DON WINSLOW'S BORDER

NOTE: This is the 1,200th post to this blog since I first posted a review of George Pelecanos' The Turnaround in July 2008. I like that symmetry, in part because I have written about Don Winslow often, going back before this blog, and I have been pleased with the way he has taken his career, much as Pelecanos did, from insider's favourite to major best-seller. As you'll see from this review, his success is well-deserved.

I was partway through The Border, following along with the battles between cartels and gangs to fill the power vacuum left in the Mexican drug trade, when I found myself, trying to keep track of who is a cousin of whom, and which section of Mexico they control or wish to control, wishing for a list of the characters, the kind of thing you would find at the start of an epic Russian novel. And it occurred to me at that moment that Don Winslow's War On Drugs trilogy, of which this is the final volume, is a crime fiction version of War And Peace.

No, Don is not Tolstoy, but as the scope of the narrative widens in his story, he manages to do the most crucial thing any epic novel needs to do: balance the stories of its main protagonists on the wider stage with the stories of those affected by what happens on that stage. The Border is balanced finely between Art Keller, the agent who has battled through two novels and 40 years against the Sinaloa Cartel and its rivals and successors, and the newly-embattled drug rivals. Keller, the rebellious, uncontrollable agent, is now head of the DEA, and mired in the Beltway politics which have always been at the heart of the failure of drugs policy. Meanwhile Mexico is breaking out in full-scale warfare between rival drug lords, with the body counts threatening Keller's always tenuous position.

Meanwhile, a new administration is taking over in Washington, a property developer turned reality TV star, whose son in law deals with laundered money. You may see the possibilities for conflicts of interests arising. This plot strand attracted plenty of attention in America, for obvious reasons, and Winslow to some extend has become a visible spokesperson against 'The Wall' as well as on drug policy. It speaks to his intimate knowledge, gleaned from agents and from journalists, and one thing his writing makes clear is how dangerous a profession being a journalist is among the cartels in Mexico; The Border is dedicated to dozens who've sacrificed their lives.

For Keller, whose fight against the cartels has cost him a family, the new job includes a new turn in his relationship with Dr Marisol Cisneros, herself physically a victim of drug violence. Keller has always had at least a foot in both worlds, now he has his entire existence there. But beneath that story, Winslow works the other end of the drug world: the cops and dealers, the junkies and those who try to help them, the refugees fleeing for safety to El Norte, their trip dangerous along the way and difficult once they get there, because you cannot follow the progress of the war without being aware of the lives torn apart on its battlefields. This is epic writing at its layered best, and at times the personal becomes almost unbearably tragic, even as the large scale violence seems unbelievable, except that its real.

As impressive as The Power Of The Dog was in 2005, it was impossible to conceive then that, 15 years later, the story would have been continued through two more novels, each getting better, more nuanced, more textured even as they grow more epic. Sadly, this trilogy may have concluded, but the drug wars, the border crisis, have not.

The Border by Don Winslow

Harper Collins, £20, ISBN 9780008227531

note: this review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

DON WINSLOW'S IRRESISTIBLE TOUR DA FORCE

Detective Sergeant Denny Malone leads the Manhattan North Special Task force. He is the King of Manhattan North, or the king of kings, leading their blue-uniformed knights as he and his three-man crew enforce their domination over the neighbourhood, 'Da Force' battling with the gangs to protect a population that sees them as part of an occupation force. It's a never-ending battle, and it's one in which he and his crew have become very wealthy making compromises as they do business in their nominal fiefdom.

Dope is the currency of these streets, dope and guns, and you can't run the streets if you don't deal in that currency. Malone is from Staten Island, from a family of Irish cops and firefighters. He went on the pad bit by bit, and now he controls, or tries to control the money he and his partners think of as feeding their families. But he's left his family, and now is involved with a black nurse who's a recovery junkie; a nod back to Heywood Gould's script for the film Fort Apache: The Bronx, perhaps, and Rachel Tictotin's take as cop Paul Newman's nurse girl friend.

There is much that is familiar in Don Winslow's superb novel, especially those steeped in the lore of the NYPD and corruption. The stories of Frank Serpico, Bob Leuci, and Sonny Grosso will ring familiar; books like Robert Daley's Prince Of The City; Philip Rosenberg's now-overlooked Point Blank, much of the work of Richard Price. But The Force stands with any of them, maybe even rising above them. Winslow's writing carries this book to new heights of plumbing these depths. He has written about Manhattan before, the New York of the Fifties, in the wonderful novel Isle Of Joy, but this is something on a different level and vaster scale, something six decades more intense.

