Of arms and the man he sings — no, seriously, he does. Don Winslow's latest novel, "City in Ruins," completes his Danny Ryan trilogy, the saga of a mid-level Irish-American mob soldier from Providence, Rhode Island, who flees across the country to build a new life, first in Hollywood and finally as an empire-builder in Las Vegas. Winslow says the trilogy took 30 years to complete — nearly his entire writing career, in other words — and also says it's his final work of fiction. We'll get to that. All three novels have been published in rapid sequence — the widely acclaimed "City on Fire" in 2022, followed by "City of Dreams" in 2023. They're loosely based, Winslow says, on the real-life gang war that paralyzed Providence in the late 1980s and early '90s, in which nearly 40 people died. (Someone in "City on Fire" observes that Providence tolerates only three religions: Irish Catholicism, Italian Catholicism and the Red Sox.)
But the Ryan trilogy is also based on "The Aeneid," the Homeric knockoff epic by the Latin poet Virgil that turns a minor figure from the tale of the Trojan War into the founder of Rome. Yeah, Winslow is a guy who writes hard-boiled crime fiction full of leggy, tough-talking dolls and guys with $70,000 watches and short, telegraphic sentences. ("First thing you learn in this kind of life: Never get in the car.") But he's also another kind of guy, a historian by training and inclination, as he told me during his recent visit to Salon's New York studio. He's not kidding about "The Aeneid": After our conversation, he sent me the "character key" for the Danny Ryan novels, which runs to three pages. So I could tell you who his cognates are for Achilles, Hector, Helen of Troy, Aphrodite, Odysseus and a whole bunch of others. But Winslow asked me not to share it, and as a character in his fiction might say, he seems like the kind of guy you don't want to cross.
