The Press Box - Don Winslow on His New Novel, Mob Stories, Crime Fiction Before the Smartphone, and Why He's Retiring From Writing

Episode Date: April 27, 2022

Bryan is joined by author Don Winslow to preview the new novel in his ‘City on Fire’ trilogy. They discuss the writing process and the influence the ‘Iliad’ had on this particular novel, touch on the impact smartphones have on crime novels, and later, Winslow shares news of his retirement and what the future holds. Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Don Winslow Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Sean Fennessey. We've got something special cooking on the Prestige TV podcast. I'll be recapping one of my favorite shows, HBO's Barry, every Sunday night with the writer-director star of the show, The Great Bill Hater. We'll talk about the show's wild twists and turns, its special brand of dark comedy, and how it all came together. So on Sunday nights, immediately after a new episode airs, you can hear Bill and I break it all down on the Prestige TV pod. Subscribe on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to Pressbox. Curtis and producer Erica Servantes here. You know, we've been doing a lot of sports lately on this show.

And I feel there's a point where we can have too much of that in our lives and we need to turn to serious business, like crime fiction. You've heard David and I talk with reverence about Don Winslow, the author of the new book City on Fire, which came out this week. What I love about Don Winslow is that he writes these big, ambitious stories like his cartel trilogy. I love that he has single-handedly redeemed the art. of the one-sentence paragraph.

And I love that Winslow blends high fiction and pulp fiction so well that you forget which one you're reading until you realize the answer is both at the same time. Now, even if you're not going to read City on Fire, I think you really dig this conversation. Because Winslow based this novel on the Iliad, which was left out of his formal education, and mine, for that matter, he talked about how he turned epic poetry into a tale of Rhode Island mobsters. Speaking to which, we talked about mob movies. As an author, how much do you let the godfather and goodfellas sit in your head when you're writing your own book?

And finally, we talked about the big announcement Winslow made over the weekend, which is that City on Fire and its sequels, which he has already finished, will be the last novels he writes. He is sicking those dagger-like sentences on American politics. I get to interview Winslow next month in New Mexico at the debut edition of the Santa Fe Literary Festival. So consider this conversation to be the first part of a double header. Here's Don Winslow. All right, Don, you write in the intro to City on Fire that you worked on this book off and on for decades.

What made it so hard to crack? A couple of things. You know, I think that I wrote the first chapter of this maybe 27 years ago, believe it or not. And then I went on it, you know, I kind of dropped it to do other things. I did that big sort of drug trilogy that took, you know, 23 years. And then a big book on the New York Police Department and other things. That's the easier answer. I think the more complicated answer is I don't know that I was ready to write it.

You know, I don't think I was ready to come home yet. This is the first book I've done that's set in my hometown. First time I've ever written about it. And so I think it took me some. I needed some distance, both in terms of time and space, to come back to it in a way that I could write about it. So, City on Fire is in the proverbial drawer or on a hard drive somewhere. Exactly, yeah. When would you think about it?

A lot. You know, I'd finish another book and I'd come back and I might, you know, play with it and write a few pages or think about it. And then I'd set it down again. So this went on and off for decades, yeah. Are you a guy who likes to try to write two things at once? Yes. I am. I usually am.

I kind of think it is a morning book and an afternoon book. I usually around, you know, I start work at 5.30 typically in the morning and typically around, I don't know, three in the afternoon. I know I'm not going to accomplish much on that book anymore. And so, you know, I'll jump on another pony and ride it around Corral for a while. This is the old writer thing where what you're supposed to be working on, you're stuck. And then the thing you're not supposed to be working on, you see with absolute perfect clarity. Isn't that the truth? I'm just trying to do the video.

