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Interview: Don Winslow on Broken and the Jazz of His Crime Fiction

The acclaimed crime novelist discusses his new collection of novellas, his influences, and more.

Don Winslow is a testament to life as the best school of writing, as he’s as colorful as the characters who appear in his propulsive, sensual, political, and often brutal crime novels. An ex-private investigator, a rancher, a surfer, a hiker, a jazz enthusiast, and a journalist who’s studied the intricacies of Mexican drug trade for his acclaimed Cartel trilogy, Winslow is a man of vast experience, empathy, and curiosity who dramatizes all perspectives on the criminal ecosystem, from the hippie stoner to drug czars to all the cops, reporters, immigrants, and imperiled children who’re trying merely to get by.

Honing over the years a clipped-paragraph style, Winslow fashions novels that simultaneously suggest tabloids, op-ed pieces, and Norman Mailer-style epics. But his new collection of novellas, Broken, finds him working in more moderate and relaxed keys, after writing a handful of the biggest books of his career: The Cartel and The Border, the final installments of the Cartel trilogy, and the searing The Force, about a corrupt New York City cop.

Broken thrives on misdirection, opening with one of Winslow’s most violent pieces of writing—the title novella, about a New Orleans cop who hunts the drug dealer who tortured his brother to death—before seguing into mellower character studies that recall his earlier, chiller, more comfortably genre-based origins. In “Crime 101,” a jewel thief intersects with a rumpled yet calculating police officer; in “The San Diego Zoo,” a bizarre case of animal armament leads to unlikely romance; in “Sunset,” an aging bail bondsman, the titanic Duke Kasmajian, reflects on a vanishing way of life while overseeing a final chase, leading to lovely ruminations on scotch and West Coast jazz, among other things. The last two novellas, “Paradise” and “The Last Ride,” return the book to more violent and topical terrain: the American drug war and our government’s inhumane imprisonment of fleeing families on the Mexican/U.S. border.

These stories are all animated by Winslow’s ear for dialogue and feeling for place, particularly San Diego, which becomes a recurring symbol of a vanishing way of life, a paradise that’s gradually being commodified into nonexistence. The Pacific Coast Highway, an ongoing subject of reverie in Winslow’s books, serves as a kind of circulatory system in Broken—a route toward contemplation and healing. Throughout these stories, Winslow also rhapsodizes on the little elements of Americana that can offer transcendence, from the classic ballgame-and-hot-dog date to the ritualistic grilling of fish for fish tacos. Winslow’s juxtaposition of such details with this country’s slide into political sadism suggests nothing less than the internal war to remain decent in an age of sensationalized heartlessness. (On Twitter, Winslow is a mercilessly astute critic of Donald Trump’s lies, incompetence, and trademark callousness.)

Particularly given our current social calamity, Winslow’s Americana continues to haunt me. Ball games. Grilling with buddies with beers on the deck. Intoxicating sex with someone you’ve just met by chance. These are heartbreaking things to ponder as the COVID-19 epidemic forces us into isolation. In this light, these rituals become even more fantastical, even more poignant, even more seemingly lost, than Winslow could’ve possibly intended.

How are you doing with this thing personally?

I’m fine, thank you. My wife and I live way out in the country sort of north and east of San Diego on an old ranch, and it looks pretty much the same around here as it always does. It’s kind of quiet and not many people are around and we’re hunkered down. We’ll just see how this goes, I guess. I have to tell you, it feels a little weird talking about a book during all of this. “Oh, people are dying, people are suffering, let’s talk about me.”

I’ve felt the same way about writing movie reviews lately.

Right? But life goes on, I guess. I know I’ve been reading more and watching a lot of old DVDs and things, because we don’t get very good internet service up here. So, you know, I guess we serve our purpose. [laughs]

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I was reading Broken while COVID-19 was creeping into Virginia where I live, and, I hate to call art an “escape” because I think that’s often a horrible reduction, but this book was an escape.

Well, I think escape is one of the purposes of art. I think it can be engagement and escape. I’m not insulted by that at all. If people are entertained and it takes them out of this thing for a little while, God bless.

Broken is a collection of novellas that’s arriving after a few of your weightiest and most political novels. Did you consciously think of it as a palette cleanser?

Well, it’s an interesting way of putting it. I’m not sure I’d put it exactly that way, but I know what you mean. These were stories that I had had in my head for a while with the exception of the final one. And I knew that they were too substantive to be short stories but they were certainly not going to have the epic bulk that you alluded to. If I may use a different analogy, I’ve been sort of running ultramarathons for the last 20 years, you know? And so it felt it would be refreshing to run a middle-distance.

There’s a clever structural misdirection in this book. It’s called Broken and fans of your recent work may have a bleak expectation. The title story certainly fulfills that expectation, but many of the stories are warm, comparatively light character studies. At what point did you begin to consider that pervading arc?

