Aeneas to Danny
The protagonist of “City on Fire” is Danny Ryan, a lieutenant in an Irish crime family in Providence, Rhode Island. Danny is married to the boss’s daughter but still outside the inner circle when a romantic rivalry over the same woman sparks a war between the Irish and Italian crime organizations.
The character is loosely based on Aeneas, a supporting character in the “Iliad” who, like Danny, grows into a larger role in the aftermath of the Trojan War.
“What we often forget about the ‘Iliad,’ while I’m in lecture mode, is it does not tell the end of the Trojan War,” Winslow says. “It starts in the middle and stops in the middle.
“Everyone thinks it tells the story of the Trojan horse,” he says. “It doesn’t. That’s left to Aeneas when he’s talking to Queen Dido, you know, ‘Sorrow, terrible sorrow, you asked me to recount again.’ And he tells that story.”
The appeal of Aeneas — and a few thousand years later, Danny Ryan — to Winslow was that they are outsiders, he says.
“I always like writing a little bit from the outsider perspective,” he says. “It gives you a little bit of a slant and a perspective on things that you don’t get from people who are exactly dead center.
“And I just liked this guy,” he says, speaking of Aeneas but also Danny. “I love the idea of this guy who loves his wife but has to leave her in the ‘Aeneid.’ She just disappears; he searches for her and can’t find her, but then he has to get his infant son and his aging father out.
“To me, he was a sympathetic character. Someone I could relate to, but also someone I could carry on to two more books, Aeneas’ arc. To me, that was a compelling saga.” the middle of these wars,” he says of the battles between the state’s organized crime syndicates. “You’d pick up the Providence Journal like it was the sports pages, and there’d be photos of guys who’d been shot.
“You were always aware of it,” Winslow says. “I was in a restaurant one time as a kid, literally 13 or 14 years old, and the next day two mob guys were shot there. Even the little fishing village where I grew up, you would see it in the bars and the restaurants.”
In recent years, Winslow started to spend more time in his hometown, caring for his mother in her final years and eventually restoring the home he grew up in. Today he and his wife spend about half the year there, walking the same beaches he walked as a boy, the same beaches his characters walk in “City on Fire.”
When he left for college in the ’70s, it was just another hard-luck East Coast town, past its glory days of factories and fishing that could sustain a middleclass life. Winslow says he set the book there in the ’80s because he wanted the story to take place in a time before its rough edges were sanded down for the more gentrified town it’s become in recent years.
“It was a Bruce Springsteen town,” he says. “You know, ‘It’s a town full of losers, I’m pulling out of here to win.’ ”
The vivid settings in the book came easily no matter which coast he was on at the time.
“It didn’t take anything to walk around what it looks like now and see what it looked like then,” Winslow says. “There’s an old joke about New Englanders that they always give you directions by what used to be there. Go two blocks to what used to be Benny’s, turn right.
“They still do it,” he says and laughs. “I do it.”
“City on Fire” was originally set for publication last fall but was pushed back due to the pandemic. That’s given Winslow time to finish the second book in the trilogy and get deep into the third.
From the classics that inspired them, this would suggest a story arc that finds Danny wandering in search of home and then establishing a new empire.
“I don’t want to get into it too much, but yeah,” Winslow says. “There are always scenes in Rhode Island because we follow all these characters through the next decade or so. But primarily Book 2 is Hollywood, and Book 3 is Las Vegas. Both towns of which I, for good or ill, am very familiar with.”