Yeah, I think that that's, yeah, it's a little sad, isn't it? It really is. But it's funny because then you've got your project, the next project, completely worked out in your head. And then you've got to come back to the one in front of you. Right, right, right. And the other one's always more tempting, right? it's it's you're like dating you know and the other one's marriage right key moment for you in writing city on fire comes in the late 1990s you're in your 40s by

this point you've written and published several novels but you say your education was to say the least narrow so what do you do well i i have a very as you alluded to narrow education in african history african history and military history and it gets worse african military military history. So, which was great, you know, I loved it. But I realized that I was pretty ignorant about literature. And so I grabbed one of those great books lists. You know, there's a dozen of them more. And I said, I'm going to read my way through it in this sort of autodidactic, you know, marathon. It took me seven years. But I read through the great books list, all of it. And you came to the Iliad at some point?

early, right, as one would, you know. You know, you do Gilgamesh and you do the Bible. And pretty quickly, you're going to hit the Iliad, one of the earliest stories, you know, written down. And so I came to the Iliad and the parallels between it and real life crime stories that I knew from growing up into New England were absolutely striking. Right. I went, I know this story already. You know, I saw it acted out in Boston and Providence and elsewhere. And that's what gave me the idea for this trilogy. And the parallels are what? Murder, betrayal.

Look, yeah, of course. All the great themes that we deal with in my beloved crime genre, the Greeks and Romans did thousands of years before us. Sorry, you know, but it's true. one of the New England crime conflicts began in an argument over a woman on a beach, in a very Helen of Troy-like incident, by the way. And I went, wow, that's Helen of Troy, right? Except it's in Massachusetts, you know.

And so I decided to take those stories and take those characters, put them all in my native Rhode Island. and write a contemporary crime. Now, you say this all at the top of City on Fire. If you hadn't said it, how many readers do you think would have noticed the parallels between this and the Iliad? I don't think very many. And that's okay.

That's actually good, because one of the things I'm trying to do is to write a contemporary crime novel that stands alone just as that. You can pick this book up and I hope enjoy it without any reference to the classics at all. And that was important because I didn't want to write symbols.

Do you know what I mean? I didn't want to write cartoons. I wanted to write fully human, fully modern people that you could read in that way. If, on the other hand, you have some nodding acquaintance with these stories, you might go, man, that's kind of like the Trojan horse. That's kind of like this. That's kind of like that. If you have a deeper knowledge of the classics, I think you can play a pretty fun game by finding the analogous character and analogous story in various classics.

Yeah, there's got to be that reader out there who minored in classical Siv who would have gotten to page 200 and go, wait a second. You know, why is this familiar to me? I talked to one yesterday. You know, he said, what do you think I minored in college? I have no clue, but classical literature. Okay. Well, here we go. There you go. The main character here is Danny Ryan. Tell us about Danny Ryan. Danny is your normal guy. Starts as your average guy. He's a longshoreman. He's a fisherman. He's cobbling together a living. But he's also a minor player in the Irish criminal syndicate in Rhode Island. He marries into the royal family, if you will, marries the daughter of the boss. But he's never really looked at as an insider. He's kind of looked down on a little bit.

He's sort of on the outside. His son-in-laws sometimes tend to be, you know. And so he gets involved in this war, you know, between the Italians and the Irish, out of loyalty, you know, to his family and to his people. And it escalates from there. The syndicate was a royal family. You say, Danny, was a minor duke. Yeah, I think so.

At best, you know, at best, maybe just a knight. You know, in the beginning, now as the story moves on, you know, he takes a larger and larger role. Is it fun to write through the eyes of someone who's not the main player? Absolutely. It's really a stoop question. Thank you. And one of the reasons that I picked him and picked that prototype, you know, I like taking a compass, pointing at true north and then kicking it, you know, off center. because that allows that character to see things and comment on things from slightly an outside perspective. He's not so in it that he can't see it. At the same time, he's in it in terms of the action. And so, yeah, having that outsider's perspective is really a fun.

He can see it from outside and he can also see the top and he can also see the bottom, which perhaps the leader of the syndicate could not see with the same clarity. Exactly. I mean, the leader of the syndicate is completely blind about all, you know, the larger issues until very close to the end of the book when tragedy forces him to see it for what it is. And Danny is going along with it all, albeit reluctantly, but he is definitely seeing it, you know, what could happen down the road and how harmful all this is, not only to them externally, but to their hearts and their souls. Now, you mentioned the syndicate is based in Rhode Island. as opposed to New York or Boston. So this is minor league baseball. This is like the AA.

