Winslow Wins Again

Jiro Kimura of The Gumshoe Site reports that California author Don Winslow has won this year’s Falcon Award for his 2014 novel, Missing: New York (which is available in a German-language edition, but evidently not yet in an English translation). The Falcon, given out by Japan’s Maltese Falcon Society, is meant to honor “the best hard-boiled/private eye novel published in Japan in the previous year.”

This marks Winslow’s fourth Falcon victory. He won the same prize in 1994 for A Cool Breeze on the Underground, in 2010 for The Power of the Dog, and in 2011 for The Winter of Frankie Machine.

Winslow Knocks ’Em Dead in L.A.

San Diego-area author Don Winslow has won this year’s Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the Mystery/Thriller category for his enthusiastically reviewed 17th novel, The Cartel (Knopf). That announcement was made earlier today during a ceremony at Bovard Auditorium on the University of Southern California campus.

The other books vying for that honor were The Long and Faraway Gone, by Lou Berney (Morrow); The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Grove Press); Bull Mountain, by Brian Panowich (Putnam); and The Whites, by Richard Price writing as Harry Brandt (Picador).

In addition, mega-best-selling thriller writer James Patterson is the recipient of this year’s Innovator’s Award.

Click here to see the winners and nominees in all 10 categories.

READ MORE: “Such a Nice Guy, Such Savage Books: Don Winslow and The Cartel,” by Ivy Pochoda (Los Angeles Times).

“Sometimes Wrong Is Just Wrong”

Don Winslow, author of last year’s best-selling novel The Cartel, about efforts to bring down a drugs kinpin in Mexico, is not impressed—no, not impressed at all—by U.S. actor Sean Penn’s recent success in scoring an interview with Joaquín Guzmán, the freshly recaptured head of Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel. Winslow writes in Deadline Hollywood:

As someone who has researched and written about the Mexican cartels and the futile “war on drugs” for coming on twenty years, I know how tough a subject it is. Mind-bending, soul-warping, heartbreaking, it challenges your intellect, your beliefs, your faith in humanity and God. No journalist or writer who has ever tackled it has emerged quite the same – and all too many have not survived at all, but been tortured, mutilated and killed on the orders of such as Joaquin Guzman. (I resist the cute sobriquet of “Chapo.“ He is not one of the Seven Dwarfs—not Dopey, or Sneezy or Bashful. He’s a mass murderer.)

When I first heard that Penn had done an interview with Guzman, I was wondering what terms were demanded to grant that interview. Penn has a reputation of not shying away from controversy or hard, unpopular stances. I was hoping that he would ask Guzman questions that would matter.

Mr. Penn tells Charlie Rose that he considers the article a failure because it did not succeed in addressing his real issue—our policies of the “war on drugs.” But in an article of 10,500 words, the phrase “war on drugs” appears three times. It was not the purpose or focus of Penn’s horribly misguided piece.

Penn’s article had nothing to do with the forty year, trillion dollar failure that is the “war on drugs”—it was instead a brutally simplistic and unfortunately sympathetic portrait of a mass murderer. Penn thought he had scored a journalistic coup—instead his interview was the by-product of Guzman’s infatuation with a soap-opera actress (Guzman didn’t even know who Penn was) and told the exact story that Guzman wanted—with line by line editorial approval courtesy of Penn and Rolling Stone.

You can read Winslow’s full commentary here.

(Hat tip to Linda L. Richards.)

“Cartel” Captures the Parker

Author Don Winslow seems to have been on a roll ever since he published The Dawn Patrol back in 2008, racking up myriad plaudits, if fewer award wins. Now, though, he can add a big prize to his collection: the 2015 T. Jefferson Parker Mystery Award. According to Jiro Kimura’s The Gumshoe Site, Winslow picked up the Parker for The Cartel (Knopf), a thrilling sequel to The Power of the Dog, his 2005 novel about Mexican drug trafficking.

The T. Jefferson Parker Mystery Award is presented annually by the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association (SCIBA). The Cartel was one of three novels shortlisted as contenders this year, the other two being Marry, Kiss, Kill, by Anne Flett-Giordano (Prospect Park), and The Replacements, by David Putnam (Oceanview).

Winslow’s win was announced yesterday during the SCIBA Trade Show, held in North Hollywood, California. This was the third time that Winslow has netted the Parker award; he won it previously for Savages (2010) and The Kings of Cool (2012).