Winslow deals, as you must with the moral ambiguities. In fact, morality is the greatest danger in Malone's world; having fixed moral lines creates problems which are not covered in the cop's catechism of violence. In the world Winslow portrays, almost everyone has a moral failing; cops, lawyers, politicians, preachers, feds, judges, DAs, journalists. Yet they all profess to a moral code; something you see strongest, oddly enough, in Malone's stoolies.There is another force too, besides the NYPD and Da Force; it is the one Malone senses around himself and his fellow cops, a force field that is about to be tested beyond his comprehension.

You understand this because of Winslow's writing. He is inside the mind of Denny Malone, each choice, each rationalisation. You see every other character, from the equally corrupt head of the other Task Force to the wives and children of the cops, from Malone's perspective, how they compete for his attention, his loyalty, his soul. And Winslow builds Malone's perspective brilliantly. He gets things wrong; misjudges key people, which he realises too late. The book proceeds at a rush, fast-paced, pounding movement, taking the reader along with the visceral excitement and triumph of Malone's world, the building speed as his skates over and around the mounting dangers.

And when those dangers begin to turn on him, the pace of the book slows down, and the reader begins to feel the squeeze just as tightly as Malone does. There are twists and turns as it proceeds, but events around Malone are gathering pace just as they slow him down and narrow his perspective down to one of survival. In the end, it is a story of morality, of a moment where Malone followed his deeper feelings; 'he still fucking cares. Doesnt want to. But he does.' as Winslow puts it. So it's also a story of redemption, that part of the catechism which Malone knows may well be impossible.

Winslow's superb drug novels, The Power Of The Dog and The Cartel, were big and powerful, but sprawling and detailed. The Force is something different altogether, big and detailed, but tightly controlled, brilliantly written, simultaneously thrilling, sad, and memorable.

The Force by Don Winslow

Harper Collins, £18.99, ISBN 9780008227487

This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

PAUL VIDICH'S HONORABLE MAN

George Mueller is at a turning point in his CIA career. He isn't the typical 'old boy' at the agency: midwestern, public school, Yale on scholarship, but he's done things right. Rowed in the crew, sang in the Whiffenpoofs, made good friends, served in the OSS behind German lines during the war, worked on Wall Street afterwards. His boredom on the street was relieved when his Yale friend Roger Altman recruited him for the Agency; he worked with and married an Austrian woman and had a son. Now they are back in Austria, Mueller is drinking too much, and the director wants him to identify the agent who is passing information to the Soviets, though there is considerable suspicion placed on him.

And, while investigating, he meets his friend Roger's sister, Beth.

Paul Vidich's first novel is a spy story of the old school, and, as the title might suggest, very much an hommage to John LeCarre. (Full disclosure: Paul and I were at university together, though whether I qualify as an old boy I don't know. But like George Mueller, I am able to evaluate dispassionately). But it also benefits from recent events: the Soviet weekend compound on Maryland's Eastern Shore which plays a part in this story was in the news during the questions about Russian involvement in the last US presidential campaign.

An Honorable Man is strongest on setting: it is 1953 and it feels like it: I'd compare it to Don Winslow's slightly later Isle Of Joy for accurate period atmosphere. But it's the deep atmosphere at which Vidich is even better, and not just the CIA background. Those who've delved into the deep state will recognise some of the players and situations, there is even a winking tip (I think) to the former chaplain of Yale, an ex Company man (another character is named, coincidentally, I assume, after a best friend of mine from a rival university). The spy craft part of the story rings true. But more importantly, Vidich is pitch-perfect on the clubby feeling of those CIA old boys and their clubby haunts, the assumptions and blind-spots which those feelings carry with them. It's very much like LeCarre, because the core of the book lies in the very LeCarre question of loyalty's, and the fact that the nature of the spy game depends on loyalty, and depends on betrayal of that loyalty. Meuller's dislocation from this world is the reason this novel works so well: the reader shares his almost dizzy feeling of instability. There is nowhere to sink the anchor of faith or trust, and Meuller is in every sense adrift. 'Washington is a terrible place for an honourable man to work,' he explains at one point.

I might have preferred even more ambiguity in this masque of betrayal. Toward the end of the book, Altman says that Mueller was always the director's favourite spy. The Favourite Spy might have been a more accurate title, open to more interpretations, but as I said, An Honorable Man sets the story into its context, and Vidich takes up the challenge and delivers, as its resolved with a resolutely tragic sadness that lives up to its title's challenge. If you like the classic spy novel, this one delivers.