Well, don't you tell that to Providence, man. But yeah, look, and that's an issue, and that was an issue in the New England Crime Wars. You know, New York came up at one point, and Providence chased New York out, chased New York orthodox. Albert Anastasia came up to take control of the Rhode Island docks and the local Irish and Italians. I said, no, thank you. But there's always been, as there is in sports, you know, tension between New York and Boston. Providence does have a little chip on its shoulders or the red-headed stepchild of Boston.

You know, there's always that kind of tension. And yet a lied in a ferocious loyalty to the Red Sox and the Patriots. But the nice thing about writing about Rhode Island crime, and listen, it had a very serious crime family. you did not mess with Raymond Patriarcher and those people. The nice thing about writing Rhode Island is because it is a small world. If you write about the New York five families, guys may or may not know each other. Probably not if they're from different families within the five families. Same with Chicago and the larger cities.

Rhode Island, everybody knew everybody. It was intimate. and they were variously friends and enemies, as in this book. You know, the book starts at a party, a beach party, where they're all at as friends and as allies, and then things fall apart. I've often joked that the motto of Rhode Island should be, I know a guy, you know, because everybody knows somebody to get something done for you. And they have this existential fear that if we screw it up here, that the guys from New York and Boston are going to come kill us all. Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely. And that was a reality. You know, New York and Boston are always lingering on the edge, you know, looking up saying, can we absorb that as a colony? But not only that, you know, Rhode Island, I mean, Providence did its own empire building in terms of trying to take over crime in New Haven and New London and Hartford and some of these other smaller towns. So that was a continual tension. Everybody's trying to push around somebody that's smaller. Everybody wants a piece of the action, you know. Now, you mentioned the real life incident on the East Coast that was on a beach that sort of sparks a war. Did you know that was, that took place when?

That took place back in the late 60s. Okay. So you were aware of it at the time or sometime later that that? Sometime later, yeah. And did you put that aside and say this is a germ of something. This could be a story at some point? Not then, but later on. When I read the Iliad, I went, oh, my God, that's like that.

you know yeah i've asked you about one sentence paragraphs before don which when i see him in journalism i like look at this hackwork this is incredible but when i see him in your novels like oh this is this is amazing you know how to do it i'll read a couple here for you spoiler free uh he turns and walks away down the beach paragraph knows he can very well catch a bullet in the back paragraph fuck it danny thanks paragraph now why do you like one sentence paragraph so much Given that example, right, I'm trying to create suspense and fear for the reader in what's going to happen with Danny, right? So the white space that you enforce on the reader's eye creates a little pause. And inside that pause, there's suspense and there's fear.

So this is like in the old days with a typewriter where it would come back to the left-hand side when you'd hit the return key. Yeah, that's the pause that we're experiencing when we read it. Yeah, exactly. You know, we sometimes forget that reading, you know, we always think of it as an intellectual and mental event. It's also physical activity. Yeah. It's the eye sees and the ear hears. And so, you know, as a writer, I like to take advantage of that.

If I'd written that in one paragraph, it goes by too fast. And, you know, you don't get that suspense. You don't get that little frisson of fears. is this guy going to shoot me in the back? Yeah, it's interesting that it slows you down rather than speed you up, the short time. Yeah, it's counterintuitive, isn't it? Yeah. Now, this is the first part of a trilogy,

coming out next year and then another book coming out the year after. You've done this before with the border that you mentioned. Yep. What's appealing to you about writing a trilogy? The length. I know that begs the question. What I really mean is I always knew this was going to be a saga. that we were going to follow Danny through a number of years and a number of places.

And so the older me might have tried to do that in one book, you know. I thought better in three, you know, shorter books that each stand on their own if you want them to, but tell this continuing tale because we're going to follow him. We're going to follow these other characters over about the next 15 years or so. When you start on a trilogy, do you know what? what's going to happen in books two and books three? Not in any detail. I know the rough beats because, again,

I'm sort of following the rough beats of the Odyssey and the Aeneid and Greek tragedy. So I kind of had, you know, yeah, these are touchstones that I know that I'm going to set my feet on on the way. But I don't outline. I don't plan. I just kind of sit down and write and see what happens. And I read in an interview you're going to move from Rhode Island to Hollywood for the second one. Yeah. And then Vegas for the third one.