Pretty early on. The three middle stories [“Crime 101,” “The San Diego Zoo,” “Sunset”] I’ve sort of had in my head for quite a while. The titular story was a bit later. And then I thought that this collection really needed a bookend, a story that matches the feel of “Broken.” And so then that structure became apparent to me. I think a lot about jazz because I listen to a lot of jazz. And sometimes there’s that kind of opening statement, the melody that’s being written down, you know, and then you go off into this middle phase where people are improvising on that, which, sometimes, tonally, is very different from where you started, until you circle back to the opening theme. In the case of this book, we open and circle back to brokenness.

So you have the same interests as your character Duke then?

[laughs] Yeah, which comes in handy, you know? Jazz has been a big thing with me since I was a kid and I took an especial interest in West Coast Jazz, you know, though I like other stuff as well. And so that was just fun to write and kind of visit.

To continue this jazz metaphor, particularly the idea of riffs on a theme, the broken motif is certainly in the lighter stories, too, just expressed differently.

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Yeah, exactly. Not to torture this metaphor, which is kind of fun, but you know there’s going to be a certain chord progression that you’re not going to completely depart from. Well, some jazz does, but the kind of jazz I really love doesn’t. And I know who I am as a writer and as a person; many of these themes are going to come out anyway. In terms of chord progression, I was always very clear about the order of the stories.

Did you write the stories in chronological order?

Not exactly. Again, I knew what the order was going to be, but I’d been working on some of these stories for a while. I’d been working on “Crime 101” for a couple of years and never quite “got it.” I had the opening line of “San Diego Zoo” in my head for literally years. But I didn’t know what it meant. It was a line that struck me funny.

When I read that, I thought, “This is a new Winslow. Where the hell is this going?”

We live out on an old ranch and brush clearance is a huge issue because of wildfires. I had a bunch of downed trees and somebody asked, “Why don’t you get a chainsaw?” And a buddy of mine, this old cowboy, was standing next to me and said, “Giving Don a chainsaw would be like giving a revolver to a chimp.” [both laugh] Which sadly is true. I’m notoriously clumsy and not very mechanical. And he was right: I probably would’ve cut my hand off, or my leg off, or something. Well, somehow that line evolved in my head into “No one knows how the chimp got the revolver.” It stuck in my head for years, and when I was committing to doing these stories and trying to figure out what was the next thing after “Crime 101,” I typed that line out and just made the rest of it up. I was playing that great game “what if?” I did not know how the chimp got the revolver until I typed the end of it.

What’s striking about “The San Diego Zoo” is that it’s genuinely, unforcedly sweet, especially coming after “Broken,” which is a bitter pill to swallow.

“Broken” is one of the toughest, harshest pieces I’ve ever done. It was fun to go to sweet, you know? And I agree with what I think you’re saying: that there’s a very fine line between sweetness and saccharine. But there’s not much chance of my crossing over into that. [laughs]

Did you consciously perceive a relationship between “Broken” and The Force?

Of course. I’d written that big cop book, and I knew there were going to be similarities here. But I also knew there were going to be important differences, and I very deliberately set “Broken” in a completely different location to help achieve that, but sure I knew the reader would say “this is kinda like The Force.”

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The Force is one of my favorite books of yours. I think you have a daring, uncomfortable empathy with your antihero.

An uncomfortable empathy is a good way to put it. A little frightening. I spent a lot of time with cops in doing that book, but I have my whole life anyway, because I was a private investigator. I had a lot of cop friends, and I really did feel an empathy with Denny. I’m not trying to make moral judgments about my characters. I might have them, independent of the book, but it’s not my job to create good guys and bad guys; it’s to create as realistic people as I can, and get the reader close to them. I’ve sat down with a lot of objectively evil people: serial killers, psychopaths, drug folks—you name it. None of them define themselves as monsters. They have a point of view, we might loathe it, but they have a point of view.

“San Diego Zoo” is dedicated to Elmore Leonard and “Crime 101” to Steve McQueen, which makes sense when you read that story, though it feels very Elmore-y to me too.

Absolutely. And Michael Mann. I don’t run from my influences. I’m very happy to proclaim them, and one of the great thrills of my life was spending an hour with Mr. Leonard. We were in the same room one time very early in my career on my first book, and I was too shy to go up to him. And then later, I might’ve done a film with him, which didn’t work out, and he died, sadly, shortly thereafter. But I got to be on the phone with him for an hour.

Did he live up to your expectations?

Oh, even more. I don’t think I said five words. He got on the phone and said, “Don Winslow, you were two-years-old when I wrote 3:10 to Yuma.” Which was the most charming way of putting me in my place. And I said, “Yes, sir, but I tried to read it.” And he laughed and told stories for an hour, nonstop. It was me, my agent, his agent, and him on the phone. And I was standing in the rain. We were living down on the coast, and we didn’t get good cell reception in our apartment. In fact, if you stepped two feet closer to the beach you couldn’t get cell reception. So, I went outside, and it was one of those rarely raining Southern California days, and I stood in the rain for an hour listening to Elmore Leonard. I would’ve stayed there all day.

That’s got to be one of those moments you keep in your pocket.

Absolutely, man. Absolutely.

I’m not trying to blow smoke, but I think you’re playing on Leonard’s level these days.