AN HONORABLE MAN by Paul Vidich

No Exit Press

cloth £14.99 ISBN 9781843449577

paper £8.99 9781843449584

NOTE: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

ACE ATKINS DOES SPENSER IN ROBERT B PARKER'S LULLABY

Continuing another writer's series is a thankless task—you can try to imitate, in which case you usually fail, or you can try different directions, in which case you risk alienating the fan base of the original characters.You could go post-modern, and try for something that makes ironic commentary on the original, but then what's the point? Or you can ignore the whole problem all together, in which case you're probably a big-name writer handed the next huge contract for a James Bond novel. I wrote about this phenomenon when Don Winslow wrote a prequel to Travanian's Shibumi (you can read that here).

At least three of Robert B Parker's series are being continued by other writers. I've written about Michael Brandman's Jesse Stone here; he's faithful more to the TV movies Brandman produces and has written than to the novels. Now comes Ace Atkins writing a new Spenser novel, and I have to say that as continuations go, Atkins has come very close indeed to the original.

He does this without being slavish, either. In fact, the whole premise of the book, Spenser being hired by a 14-year old from the projects of Southie, who believes her mother's real killers are running free while an innocent man sits in jail, provides a good dose of cross-generational comedy which Parker would probably appreciate. Atkins also refers specifically to Paul Giacomin, the alienated teen Spenser taught to be a man, Hemingway-fashion earlier in the series (Parker also had Randall do the same thing, from the other gender prspective, with a young girl). But Mattie Sullivan is a different person, and Atkins is excellent in the way he shows her resisting Spenser's efforts, not so much because she doesn't need something, but because it doesn't fit—she's already more of a Hawk, and it's with Hawk she instinctively bonds. It may seem a small touch, but it's an indication that Atkins isn't going to stick slavishly to the formula.

He writes just slightly different from Parker—a little less of the punch line finish to each chapter, a little more involved in the description. This highlights Parker's greatest skill, which was to draw a setting or a character in very quickly, but very perceptively, which put the reader into the detective's shoes. In first person narration, you're supposed to be seeing what the narrator sees, and if the narrator is as confident and perceptive as Spenser, you ought to reap the benefit.

The story goes back to a number of old Spenser favourites—including hang boss Joe Broz and his son, and if it has a flaw it may be that the main villain is offstage for too long, and we perhaps don't see enough of his psychopathy. But it's hard to miss the parallels with the Whitey Bulger case in Boston, and Atkins has also done a pretty good job, for a Southerner, of sketching in the Hub; the research trips must've been fun.

Atkins' Spenser is, if anything, a bit more pro-active with Susan—and that reminds me of the problem which has bothered me, probably inordinately, in the later series. Dedicated readers know Spenser was a Korean War veteran, which means today he is either in his eighties or dead. Now this is a fiction character, a relatively mythic one at that, and if Parker, or Atkins, want to keep him existing out of time that would be fine with me. But when Spenser specifically references his fighting against Jersey Joe Walcott (which was established long ago in the series). Well, the youngest guys who fought Jersey Joe were born in 1928 (Rex Layne and Harold Johnson) and they would be 85 years old were they alive today, which they aren't. I think we can all accept that the Spenser in this novel is not 85 years old; his libido, fitness, and ability to get shot in the shoulder and not even notice it would suggest he's probably in his early 60s. So why mention Jersey Joe at all?

But most readers won't notice or care; in fact I wonder how many know who Jersey Joe was and what it meant that Spenser had been good enough to get beaten handily by him? It's not very important, because Atkins' continuation of Spenser is about as faithful and yet creative as anyone could hope.

Robert B Parker's Lullaby

by Ace Atkins

Berkley Books $9.99 ISBN: 9780425260982

NOTE: This review will appear also at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk

FOOL ME TWICE: MICHAEL BRANDMAN'S ROBERT B PARKER

Considering that this is Michael Brandman's second outing with Robert B Parker's Jesse Stone, it was bold to title the novel Fool Me Twice. But if anything, Brandman is making Stone his character, not Parker's. As I mentioned when I reviewed his first Stone novel, Killing The Blues (you can link to that review here), Brandman's Stone is more of a loner, more aggressive, and somewhat darker than Parker's Stone was. Parker could make Stone's sometimes flippant attitude work because he was a master of quick scenes and sharp patter, he also delineated supporting characters quickly and with far more efficiency than Brandman's able to do.