Doubling Winslow’s Pleasure

For the second year in a row, author Don Winslow has captured the T. Jefferson Parker Award for Mystery from the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association. That announcement was made on October 20 during the annual Authors Feast & Trade Show, held aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California.

Winslow’s win this time is for The Kings of Cool (Simon & Schuster), the prequel to Savages, which picked up the Parker prize last year. Also nominated for this 2012 commendation were Getaway, by Lisa Brackmann (Soho Press), and Taken, by Robert Crais (Putnam).

(Hat tip to The Gumshoe Site.)

Nothing But the Best

From the author of the new novel, The Kings of Cool, comes something else pretty cool. For Publishers Weekly, Don Winslow has named his five favorite crime novels as follows:

• The Friends of Eddie Coyle, by George Higgins
• The Long Goodbye, by Raymond Chandler
• The Guards, by Ken Bruen
• L.A. Confidential, by James Ellroy
• Laguna Heat, by T. Jefferson Parker

You’ll find Winslow’s enthusiastic remarks about each book here.

(Hat tip to Campaign for the American Reader.)

Winslow Lands the Falcon

This is shaping up to be a good season for author Don Winslow.

Last month his novel Savages won the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association’s 2011 T. Jefferson Parker Book Award.

Now The Gumshoe Site brings word that Japan’s Maltese Falcon Society has given one of Winslow’s earlier works, The Winter of Frankie Machine (2006), its 2011 Maltese Falcon Award. That commendation is presented to “the best hard-boiled/private eye novel published in the previous year in Japan.”

Winslow Wins?

I am putting this post up with some hesitation, as I don’t find any corroborating information on the Web. But Jiro Kimura reports on The Gumshoe Site that Southern California novelist Don Winslow has won the 2011 T. Jefferson Parker Book Award for his novel Savages (Simon & Schuster). I sent an e-mail note to Winslow, hoping for confirmation of this news, but have not yet heard anything back.

Other contenders for this same 2011 prize in the mystery/thrillers category were: The Sentry, by Robert Crais (Putnam); San Diego Noir, edited by Maryelizabeth Hart (Akashic Books); and The Informant, by Thomas Perry (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

Winslow’s win was supposedly announced on October 22, in San Diego, by the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association.

FOLLOW-UP: Here’s confirmation of Winslow’s award pick-up. Thanks to Lance Wright of Omnimystery News for sending along the link.

Still More “Savages”

From Carolyn Kellogg of the Los Angeles Times’ Jacket Copy blog comes this very interesting item about a writer I’ve raved about before:

Mystery writer Don Winslow is getting an unexpected bonus out of Oliver Stone’s adaptation of his book “Savages,” about pot growers in Southern California getting in too deep.

First, the film begins shooting next month with the Oscar-winning director at the helm. With Stone comes a star-heavy cast, including John Travolta, Uma Thurman, Emile Hirsch, Salma Hayek, Taylor Kitsch, Blake Lively, Aaron Johnson and Benicio Del Toro.

So what’s the bonus? Winslow is now writing a prequel to “Savages,” an idea that came out of working with Stone and screenplay co-author Shane Salerno, Deadline Hollywood reports. Not coincidentally, the new prequel will be published by Simon & Schuster around the time of the film’s release in 2012.

You’ll find the whole post here.

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Speaking of good thrillers, installment 36 of my serial novel, Forget About It: The First Al Zymer Senile Detective Mystery, has just gone up. An archive of previous chapters is here.

A Very Odd Couple

Why would one of the best crime-fiction writers in the world decide to take on the composition of what the finished book’s cover describes as “a novel based on” the work of another author?

That’s what I wondered when I first heard that Don Winslow, the author of such classics as The Death and Life of Bobby Z, The Winter of Frankie Machine, The Power of the Dog, and The Dawn Patrol, had signed to write a prequel to Shibumi, a 1979 thriller by the novelist known as Trevanian, whose most famous book was The Eiger Sanction (1972). Money probably had something to do with it, but Winslow has sold many books. And, to my knowledge, he is the only writer to make the work of an insurance investigator--in California Fire and Life--not only interesting, but fascinating.