Vegas for the third one. Yeah. You know, I wanted to follow a general trend of American crime history. And I think a lot of it stays in Rhode Island because I stay with some of the characters who remain there. But in terms of the protagonist, Danny, we make these moves. Hollywood's always great to write about, you know. and I think I found a pretty creative way to bring Danny there. And then, you know, Aeneas builds an empire.

Well, what does that mean in the 1990s? You know, and I decided he builds a casino empire. So we go to Las Vegas. Now, part of writing with the Iliad as kind of a rough outline you write in the intro is to stay away from milking Raymond Chandler for, you know, yet more hard-boiled pros. or something like that. Now, when you set something in Hollywood, do you find yourself, do you find the Chandler tractor beam pulling you? No, not in this case, you know, because it's in the 90s, you know, and so it's a completely different environment, you know, than what the great, great Mr.

Chandler wrote about. Now, I always love to taunt my L.A. friends that Chandler wrote his great L.A. novels living in San Diego. Yeah, La Jolla, right? Yeah, La Jolla. I've been to the house. It's great. Yeah. Yeah, which is very funny, right? Because at that point in his life, he's so distant and sort of hates L.A. and hates the movie business and everything else. But it seems it, again, with perfect clarity. Yeah, with perfect clarity from, you know, a couple of 150 miles away. A couple of questions about writing mob stories. Yeah. When I see interviews with David Chase, who created the Sopranos, he talks about how his head was filled with images of the godfather and goodfellas. And he said, someday, I want to make something like that. Yeah. Did you feel? feel that way? Sure. Look, it would be disingenuous for any of us of this generation to say that we were not influenced by the godfather, Goodfellas, casino, right? Sopranos, because they're iconic and they just are, you know. But there's an old saying, religious saying, if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. You know, which means you can't rely too hell.

on your gods. You have to walk your own path. So similarly to, you know, having really absorbed those classics, when I sat down to write, I had to forget about them. Right. You know, I had to write my own story and write these as real modern people, as I said. Likewise in in coming along on this great, you know, gang story, mob story tradition of those. And they are that great works, You know, great books, great films, great television show. You have to acknowledge it and realize that you're following in those footsteps and then forget about it. When you were writing about the drug cartels in Mexico, you're writing about a point in history where they're at their zenith or somewhere near their zen. Yeah, yeah.

And these guys, you said another interview or not at their zita. No, they're in decline. And that's interesting to write about, you know, the drug cartels, you know, I wrote three pretty fat books over the course of the number of years. I think it's 50 years that that follows. And so you saw the whole arc, you know, from the origins, you know, of those cartels to their height of their power and then what happened later. With this, I'm writing about the mob world in decline. And that's interesting to me. I think that cultures in decline are pretty interesting.

And in many ways more ferocious because the cheese that they're fighting over is getting smaller and smaller. and people are getting hungrier and hungrier. So little things mean more than they did. And people can be pushed to violence over a smaller sort of slight than maybe in the past. Absolutely, absolutely. You know, there's a dispute over some stolen jewelry in this thing that gets completely out of hand that at a time when they were at their height, you know, would have been a coffee conversation. And that's about it.

Female characters in mob books and movies often get relegated to, the woman who's sobbing because she realizes what she has married into. How did you think about female characters when you said out on this book? I thought very much about that aspect of it, right? Because as much as I love the godfather, Diane Keaton has nothing to do in that movie. You know, Sopranos does. I just spaced on her first name.

Sorry. Well, this was an interesting challenge because in the case of one of the female characters, I'm writing literally about a goddess, Danny's mother. Sure. Who had to be powerful. Barstow to Vegas, yeah. Barstow to Vegas, you know.

And so, you listen, you're always a little nervous about writing female characters as a guy. You know, do I have the knowledge? Do I have the right to do it? You know, but you have to in this book. You know, you can't ignore those characters. They played major roles in driving the action.