Instead, Brandman has blended together three stories, and in each of them Stone is able to crack wise with pompous figures of authority. A movie production has come to town, and the leading lady fears she's being stalked by her soon-to-be-ex husband. A spoiled teenaged girl is driving while using her mobile and Jesse, as is his wont, takes her on as a personal project (though he never refers her to a shrink, as Parker's Jesse might have). And most bizarrely, what starts out as a nuisance call from an old busybody, about her water bills getting bigger, turns into something far more complicated. The stories don't cross over, but their concerns reinforce each other to some extent, keeping the plotlines going. And of course there is a bit of romance for Stone, but this Stone has no pesky ex-wife haunting him, no Sunny Parker either, and we quickly learn that the last novel's entanglement has disappeared.

Jesse has always been Parker's most problematic lead character—he's Spenser in many ways, but with more id and less ego (or super ego), and more of a lone wolf. Spenser kept him entertaining with his baseball past, his drinking, and his multi-layered problems with the opposite sex, but Brandman has eliminated most of that, and Jesse's sessions with his shrink. He's gained a more forward-driven plot, but lost some of the relative complexity of the character, and in terms of women, frankly, turned him into Tom Selleck on TV.

Here he brings back Parker's Crow, a figure much like Spenser's Hawk, only without the repartee. Crow was more a construct than a character, and his backstory with Jesse's deputy Molly is ignored, partly because Molly has become a different sort of character too. Crow doesn't do much except play his part in the plotline, which is OK since he'snot very interesting, but with the state cop Healy rendered one-dimensional as well, it leaves only Jesse and his verbal sparring partners as characters.

Taking over someone else's character is a thankless task. Stick too close to the established formula and you're riding coattails, change it and you're messing with the master. I wrote about this with Don Winslow's taking over Trevanian (link here), but it seems to me that what Brandman is trying to do is gently make this Stone his own, or better, the Stone who was already there in the TV movies which he and Parker collaborated on. It's not a bad way to proceed, but he needs to go all the way, and fill in the missing blanks of character around Stone to really make it work.

Fool Me Twice by Michael Brandman

Quercus £18.99 ISBN 9781782064763

NOTE: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

DON WINSLOW'S KINGS OF COOL

Don Winslow is a daring writer. He's not afraid to venture into new territory, and his best books are as different as the deft subtleties of Isle Of Joy are from the epic sweep of The Power Of The Dog; as the off-beat California Fire & Life is from the even more off-beat The Dawn Patrol. With Savages, Winslow again broke new ground (see my review here)--not only with his characters, but with the style of writing, a small masterpiece of form following function as he broke down the drug wars to a more personal scale than The Power Of The Dog.

Writing a 'prequel' to Savages might be looked at as being a commercial decision, the way his 'Trevanian' exercise, Satori was (you can link to my review here). Oliver Stone has turned Savages into a movie, and tinkered with the ending, but without giving too much away suffice it to say a sequel to Savages would have been a difficult task even without the movie--which I haven't yet seen, by the way, else I would have written this review and that one earlier!

But Kings Of Cool works as a prequel because it follows up on a couple of Winslow's ideas about the drug wars and American (or Californian, which you can see as an outlier or a wind-tunnel for the rest of the country) which were explicit in Power Of The Dog, and implicit in Savages. The big one is that the whole miasma of the so-called war on drugs is a function of demand. Take away the demand for product, and the 'problem' goes away. But we as a country are so reliant on that product, that the world's entrepreneurs can hardly resist the opportunity. Oddly enough, this point became crystal (not meth) clear to me while reading Dashiell Hammett's stories again for the Open Book interview I did last month (link here). There are plenty of hopheads in Hammett's work—most of them are confined to the murky underworld and skid rows or their like, and the others are primarily among the very rich and famous. As long as things remained so, even as usage spread on a large scale within the black community, the drug 'problem' remained under control.

In Savages, although Ben and Chon (and their girlfriend O) are new age small-scale homeland-endorsed entrepreneurs, they find in the end that market forces have outstripped drug culture boundaries—as pot dealers they are no longer above or beyond the drugs lords who control heroin or cocaine (and there's an interesting sidebar to be written about the place of the other home-grown business, meth cooking, the bootlegging of the 21^st century and it's relation to big-time organised crime).

Kings Of Cool shows us how that came to be. The story begins Ben and Chon setting up their business in the new century, but quickly flashes back to the Sixties, with California hippie culture in full bloom and Chon's father, John (in prison when we meet him Savages) is a skateboarding kid called Johnny Mac who's taken under the wing of Doc, the Taco Jesus of the boardwalk in Laguna Beach, and quickly becomes his most successful drug dealer. We meet O's mother (the so-called Passive-Agressive Queen of the Universe) when she is just a young beauty trying to score a rich husband, and we meet Ben's well-meaning parents, who want to use their pot-selling profits to run their new-age bookshop. It's a rich mix, and it rings as authentic as Winslow's late Fifties Manhattan did in Isle of Joy, and it raises various questions not only about the parenting given our three marijuana musketeers, but indeed paternity itself.