Now comes the result of this unlikely collaboration: Satori (Grand Central Publishing). The title itself is a tribute to its source. “The tea room was exquisite, elegant in its simplicity. a perfect expression of shibumi ...,” explains the lead character, Nicholai Hel. “In his role as guest, Nicholai admired the skillful brushwork. which depicted the Japanese symbol for satori. An interesting choice, Nicholai thought. Satori was the Zen Buddhist concept of a sudden awakening, a realization of life as it really is. ... Nicholai had never known satori.”

The more pages I turned, the more I understood why Winslow had taken on this project. He is very kind to Trevanian family members, and makes me believe that he really admires the author. Although I would argue that Winslow has known satori in virtually all of his books, the challenge here must have been irresistible. And he pulls it off with so much energy and imagination that Satori turns out to be a total triumph.

After the young half-Japanese, half-Russian Hel is suddenly released from an American-run prison in 1951 Japan, he quickly learns from his former captors what they have in mind for him. That gang of “spooks”--mostly new renderings of, and much more frightening than, the ones in Shibumi--make Hel an offer he knows he should refuse: they want him to go through painful plastic surgery on his face and carry out a probably suicidal mission to assassinate a Soviet commissioner in China. But he also knows that Solange, the older French woman who is looking after him and teaching him to talk, eat, drink, smoke, and smell like a real Frenchman, will be in grave danger if he refuses. He has come to love this stunning woman with a tragic back-story of her own.

So, having adopted the identity, visage, and aroma of a 26-year-old French arms dealer, Hel enters a very dangerous and beautifully drawn world, which eventually takes him to war-ravaged Vietnam, where his expertise in playing the ancient game of Go (I bought a set after reading about it here) becomes as important as his physical skills.

On the way, Winslow paints a bleak but touching picture of China two years after Mao Zedong seized power--including a 1952 visit to Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Satori is proof that a fine writer can take on any challenge, and make it work for him.

Here We Are Now, Entertain Us

In January Magazine this morning, critic Brendan M. Leonard calls Savages, Don Winslow’s new novel about drug dealing and kidnapping, “the book of my generation.” He adds:

Savages is nothing short of revolutionary, a flash grenade into the ineffectual heart of Generation Y. A message for the kids who grew up in unparalleled economic prosperity with overeducated parents. The kids, to steal a line from another of Winslow's novels, who have a problem with impulse control. The kids who hit the brick wall of the Great Recession and wound up asking, “What do we do now?”

You can find Leonard’s full review here.

Up in Smoke

Great news for lovers of the fabulous Don Winslow: In July, Simon & Schuster will publish Winslow’s Savages, which just might be his best novel yet. Savages is about two pals from Laguna Beach, California--an environmentalist named Ben and a born warrior called Chon--who share the same girlfriend, the stunning O (for Ophelia, a family joke), as well as a thriving business growing and distributing the best-quality pot on the planet. When they resist being muscled by a Mexican drug cartel, O is kidnapped and the ransom is every cent they’ve made over the last five years. They agree to pay, but hatch an alternative plan to get her back, get revenge, and then get lost.

I’ve raved about Winslow on this page before--most recently in regard to his second San Diego surfing thriller, The Gentlemen’s Hour, for which I laid out actual cold cash in order to obtain an early, UK edition. It was wonderful stuff, better--believe it or not--than his gorgeous 2008 novel, The Dawn Patrol. Even if the closest you’ve ever come to a surfboard is watching a Gidget flick, there’s enough action, suspense, sex, love, humor, and wisdom in The Gentlemen’s Hour to get you down to your nearest point break at top speed.

Winslow’s other fine books include The Winter of Frankie Machine, The Power of the Dog, and The Death and Life of Bobby Z.

Savages is a darker and bloodier than much of his work, and thus harder to quote from on a family friendly blog. But here’s a taste:

O has diagnosed Chon with PTLOSD. Post-Traumatic Lack Of Stress Disorder. He says he has no nightmares, nerves, flashbacks, hallucinations or guilt. “I wasn’t stressed,” Chon insisted, “and there was no trauma.”

“Must have been the dope,” O opined. Dope is good, Chon agreed ...

Savages features 290 more pages of action, adventure, swearing, shooting, killing, and close shaves. It also contains some rare insights into how and why it is that people go into the drug trade. This is a book not to be missed.