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Well, I wouldn’t say that, but thank you, I try. We all revere him in the genre. And he’s one of those guys you’ve never heard a bad word about. Or Michael Connolly, who’s terrific. Or Lee Child or Dennis Lehane. These guys, who’re so huge and so great, are genuinely nice people.

That’s great to hear. I’m a big crime book guy.

Yeah, apparently. [laughs] And you know I dedicated another story in Broken to Raymond Chandler, who’s the granddaddy of us all, and if I write for another hundred years I’m never gonna write as well as him.

Your Chandler story, “Sunset,” may be my favorite in this collection.

I have a fondness for that story, which I wrote from beginning to ending. I sat down, started typing and almost literally didn’t stop until it was over a few days later. I just knew the story.

To borrow an element from that story, to belabor another metaphor, it has the feel of scotch: It’s mellow, there’s depth there that doesn’t announce itself.

Well, thank you. I wanted to write a sunset story that was a little mellow and was a little mature, and talked about some older guys, you know? And talked about loss of a lot of things: loss of loved ones, loss of a hero, loss of a certain kind of life.

There’s an additional commonality to these stories that affirms the “broken” theme. In every one, there’s a decisive moment where a character essentially says, “Screw it, I’m going to act for decency, against the fabric of my surroundings.”

Yeah, frankly you’re the first person who’s picked up on that. I think the ultimate question of crime fiction has become the ultimate question for all of us in these times that we live in, and I’m not happy about that. For me the ultimate question of crime fiction has always been, for the characters: How do you to attempt to live decently in what’s basically an indecent world? Increasingly, we’re living in an indecent world.

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To piggyback on that, this book offers a vision in which people must act apart from mass politics, divorcing themselves from the media maelstrom. Is that fair?

I think that’s fair. In some ways, in all these stories, there’s a return to older values. The last story, I’m sure you picked up on it, is a neo-western, quite obviously. And I thought it would be more interesting if I made that guy a Trump voter, a conservative.

Yeah. I follow you on Twitter and I know what your feelings about Trump are, which I share. But I like that you don’t editorialize the conservative at the center of “The Last Ride.”

It just struck me as a more interesting slant on it. And then this guy changes his mind, you know, and goes back to what I would think of as those older western values.

There’s an image in “The Last Ride” that I don’t think I’ve seen in a western before. That startling image paralleling the hero’s fate with that of his horse.

I went to college in Nebraska and worked on ranches. I’ve lived in Idaho, Montana, out in California. I’ve had cowboys all around me, and I’ve seen too many horses put down. It’s a terrible moment. And I thought that was just the right ending.

In some interviews, you’ve wondered if your style as a writer is too flexible. I find your voice distinctive though, with those short, machine-gun paragraphs. Do you achieve that structure in the editing phase, or do you compose that way?

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Basically, I’m composing it that way, but I make it better, I hope, in the cutting phase. When I do first drafts I’m not thinking about the reader much at all. I just try to get it down, and then, with every subsequent draft, I’m thinking more and more about the reader. What is the reader hearing? What is the reader seeing? We sometimes forget that reading, though certainly an intellectual activity, is also a visual activity. I pay a lot of attention to what the words look like on the page, and if the look is achieving the effect that I want it to. So, in reference to that kind of machine-gun thing that you’re alluding to, sometimes I think words just need a lot of space around them so that they do stand out. But, other times, if you want to grab the reader and not let him or her go a while, then you want the page to look very dense, so that there’s no space for them to take a break. You want to control the ride that you take them on that way.

It’s funny to hear you describe this process. As someone who writes reviews, I often edit according to how I like the visual shape of a paragraph in a word document.

That’s exactly what I’m talking about, Chuck. This is going to sound really goofy, but sometimes I’ll step away from the screen to the point where I can’t make out the words, only the shapes.

It’s almost as if such abstractions allow you to see your over-writing.

I think that’s absolutely the truth, and it does sound crazy.

With jazz, crime novels, and other arts, there’s an East Coast/West Coast distinction. With your traveling, with your New York- and California-set novels, it seems that you can lay claim to both coasts. Do you have a preference?

I don’t think so. I come from blue-collar New England, not tweed New England. [laughs] My dad was first-career military. I’m from a fishing town. My old man used to take me to the fishing factory, where they rendered all that shit. From 500 yards you could smell it. And he’d say, “If you don’t buckle down and steady you’re going to spend the rest of your life shoveling fish guts.” I came from a Bruce Springsteen kind of town that’s now become a touristy town. All that has always been a big part of my life, and I go back there every year, and I probably do more surfing there now than I do here.

But when I came to the West Coast, which was in the late ’80s, as an investigator, I just fell in love. There’s no other way of putting it. And I can remember like it was yesterday the first time I drove on the Pacific Coast Highway. I went, “My God,” and I’m still in love with it. I don’t know how many hundreds of times I’ve driven that road down here, and I never get bored with it, it always excites me.

I go back to New England and I eat fish and chips and chowder and out here I’ll have my beloved fish taco. The two oceans are also very different, very different kinds of personalities, if I can put it that way, and I love them both. I feel like I have the best of both worlds. You need to come out here when this blows over.

Broken is now available from Harper Collins.

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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