And so with Madeline, Danny's mother, the goddess Aphrodite, you know, I had to find her, you know, ways to make her powerful in her own right, you know, without reference to her sexuality. And that was a challenge and I hope I pulled it off. The other female character in this book that kind of fascinates me is Cassandra Cassie, who, you know, has the gift of prophecy and is trying to warn these guys. don't do what you're doing. Don't do it. It's not going to end well, and they don't listen. Yeah, this last score may not turn out

the way you think it is. Right. Don't walk through that door, yeah. Exactly, yeah. Mob stories have certain elements that are in common from story to story. At some point, perhaps a body will be dug up. A younger brother character

will screw things up for the whole family. Do you find readers want those elements changed up or do they want those elements kind of spun out in a different way. I think the latter. I think that they want them, you know, listen, there are certain, I guess, tropes in gang fiction that people expect. It's in the stories.

It's in reality, right? You're not making these things up. And it's in the classics. And so, yeah. You mentioned setting a novel in Rhode Island versus the Pacific Coast Highway here in California where you often have a character eating a breakfast burrito or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what does New England, other than weather, what does New England allow you to do as a writer?

Oh, boy, all kinds of things. For one thing, it's a whole different dialect and a whole different way of talking, which I really enjoy. There's a sort of a sardonic toughness about it that you don't find in California very much. That's interesting to write. The food's very different. It's not breakfast burritos. You know, it's bacon and eggs and it's clam chowder, it's clam cakes. And Rhode Island specifically has some.

you know, some foods that are just specific to it. The ocean is quite different in terms of its colors and, you know, the sky in terms of its attitude. So, yeah, it's a different world and fun to write. What's the different color of the ocean out there? Tends to be more bottled green. You know, California oceans famously blue. And the New England ocean tends to be darker, kind of a greener kind of color. And you get a lot more foggy days and misty days, you know, that bring about a lot.

a certain mood. You introduce the concept of a fuck you storm, which appears in March in Rhode Island. What's the fuck you storm? A fuck you storm is that that last storm of winter you don't expect. And it's just winter saying, you know what, I'm not done with you. Fuck you. And here's some more snow for your ass, you know, go out and scrape that windshield again, you know. You live out in Rhode Island part of the year. Yeah, yeah. So did you do a lot of walking around when you're writing this book, Bow into the places. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

I think I was at this location's almost every day. And you, what, do you take a piece of paper, notebook, something like that? No, no, never. Just absorb? Just absorb.

You know, if you're so busy taking notes all the time, you're perforce looking down. And so, you know, I don't like to do. I just, every once in a photo, maybe.

But, no, you just absorb it and you remember. But then again, you're there, day. You know, it's walking out the door. So the photograph kind of lives in your head at that point. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. This book takes place in the late 80s. Is it fun for you to write crime fiction in an era before smartphones? Yes. Thank you very much. Yes. It is because smartphones have changed the way everyone does everything and particularly the speed of information. You know, if you'd had smartphones in Romeo and Juliet, they'd both still be alive, right?

You know, it's the crossing messages that gets them killed. And so, yeah, it really is more fun to do that. And I think maybe it was more fun to live in an age before smartphones. I had a genre writer tell me one time the two things that changed the crime novel or the thriller novel were the fall of the Soviet Union. Because it took away a lot of obvious and easy enemies and the introduction of the cell phone. Yeah. Because as a reader, you just want to say, well, why aren't they just calling your help? call. Just, yeah, yeah, text, you know, guys coming with a gun, you know.

So now you're free to say, okay, he can be alone on the street and you can't necessarily just reach into your pocket. Reach in the pocket and say, look out, yeah. Here are my guys come help me out of this. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. What kind of affected the pandemic have on your writing? You know, look, a writer's life is isolation anyway. That's our work strategy. So in literally in terms of work not much. But that sounds very glib because, you know, and I dedicated this book to the people who died in the pandemic because I felt some sort of acknowledgement was needed by a writer sitting healthy, not on the front lines, writing books, you know. I don't know, you know, psychologically, I think we all struggled with this, you know, with the deaths of, you know, family and friends

and being isolated and, you know, not being able to get out on, if there is a positive side, you know, I sat down and I wrote these three books during the pandemic, you know, so in a way it sort of focused you. But I had to be very aware of not letting the pandemic influence a book that took place in 1986. You know, when I'm sitting down typing, I had to be. be very aware of being in that time frame and not in the time frame we were in. New York Times had a piece a few weeks ago about how we're seeing the first wave of pandemic novels that is novels set during these times.

