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Photo: Jean Winslow
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Crime Writer Don Winslow Tackles the Mob, with a Classic Twist
"City on Fire" starts a new trilogy from the author, who was inspired by Homer's "Iliad" to create a modern-day gangster story set in 80s Rhode Island / BY Robert Wiersema / April 26th, 2022
Crime writer Don Winslow has never been one to back down from a challenge. His 2017 novel The Force, for example, was a deep dive into corruption in the New York Police Department that took an almost Shakespearean approach. More impressively, the Cartel trilogy (The Power of the Dog, 2005; The Cartel, 2015 and The Border, 2019) explored American involvement in the Mexican drug trade in a sprawling series that spanned multiple decades and countries with a cast of hundreds. (If you haven’t read it, you are missing out.)
Winslow has embarked on a new trilogy, which begins with City on Fire; it is perhaps his most ambitious work yet. For the American author, this new project is oddly personal.
“City on Fire, for me, is a homecoming,” Winslow says, when I reach him via Zoom in Julian, Calif., an hour northeast of San Diego. “It’s the first time I’ve written about my hometown, back in New England, in Rhode Island.”
Winslow, who was born in New York, grew up in “a fishing village similar to the one that provides the initial setting of this book,” as he writes in an introductory letter for the novel. By the time he left to go to college, he continues, “my home was a Bruce Springsteen down-and-out beach town – the factories were long gone, the fishing depleted, the optimism drained.”
That sense of homecoming goes beyond the book, as well. Following the loss of his mother – who passed away during the pandemic – Winslow and his wife have renovated the house where he grew up, and now split their time between California and Rhode Island.
City on Fire is set in the 1980s. Providence, the state capital – and Rhode Island – is mob-controlled, with clear divisions and a delicate balance of power between the Italians and the Irish. The mob families in Boston and New York are always looking for an opportunity to expand their empires. The novel’s focal character is Danny Ryan, son of the former leader of the Irish mob, son-in-law to the current leader, and a low-level player, largely on the periphery of the machinations that have kept the peace.
That peace is shattered by a beautiful woman, Pam, who appears on the beach in late summer, 1986, coming “out of the water like a vision emerging from his dreams of the sea,” Winslow writes. “Except she’s real and she’s going to be trouble.”
Pam is the girlfriend of a young Italian mobster, but she catches the eye of the favourite son of the Irish leader, who aggressively, and drunkenly, gropes her at an end-of-summer clambake attended by both families. Before long, the headlines are full of news of war, all because of a beautiful woman (though that, of course, isn’t the real reason: rivalries and generational ambition run deep in the respective families).
If that description is ringing faint bells, that’s by design, and this is where the ambition of Winslow’s new trilogy reveals itself. City on Fire is a re-casting of Homer’s Iliad, with a gang war taking the place of the Trojan War, and Pam as a modern Helen of Troy, “the face that launched a thousand ships,” as Christopher Marlowe put it. In this design, Danny Ryan is modelled on Aeneas, a relatively minor character in the Iliad, though his destiny is far greater.
“City on Fire is a modern crime novel,” Winslow says, “that I think you can read without having any reference to the classics. It’s a standalone, but it really retells the story of the fall of Troy.”
Winslow’s classical approach to the trilogy grew out of what he saw as a personal limitation. “All the way back in the nineties, I realized how ignorant I am,” he says with a smile. “I had this very narrow education in African history and military history, but I was otherwise really poorly read, so I grabbed one of those great books lists and it took me seven years to read the damn thing. But early in it, of course, I hit the Iliad and the Odyssey and the Greek tragic dramas, and, most crucially for this book, [Virgil’s epic poem] the Aeneid.”
What he discovered in the classics shaped City on Fire and the upcoming novels. “In reading those books it struck me, all these parallels to real-life crime stories I had grown up around in Rhode Island, which at the time was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mafia,” he says. “There was a series of wars in New England that began over a very Helen of Troy-like incident, and so I had this idea: could I take those great themes and stories and characters and match them with my beloved crime genre?”
While City on Fire was sparked by Winslow’s mid-90s reading, the author spent almost three decades on the novel.
“I think I wrote that first chapter 27 years ago,” he says. “Look, I spent 23 years writing this big drug trilogy about the Mexican drug wars, and that was pretty intense and all-encompassing. Then I wrote a book about the NYPD and some other stuff, so I didn’t have the time and space to write this.”
His voice drops, as he continues.
“If, however, I’m being really honest, I don’t think I was ready to confront it yet,” he says. “I think I doubted my own ability to do it. I think it’s hard to go home, in any sense. In a literary sense, certainly.”