The Final Score - Don Winslow

 A couple of years ago Don Winslow announced he was retiring from writing (to spend more time excoriating Donald Trump, if I remember right).   Turns out he only retired from writing novels.   Short novels, which is what he calls the six pieces here, he still writes and publishes.

I am an enormous fan - but lost a little faith with The Force and couldn't get on with the City trilogy.   But the Cartel trilogy is unsurpassed in modern crime literature.  I loved Savages and the surfer crew in The Gentlemen's Hour.   More recently I thoroughly enjoyed his masterly continuation of Trevanian's Shibumi (Satori).   All of these, I believe, are reviewed on this blog.   So I was never not going to pick up The Final Score on the offchance it was more like the Winslow who had once blown me away.

And boy, is it just!   Every single one of the six a winner.  Even better, 'The Lunch Break' is a return for Boone and his surfer crew.   For me the sextet starts really well with 'The Final Score' itself and gets better with each story thereafter.  'The Lunch Break' is fifth of the six and the final, longest story, 'Collision', is so good, it could be an outtake from The Cartel.   In case I have inferred there is something retrospective going on here, let me be clear: these six short novels are fresh, entirely original, in some instances going further in technique than Winslow has gone before.  'True Story', for example, is a dualogue between two wise guys who aren't even given names, who nevertheless bring the mob world to life in banter alone and deliver a powerful twist in the tail.

An absolute treat from start to finish.   Thank you, Don.

Satori - Don Winslow

 Back in 1979 Rodney William Whitaker (1935-2005) wrote Shibumi, a spy novel, under his best-known pseudonym Trevanian.   In 2011 Don Winslow, author of The Cartel, wrote Satori, which is a prequel to Shibumi.   I am a die-hard fan of Winslow and am fascinated by Trevanian (see my review on this blog of his spoof spy novel The Loo Sanction).   I had to read Satori.

Trevanian's hero, Nicholai Hel, is a retired assassin.   Winslow's story, set more than a quarter century earlier, is why he retired.   Hel is the son of an exiled Russian aristocrat, born in Shanghai in 1925 who masters the game of Go under a Japanese master, who also happens to be a general in the Japanese army that invaded China in the Thirties.   After the Japanese surrender in 1945 Kishikawa is tried for war crimes.   Nicholai, who has also become a master of the Naked Kill, visits him in prison and, at the general's own request, murders him, for which he too is imprisoned and tortured.   Ultimately he is freed and recruited by the US Intelligence Service. in October 1951.

They embroil him in a complex plot to smuggle rocket launchers to the communist insurgents in Vietnam in the hope of preventing American involvement in the coming war.   In return Nicholai gets a new life plus the names of those who tortured him.   An added bonus is that the Rushian spy chief he gets to hoodwink and ultimately kill, is the man who seduced his mother and stole the family fortune.

It's all great fun, very cleverly plotted and of course beautifully written.   I love the way Winslow has a voice for each strand of his fiction whilst never losing the narrative force of simplicity.   I got lost in the later sections of the book, knowing absolutely nothing about the geography of south Asia, but I was always entertained and the concluding battle was highly sarisfactory.

The Loo Sanction - Trevanian

The Loo Sanction is the follow-up to The Eiger Sanction.   It's a spy pastiche by the reclusive Anglo-American Trevanian.   It therefore features American academic and retired hitman Dr Jonathan Hemlock, but takes place almost entirely in England.    It was written in 1973 and is thus about Swinging London in its dark last phase.

Hemlock is in London to give guest lectures.   At the Royal Academy he is hijacked by his former lover Vanessa Dyke to evaluate a contemporary bronze of a horse that is about to go up for auction.  The thing is, Hemlock has the perfect eye - for art and for shooting.   The mysterious vendor, it seems, is trying to hike the hammer price.

Next, Hemlock hooks up with a young Irish wannabe artist, Maggie Coyne.   They spend the night in one of Hemlock's two luxury London pads.   Next morning they find a man grusesomely murdered in the bathroom.   Hemlock finds himself hijacked again, this time to the HQ of Loo, an interservice secret agency.   Maggie has been recruited by them as bait.   They want Hemlock to track down one Maximilian Strange who runs a high-class speciality brothel in which many high-ranking pillars of the Establishment have inadvertently let themselves be filmed in the act.   Loo want the films.   If Hemlock feels the need to 'sanction' someone, or indeed several, Loo will clean up the mess.

