In the mid-’90s, Don Winslow had already published a handful of novels when he decided to fill the gaps in his literary education by reading through a list of the great books of world literature.
His intent was to broaden his reading beyond the African and military history he’d studied in college and graduate school and the crime fiction of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, whose works had led him to his writing career.
What he found in the Greek and Roman classics was something both familiar and new, Winslow says.
“When I was reading the ‘Iliad,’ particularly, it struck me that some incidents in the New England crimes wars that I grew up in reminded me very much of the Helen of Troy incident that touched off the Trojan Wars,” says Winslow of Homer’s epic poem.
“Then I’m reading the Greek tragic dramas, and I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, these are crime stories,’” he says. “They’re absolutely noir.
“And so it hit me that all of the subjects that we deal with in contemporary crime fiction, my own beloved genre, had already been done by the time Homer and Virgil and the Greek playwrights had finished.”
And an idea started to take shape as Winslow considered ways in which the classics and crime might be combined.
“Could I write three contemporary crime novels as a saga that would stand on their own as crime novels?” Winslow says. “If you knew about the classics, you’d still enjoy them as crime novels, but that sort of merged the great themes of the classics with the great themes of the crime genre?”
It took 20 years or so, or about as long as Odysseus was at war and wandering in ‘Iliad’ and “Odyssey,” but on Tuesday, the first book in that trilogy, “City On Fire,” arrived. The books, he announced last week (after this interview had occurred), will be his last ones; he’s retiring.
Classics of crime
For Winslow, the elements of crime fiction jumped out as he read the Greek and Roman classics.
“The big themes about honor, loyalty or betrayal,” he says. “Violence. Retribution. If you read the ‘Iliad,’ it is one revenge story after another after another.
“But they’re also about power,” Winslow says. “The gods are constantly interfering and changing people’s fates for good or ill. I think of sort of street-level criminals who don’t realize that they’re caught up in a much bigger political and economic system. That the gods are eventually going to determine whether they live or die, or how they live or die.
“That’s what really turned me on, but also reading plays like ‘Agamemnon,’ right? Guy comes home from the Trojan Wars. His wife blames him for their daughter’s death, and she and her lover murder him in the bathtub. That could be any noir novel from the 1940s or ’50s.”
“Agamemnon” is the first in Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy, and Winslow found seeds of crime fiction in all three.
“The son comes home and finds out that his mother’s lover, with her encouragement, killed his father, and he kills both of them,” he says. “More noir.
“Then in the final play, the spirits called the Furies track him down and find him,” Winslow says. “Like prosecutors, like cops, and you have the first trial scene in literature when he’s put on trial in Athens for murdering his mother.”
Suddenly, everywhere he looked, Winslow says he saw the same themes surface: crime stories in the newspaper, crime films and true-crime shows on television.
“I could go on,” Winslow says. “And I did go on and on for three books.”
Books, as we have since learned, that he says will be his last.
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 both 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’s arc. To me, that was a compelling saga.”
Into the past
Winslow grew up in the small seaside village of Matunuck in the town of South Kingstown, Rhode Island, about 40 minutes south of Providence, the state’s capital of government and crime.
“Growing up, you were just very aware of all that because that was in 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. 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 middle-class 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 its 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 Of Fire” was originally set for publication in the fall of 2021 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 two is Hollywood, and book three is Las Vegas. Both towns of which I, for good or ill, am very familiar with.”