The Don Patrol

Critic-blogger Sarah Weinman broke the news in October that one of my favorite writers, Don Winslow, is taking on the mantle of the late and much-admired thriller writer who published as Trevanian, the author of such novels as The Eiger Sanction and Shibumi. But at that time, Weinman added, “Winslow’s own publishing status in the U.S. is in a bit of limbo, as The Gentlemen’s Hour--the even-better sequel to the amazing The Dawn Patrol--was published in the UK, but there’s no U.S. publication date in sight.”

That situation changed last month. Noted Weinman: “Winslow not only is writing as Trevanian for Grand Central, but his own work will have a new publisher, namely Simon & Schuster. ... According to Publishers Marketplace, The Gentlemen’s Hour won’t be published until July 2011, which is a hell of a long way away--but that’s because the house has elected to publish Winslow’s standalone novel Savages, described as ‘a gritty, humorous, and drug-fueled ransom thriller set amidst the Baja Cartel in Laguna Beach, CA,’ next summer.”

2011 is indeed too long to wait, so I bought (through Amazon UK) a copy of The Gentlemen’s Hour. Weinman is right: It’s even better than the gorgeous The Dawn Patrol. Even if the closest you’ve ever come to a surfboard is watching a Gidget flick, there’s enough action, suspense, sex, love, humor, and wisdom in this sequel to get you down to your nearest point break at top speed.

There’s sadness, too, as surfing San Diego private eye Boone Daniels--broke, as usual--signs onto a case with a top law firm that has been hired to defend a nasty punk kid charged with killing a local surfing hero. Boone knows he’ll be courting outrage from the rest of the Dawn Patrol, a mixed group--a Japanese cop, a giant Samoan, a Lothario lifeguard--who would rather surf than eat, and who have their own strict moral code. But he takes on the assignment anyway. And as his closest friendships begin to fray, he digs deeper into the murkier side of surfing culture. Drug czars, corrupt builders, and self-serving politicians soon rise out of the Pacific like creatures from a very black lagoon.

The book arrived last Friday. I finished it the next day, pausing only to rest my eyes. I think you’ll receive The Gentleman’s Hour with the same enthusiasm--whether you buy an import copy, or steel yourself to wait for the American edition.

Under a Perfect Sun

January Magazine and The Rap Sheet have both been quite complimentary in the past of novels by Southern California author Don Winslow, including California Fire and Life (1999) and The Power of the Dog (2005). But critic Cameron Hughes opines that Winslow has succeeded in setting his own literary bar higher with The Dawn Patrol. “[T]his new book,” he writes, “is one of the best private eye novels I’ve read in years.”

Boone Daniels used to be a cop. Now he’s a surfer in San Diego, California, obsessively checking how high the waves are and tracking where the epic swells will be on any given day. To support this habit, he does the bare minimum of work necessary, as a P.I. Life seems pretty darn good for Boone Daniels and his surfer buddies on “the Dawn Patrol.” So why is Daniels’ bank account empty? And why does he now spend countless nights trying to find the suspected rapist and killer of a 6-year-old girl--a case that got cold fast when he was on the San Diego Police Department and refused to torture information out of the favored suspect?

Daniels’ latest hiatus from the high curls and his surfing buddies finds him taking on what seems like a straightforward case, but--naturally--turns out to be much more complicated:

A striking female lawyer named Petra Hall, who represents a powerful law firm in San Diego, hires Boone to find a missing stripper, Tamara Roddick, who witnessed her boss engage in some insurance shenanigans of the arson variety. Boone figures he can locate Roddick, get her on the witness stand to testify, and then get back to the beach in time for a big swell promising huge waves that come only every few years. Things begin to get complicated, though, when a woman is found dead by a motel pool with the mislaid Ms. Roddick’s identification in her possession. Was the decedent pushed, or did she fall? And was the stripper Boone is looking for the intended victim?

From that point in the novel, we’re off, with Winslow leading us rapidly through a succession of intriguing episodes that take place on beautiful stretches of sand and in much darker places where evil events occur--events such as the children of illegal aliens being smuggled into Southern California for more than just borderline slavery. People don’t like to talk about such uncomfortable things, but author Winslow knows they go on and is willing to explore them in his fiction. He peels back the layers, revealing the corrupted soul of a city--San Diego--that’s paying the price for paradise.

Hughes’ full review of The Dawn Patrol can be found here.

READ MORE: “Don Winslow on Surf Noir; Appeal of Crime Fiction,” by Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg (The Wall Street Journal); “Don Winslow Talks to Ayo Onatade” (Shots).