Yeah. Is that interesting to you at some point to write a crime novel that would take place within this world we live in now? I don't know. I don't. I'm not trying to be coy. I really don't know. Right now, no, it doesn't interest me because I think it's just too much in my face.

you know, I kind of like to forget about it. You said you sit down at 5.30 in the morning to start Project A. So how many of those hours are you glued but to seat looking at a computer and write? Well, I typically write from about 5.30 to about 10 and then go out for usually a four to six mile walk with my wife. Have a little lunch come back and work until about five again. Yeah. So a lot. I know you one of these novelists that likes to stop,

a certain place, you know, because some people say, oh, well, I'm going to stop a little short of where I could stop so that I'll be roaring when I get back to the computer. The Hemingway technique. No. I usually just write until I'm just too damn tired and don't feel like writing anymore. You know, it's sort of like a factory job, you know, when the whistle blows, I kind of get up and go and know that I'll be back there the next morning. you've had a bunch of movies made or about to be made of your novels.

How much do you think of movies when you're writing a book? Not at all. Not at all. Because only bad things would happen. You'd write either a crummy novel or a crummy film treatment. So I don't think of them at all, at all. But you're able to completely keep it out of your mind, even though you're saying there's going to be something like a hundred percent chance that this novel is going to be

actually. Pretty much 100 percent chance. But in fact, it already has been. option, the one we're talking about right now. I'm going to keep this even when I write a heist. I'm not thinking of how this would potentially look on a movie screen or no, not at all. Now listen, I think

again, anyone of our generation are influenced by film and television in terms of the way we see things. So I think that there are sometimes I conceive of certain scenes in cinematic terms that I conceive of, you know, boy, I might need a real close up

here. Right? Get very close to the character at this moment or at other moments, nah, I'm going to pull way back to show a larger, you know, a kind of a scene. So I might think of it in cinematic terms, but I'm not thinking about a movie. I'm not thinking about actors, nothing like that, because it would end badly. Those are all the movies in my head, screenplays you've written in the past, those kinds of things, rather than the movie treatment of this particular book. Yeah, the book has to be a book. It has to be a book first. And if it's never anything.

but a book, fine. I don't mind that either, you know. Your novel The Force, which is about New York cops and corruption. James Mangold was set to direct that with Matt Damon starring. Is that still happening? Yeah, I think so. I think it's somewhere in the tube, you know. And the Border Trilogy is going to be an FX television.

Correct. Television series. Yeah. Yeah, which I think's good. I think it gives it the time and the space to play it out, you know, and not have it be one to me. How involved do you want to be in projects like that when your book becomes a show or a movie? Yeah, you know, I'm fairly involved in the sense that they send me to scripts.

I read them, I give them my thoughts. You know, I think that in the early phases, it's important to be involved so that we all have sort of a similar vision of what it should be. But I don't go to the set very much. You know, I don't know if there's a role for me there other than to, you know, irritate people at the craft service table. So, you know, I go to say hi and, you know, be polite and that kind of thing. But in the earlier phases, yeah, I'm pretty involved. So this, I want this to sound like what I imagined it's sounding like, or I want this to sound like a good movie version of my book?

What I'm interested in is characters, really. I want them to get the characters right and I want to get the overall ideas right. At the same time, I'm aware that these are two different media. They're two different breeds of cat with different needs, you know, in a lot of ways. And so I'm not as resistant to change as a lot of people might think that I am. You know, I always tell the film people, hey, guys, 2,000 years before you were editing, we were editing. You know, I get it. You know, you've got two hours to do this thing and it's 800 pages.

So, of course, you're going to compress. And of course there are going to be things that you're going to change and stitch. And you might create new scenes to do that. And sometimes, in my experience, has been those new scenes have been very good. I had to throw out stuff too. Right. In this book, I couldn't get everything in. Exactly.

Last time we talked was September 2020. Yeah. And you were working on lots of projects, Twitter videos, things like that, to help defeat Donald Trump. Yes. Are you more or less? excited or let me do that one more time. Are you more or less optimistic about the state of politics now than you were in September 2020? I think I'm about the same. You know, look, we won. Let's let's not forget that we won, right? That he's no longer president, but I am disturbed,

to say the least, that there have been so far no consequences to his attempt to overthrow the government in the United States, him and his accomplices, no consequences. Not a single Republican politician has been subpoenaed by this committee to testify under oath. Never mind, indictments, nothing that we can see coming from the Department of Justice. And so I'm less concerned about retribution than I am about the future that if there are no consequences, this is just going to happen again. So I don't know how to gain. my level of optimism, you know, but I'm deeply concerned. How much of your day, excuse me, how much of your day do you spend thinking about politics?