The thing about Trevanian is that his jokes are complex and dark.  He was himself an academic and therefore has greater word-power than most pasticheurs.  Jokes and comic names aside, he writes an extremely good thriller.   He does not romanticise violence - it is gory and painful.   The Seventies sex is free and plentiful but comes with consequences, feelings get hurt, people get abused.   The book is not some clever bloke showing off.   Trevanian's self-obscurity and scanty output testify to the effort he put into fine-tuning his work.

I am on the lookout for more.   The Eiger Sanction itself, perhaps - or Shibumi, to which my favourite cntemporary US writer, Don Winslow, wrote a prequel.

City on Fire - Don Winslow

 City on Fire is the first in what Winslow says will be his swansong trilogy.   A year or so ago Winslow announced he was ceasing to be an author in favour of full time political activism.   in fairness, he does both equally well.

Winslow has always been fundamentally a series writer.   He began with a series and his greatest achievement has been his Cartel trilogy, which certainly brought him prominence on this side of the Atlantic.   It is how me and most of my friends found him.   Is City going to equal Cartel?   Hard to say.   It is certainly a major achievement and clearly has the potential to become a masterpiece.

Winslow openly says it is a take on the Iliad.   Instead of Troy we have Winslow's birthplace, Rhode Island.   Instead of hero warriors we have ruthless mobsters, Italians, Irish, and African American.   We begin with the arrival of Helen - or in this case, Pam, an out-of-town beauty spotted enjoying the beach.    Pam unwittingly causes the break-up of old alliances.   Hitherto, the Irish and the Italians have kept to their distinct patches and the black mobsters are purely fringe players.   Rivalry over Pam changes all that.   Paulie Moretti wants her but the useless Liam Murphy wins her - and corrupts her.

Danny Ryan is our Achilles.   His father was once a major player in the game but became a drunk after being dumped with Danny by his showgirl mother.   The Murphys took over the docks and associated rackets.   Danny is now married to Terri Murphy.   He isn't given a seat at the top table.  He doesn't mind, he doesn't particular want to be a mobster.   But then Pat Murphy, the son and heir, is taken out in revenge for Paulie Moretti...   Terri falls pregnant, gives birth to the first Murphy grandson, then falls ill...

The characterisation and plotting are, as always, superb.   We never really know what is going to happen next or how characters will repsond.   Winslow has given himself an epic canvas and fills every inch.   The prose is nowhere near as punchy as in earlier works like Savages or Gentleman's Hour; that would be tiresome in an epic.   Instead it is terse but polished, always pitch-perfect.   I was enthralled, beginning to end.   A top writer on top form.

The Gentlemen's Hour - Don Winslow

 The other day Don Winslow announced on Twitter that he's retiring after he completes his current City on Fire trilogy.  There will be no new novels published, but thankfully there are plenty of not-so-old novels just appearing on this side of the Atlantic.  Take this, for example, from 2010, the follow up to The Dawn Patrol.  The Gentlemen's Hour is what happens immediately after the Dawn Patrol on the surf off Pacific Beach, San Diego, California.  It is when the forty-somethings take over from the thirtyish surfer dudes.

Boone Daniels (brilliant name) is on the cusp.  A former cop turned PI, he is getting a little old for the Dawn Patrol.  A new generation is coming up.  Maturity calls - the need to do something with his life, to earn some money, perhaps even start a new relationship.  Since his longtime squeeze Sunny left to ride the pro surfer circuit Boone has been flirting with Petra (Pete) Hall an upmarket British attorney, though he can't quite bring himself to seal the deal on account of old loyalties and fiscal inequalities.

But then Petra offers him a job.  The prestigious practice she works for has taken on the case of Corey Blasingame, the racist skinhead who killed the San Diego surf guru Kelly Kuhio (K2) with a single superman punch.  Much against his better judgement Boone takes the gig.  After all, what can he do?  There are five eyewitnesses to the crime and Corey confessed straight away, no excuses, no explanation.  It's the refusal to explain that causes Boone the problem and sets him against his best bud Johnny Banzai, the cop who took the confession, and the rest of the Dawn Patrol.

