a value-added thing.”