It varies, you know, depends on the news. You know, the first thing I do when I get up in the morning is I look at about five newspapers, other news sources, and that more or less, you know, it's sort of a reactive business. And does that help writing crime fiction? Does that, does that? No. Yeah, listen, when you're looking at massive crimes, massive crimes like, well, I don't know, treason, you know, from the people who are supposed to be leading your country, it gives you kind of a different idea of what crime fiction may or may not be. You tweet a ton in recent days, January 6th, the Herschel Walker Senate candidacy, Ohio Senate race, Fox's very own Peter Ducey.

Is that all you? There's not another Don Winslow? Well, no, Shane Salerno, my partner and I, we both work on these things. Okay. So when I can't pick it up, he can. Because I was like, how are you writing giant novels and also tweeting at that volume? Well, caffeine has a lot to do with it. In the acknowledgments of this book, you thank Bruce Springsteen, Nils Lofgren, and John Landau.

Why them? When we were doing the videos that you alluded to last November, we wanted to use Mr. Springsteen's song called Philadelphia in a video that we produced about, literally to talk to Pennsylvania voters because like everyone else, we knew that was going to be a critical, critical state. And so they helped us, you know, they helped the Nils and helped us get to, you know, Bruce and then he gave us very graciously gave us permission to use Philadelphia. And when you do this, some of this political activism, do you get readers writing you saying, Don, I freaking hate your politics, but I absolutely love the new novel and I'll read the next one.

I get a few of those. Listen, we get mostly positive feedback. I get some of the shut up and type variety and some of the I hate you, I hope you die variety, you know. Oh, wow. Well, that's Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Who cares? Who cares? We've seen stick to sports. I don't know if I've seen stick to crime fiction being. Shut up and type. Shut up and type. Yeah. Last one for you, Donna. A previous lifetime, you were a safari guide in Africa.

So tell us, what is the trick to being a good safari guide versus a bad safari guide? First of all, I want to stress that I was a photographic safari guide. Okay. Okay. Only shooting cameras, okay? The key is observation and detail. It's very similar to researching these books. You're trying to get your clients in a good position to photograph the animals that they

want to. And to do that, you really need to be observing your environment. constantly because it's changing and shifting in terms of weather and sun and wind and what other animals are coming in. So you need a certain base knowledge, but then you need to be constantly observing around you and you also need to be aware of the next step. It's like, okay, right now they're photographing elephants and that's great. But in an hour I want to put them with lions, where are the lion's going to be at that time,

that kind of stuff. So a massive logistical challenge. Massive logistical challenge. And also with, you know, food and lodging and, you know, safety and health and all of that kind of thing. It's, yeah, a logistical puzzle that's always moving. Don, you announced over the weekend that after the publication of this trilogy, you are retiring from writing. Why are you retiring? I want to do something else.

You know, we've been active. I've been active politically over the first. the last four years on Twitter and putting out some videos that supported certain candidates and attacked certain others. I think we're at a critical moment in American democracy right now. Maybe we thought at one point we were out of the woods. We're not even close to being out of the woods. And I think it's time to devote more time to that. I noticed you said that Democrats have better ideas, but they don't have better messaging. What's a recent example of that? Oh, well, gosh, I mean, you know, anytime we talk about January 6th, you know, our messaging is weak.

When we talk about the achievements of the Biden administration, I don't know that we're getting that message out. You know, I was in a town the other day that had zero percent unemployment, zero percent unemployment. We need to be getting those messages out and getting them out in simple, straight language. and your videos that you'll be making, they'll be living on Twitter and social media? Yep. Yes. They will be doing that. And, you know, as they get passed around,

you know, it was all these things do. But yeah, I think that that's the battlefield now. You know, you fight the fire where the fire is, and I think that's where it is, and that's what we're going to do. Fiction is about persuasion to some extent. How do you make a persuasive political video? You speak plainly?