Meanwhile Boone picks up another job courtesy of a regular at the Gentlemen's Hour, a millionaire who wants Boone to keep tabs on his wife who might be indulging in a little extramarital fun and games.  It's the sort of work Boone despises but, hey, he needs the money.  And this time it's not the Dawn Patrol he finds himself up against.  It's the Cartels, their expert torturer Jones, and the full weight of corporate California.

It's all pure Winslow - the modern master at his very best.  All present tense and taut as a tripwire.  I loved every second.

The Border - Don Winslow

Winslow - back on top form. Brilliant.

The Border concludes the Cartel trilogy and brings it bang up to date. Art Keller emerges from the Guatemalan jungle to take over as head of the DEA, having realised that the only way to tackle America's drug problem is to take out the big money men. That doesn't just mean the Cartel bosses, because Keller now knows there are people above them on the US end of the chain. For the Cartels drugs mean money and power. For the financiers power can be bought by money. And now they plan to buy the ultimate power.

Meanwhile, the fact that Keller has finally taken out Adan Barrera, head of the Sinaloan Cartel and effective boss of bosses, means that the second tier go to war to determine a successor. The lack of order means there are vacuums for figures from the past to return to: men like Rafael Caro, who tortured and murdered Keller's partner thirty years ago, and Eddie Ruiz who was there when Keller took out Adan.

It is a big, BIG story, and rightly so. In so many ways it is the story of our time, the fifty year war on drugs which America has not and will never win. How close Winslow's fiction comes to reality will be open to debate. What is inarguable, a stone fact, is that nobody does this story better than Don Winslow. Does anybody else even dare to try? Each of the three novels - The Power of the Dog, The Cartel, and now The Border - is a major achievement. The three together are a landmark.

The Force - Don Winslow

Been waiting months for this, Winslow's latest, soon to be a major TV series, to come out in paperback. The moment I hear it's in the shops I'm off to Waterstones to snap up my copy. Started reading it that same night.


For anyone who saw The Shield or read Joe Wambaugh's Choirboys back in the Seventies, there's nothing new here. In fact, the situation is slightly worse than that. The storyline in The Force is virtually identical to that of The Shield. The behaviour of the NYPD is no worse in 2017 than it was in the Wambaugh more than forty years earlier. Indeed, Wambaugh's cops were better drawn and I cared more about their fate.


For those, like me, who have read Winslow's Power of the Dog, The Cartel and - best of all - Savages, The Force comes as a massive let down. In those earlier novels Winslow had staked out a territory all his own, with multiple intersecting storylines and deep background. This is New York, ground well and truly trodden, and reads more like a TV novelisation than original fiction. In fact, were Winslow an unknown, I doubt it would ever get accepted for TV because the male anti-hero is a walking-talking stereotype and there is no strong woman to counter him. This latter point is a criminal shame because the other Winslow books I mentioned are packed with interesting women.


It is not badly written - Winslow couldn't write badly if he tried - but compare it with Savages, where even the layout of the words on the page fizzes with invention, and it's pretty stodgy stuff. I liked the character of Monty and I liked Malone's snitch Nasty Ass. Other than that I didn't give two hoots about any of them, especially Malone which, when you've spent 480 pages seeing the world entirely from his point of view, is a frankly damning indictment.

Savages - Don Winslow

Savages (2010) comes between The Power of the Dog and The Cartel. It is connected in so far as it is set against the cartel wars in Mexico which are the subject matter of the two linked novels. Some of the key characters in those get a mention in this. Otherwise Savages is very different. The Power of the Dog and The Cartel are like James Ellroy on good cocaine rather than bad speed. Savages has flavours of Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen and the texture of George V Higgins stripped down.
What? you wonder. Can you get more stripped down than George V? Winslow can. As The Donald might say, Bigly.


As an indication, we have 290 chapters in 302 pages. Some lines are so fragmentary they don't have full stops. Sometimes Winslow takes the time to explain the etymology of some of his acronyms. Ophelia's mom, for example, is Pacu - Passive Aggressive Queen of the Universe. Others you are left to work out for yourself. Some passages are presented as movie script - a fun inside joke once you realise that Oliver Stone had bought the movie rights before Savages was even published. I have mentioned the Stone movie before. It's his best in twenty years and well worth a watch. But it's not as good as the novel.


Ben and Chon grow dope in South Orange County, the best dope on the market. Ben is a third world activist, Chon an ex-SEAL who has served in all the nastiest theatres of post-millennium war. Ben and Chon are best buds from childhood. They are both in love with Ophelia, who calls herself simply O. O loves them both equally.


But then the Baja Cartel seeks to muscle in on their action. Ben and Chon say no. They are happy to walk away and leave the Baja Cartel to it, but the Cartel says no. They want to market Ben's genetically modified blow. They want the boys' market, they want their people. And to make their point, they kidnap O and threaten to dismember her with a chainsaw.


Which is when things get really nasty...


The pace is relentless, the action bloody. Yet Winslow's gift is to stay perfectly balanced on the thin line between violence and schlock. Even the worst of the bad guys have backstory, people they love. The characterisation is rich and varied. It is, in short, a masterpiece.

The Cartel - Don Winslow

The Cartel takes up where The Power of the Dog leaves off - it is the second, conclusive round of the lifetime, life-and-death duel to the death between the DEA's Art Keller and Adan Berrera, patron of the combined cartels of Mexico.


I loved The Power of the Dog when I read it earlier this year. The Cartel is just as good, perhaps slightly better. Happily, Winslow still resists the temptation of going the full Ellroy. His world is very dark, very treacherous, and astonishingly violent, but it remains none of the main participants is actually stark staring mad. That's the point - Adan is all about business; where would the Mexican economy be without him? There's a great passage on page 514 where he says:

After the crash [of 2008] the only source of liquidity was drug money. If they shut us down it would have taken the economy on the final plunge. They had to bail out General Motors, not us. And now? Think of the billions of dollars into real estate, stocks, start-up companies. Not to mention the millions of dollars generated fighting the 'war' [on drugs] - weapons manufacture, aircraft, surveillance. Prison construction. You think business is going to let that stop?

That's the beauty and the power of Winslow. He is so on-the-razor's edge current. I gather his latest novel, The Force, is going to propel him into the major league. Even before the book comes out, the TV version is in production. Don Winslow is already pretty big. Within a year he is going to be huge. I just hope he can stay current.

Writing this post, I think I have hit upon what makes The Cartel ever so slightly better than The Power of the Dog. It's the subplot about Pablo Mora, crime reporter on the local newspaer in Juarez, the frontline of the cartel war. Pablo is lazy, submissive, but he comes through in the end. Boy, does he come through. I can't offhand think of anything recent that has moved me so deeply as his last post. For many writers that would have been the whole story. Here it is just part of the mix. Other readers will be more stirred by other storylines. The point is, every reader will find something to treasure here.

The Power of the Dog - Don Winslow

Don Winslow is a bit like James Ellroy. He writes dark crime in short, pared-down sentences. He depicts the underbelly of the American Dream in which corruption is the only currency. Unlike Ellroy, he keeps his conspiracy theories just this side of psychosis.


The Power of the Dog (2005) is perhaps his most ambitious novel. It took him six years to write and Winslow prides himself on productivity. It spans thirty years in the war on drugs seen through the eyes of three main characters, Art Keller, DEA agent, Adan Barrera, drug trafficker, and Sean Callan, Irish mobster turned mafia hitman. Over the years they find themselves in alliances and opposition. Linking them is high-class prostitute Nora Hayden and a broad cast of second-string characters including Tio Barrera, founder of the Mexican drug cartel, Jimmy Peaches Picone, would-be mafia boss, and Sal Scachi, colonel, hitman, the ultimate fixer. And many, many more.


Too many characters? Too much plot? On balance, no. Sometimes, as you work through the 500+ pages, you wonder, is this getting us anywhere? Does this character contribute anything to the whole? But you keep going and find out that, yes, everything contributes, every character serves a purpose. Plotting is Winslow's dominant skill. He writes well - very well - but holds back from launching into the sort of obscene purple prose that curdles Ellroy's later work. The dialogue is spot on - each character has a distinct voice, and the principals also have individual inner voices.


Did I love this book? No - you can't love a book this dark. Is it brilliant? Does it achieve what it sets out to do? Does it make me want to seek out more of Winslow's extensive catalogue, like for example Savages (2010) which Winslow turned into the script for Oliver Stone's best film in years? Yes, yes, and yes. Apparently there are half-a-dozen Neal Carey mysteries, plus standalone novels including The Death and Life of Bobby Z, The Winter of Frankie Machine, and The Kings of Cool. I mean, the titles alone are enough to spark my interest.