You use images. You use your storytelling abilities and your abilities to use images to tell a story to touch both the brain and the heart and the soul. And that's persuasion. I went back and watched the one you released right before the 2020 election. America needs Michigan. Yeah. That was narrated by Jeff Daniels. Yes, indeed.

And I noticed you talked about a lot of basic values. essentially speaking, right? Here are the things we believe in. These are the kind of people we are and used the word we a lot in that video. Yeah. Yeah. If you want me to comment on that, sure. Listen, I'm afraid sometimes we've yielded patriotism to the other side if they had a monopoly on it. People who are waving flags with Donald Trump's image on it, to me are not patriots. people who are waving Confederate flags as they attack the capital of the United States are not patriots. I want to go back and talk about a more basic kind of patriotism that's about American values and who we are as a people, what we admire, what we don't, what we aspire to be, what we don't aspire to be, you know. So that video was very heartfelt.

It was great that Jeff narrated it because his voice, he's a Michigan guy, talking to Michigan people. I saw him the other day, actually, in Michigan, was extremely powerful. As you know, there's a whole Twitter subculture of things Democrats and liberals do to make them feel better, but don't actually translate into electoral wins. What do you do to make sure your videos are leading to the latter? Apparently they have been. The candidates tell us so, the numbers tell us so, so we're going to keep doing what we're doing. I don't mean to be a boring guy, but to repeat myself, you know, you want to meet people where they're at. You want to talk to people in the language of the street, the language of the farm, the language of the workplace, the language of the home, you know, and give them images that they can legitimately identify with, not that they're not that they, not that they,

they're being manipulated, but that they can legitimately see themselves in. And that's what we do. Was it an easy decision or a hard decision to quit writing? Oh, it's a hard decision. It's a hard decision. It's something I love. It's the job I've always wanted. You know, it's the dream. having said that, it's been extraordinarily good to me. You know, better to me than I'd ever hoped and probably better than I've ever deserved. It's given me so, so many good things, and I'm so grateful. When you receive a lot from this world, I think you need to give some back to this world. I noticed you said to CBS, I've told the stories.

I want to tell. Yeah. Yeah. Did you have a moment where you felt like you were inching up to a line where you would be repeating yourself? Not repeating myself necessarily, but, you know, I've written some ambitious works to be immodest. You know, the Cartel trilogy, you know, several thousands of pages, this trilogy,

not quite as long, but still quite a project, you know, a work that I started 27 years ago. And so as I was coming toward the end of this trilogy, given my own feelings and given what was happening in the country and the world, it just seemed to be saying, yeah, this is the one to end it on. What level of sanity would American politics have to achieve for you to write another crime novel? I don't know. Hey, let's hope we find out. I guess I could ask that a different way and say, do you hold out the possibility that you could think of a story you hadn't told before and be moved to write again.

Oh, listen, the problem with this world is not that there are too few things to do. There are too many. There are too few things to write about. There are too many. They're not too few books to read. There are too many. But, you know, I think I've made my decision. Don Winslow.

Thanks for coming on the press box. Thanks for having me, man. Time for the second weekly edition of David Shoemaker guesses, a strained pun headline. Yeah. Monday's headline about a lemonade lawsuit was no country time for old men. Today's headline comes from Lee K. Schaffer. It's from Vulture. It's about the trailer for the new Buzz Lightyear movie. The trailer is boring, says Vulture. I want you to think about Buzz's famous catchphrase and tell me what was Vultures, strained pun headline. I know it's to infinity and beyond. Because that's one of,

my three and a half year old's favorite things to say. So it's really boring. It's to, what is it like this take? To infinity. Infinity and be boring. I mean,

I am so bored. I am incredibly bored. I just, I mean, David, I can barely stay awake watching the buzz light. Why can't I think of this? This is so easy.

To infinity. and um oh sorry and uh uh uh uh beleaguered um exhausted uh yawning oh beyond and and beyond why into infinity and I yawned

to infinity and we yawned we yon all right to infinity and we yawned he is David Shoemaker on Brian Curtis production magic by Eric Christopher Fonters. Back Monday with more Luke Wormt takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.