And then, to put it simply, coke comes on scene, and everything changes, and, as we already know with the hindsight provided by Savages, when Ben, Chon and O finally learn the truth about their pasts, and change their presents, the consequences are, if not preordained, almost inevitable. The presence of characters from other Winslow books, like the hit man Frankie Machine or the legendary drug dealer Bobby Z, reinforce this point, and make it seem as if Winslow has been preparing for this moment for a long time.

What helps it all work is that Winslow has again altered his style, subtlely, to reflect the various drugs that dominate the narrative. So that the early sections have a hazy, sunny feel to them, less precise and forced than what follows, and both are different from the free-form trippiness established in Savages (interestingly, O, the most interesting verbally of the characters, becomes the narrator for Oliver Stone). I'm not sure where Kings Of Cool sits, depending on whether or not you've read Savages, and/or seen the movie, but as a feat of writing it is not far short of a tour de force. The war on drugs is monstrous and serious enough to deserve a writer like Winslow, who can meet it head on, but also take it back to its roots within our world. He's a daring, and tremendous writer.

Kings Of Cool, Random House £12.99

ISBN 9780434022076

NOTE: this review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

ROBERT CRAIS' TAKEN: THE 500TH POST

NOTE: This is the 500th post at Irresistible Targets. It may be worrying that it happens to be Friday 13th, but it is also auspicious that it happens to be a review of Bob Crais' latest novel, because he's one of those writers I've been following since the start, and one whom I've been fortunate enough to review frequently and meet up with regularly, but sadly less frequently.

IT will resume its more frequent service, I hope, now that I'm back from New Zealand and Nate is on the mend and on his way back soon. Sadly, on my way back via LA I just missed Bob and another of IT's favourite people, Michael Connelly, doing a joint appearance at the Santa Monica Library to discuss Raymond Chandler (see the photo bottom left).

Thanks to all of you who've followed IT so far--your comments are encouraged, and please pass the link onward if you do enjoy what you find here...


In his last novel, The Sentry, Elvis Cole protected his friend and partner Joe Pike. It didn't take long to pay the favour back. In Taken Cole is hired to find a young woman who has gone missing, and, as it turns out, she's been tkidnapped by bajadores, modern-day bandits who steal whatever the Mexican cartels are smuggling across the border. In this case, it's people, and they extort money from the families, no matter how poor, then kill their victims rather than return them. As Cole notes, it's a business dependent on quantity of kidnappings, not quality. And with Cole involved and turning over stones, the case grows to include both the cartels and the Korean mafia, the ATF, and eventually, Cole himself, when he too becomes one of the taken. But that brings Joe Pike into play.

Taken is one of Robert Crais' most ambitious novels. It begins like a classic Cole—we've almost forgotten how irreverent about hard-boiled conventions the early Elvis was, and indeed here, when he is hired, it is as the 'World's Greatest Detective'--an ironic part of his personality which has pretty much disappeared over the years. With Cole a prisoner, the novel flips, and then becomes a Joe Pike story—but not in the 50/50 mix you might expect. Because Crais does something very daring, shifting not only between multiple points of view, but also multiple timelines, moving back and forth between not only his two protagonists, but also the kidnapped girl, her boyfriend, their fellow captives and their captors. It truly is the story of all the taken.

And a brutal story it is. Last time I interviewed Bob (for Shots, on publication of The Sentry last year; you can link to it via here) we talked about Don Winslow and Savages, his exceptional and very brutal cross-border story. It seems inevitable that the excellent crime writers Los Angeles can boast would begin to focus south, and on the border, and Crais has moved adeptly into territory worked so well by Winslow and Jeff Parker. And for him, it's a difficult tightrope to walk: Pike is a character who can deal with violence and keep even huge body counts on an even keel for the reader, but Cole's character is different. Over his past few novels, Crais has brought the characters closer together, and here he's got the tone right throughout, balancing brutality with humanity. And it ends with a simple scene that is so Californian in its metaphor, yet so touching as well, that it re-validates the whole concept of the book (validate, of course, is a key Californian word).

Along the way we also see characters who seem poised to recur: Joe Pike's mercenary colleague Jon Stone and ATF bigwig Nancie Stendahl, who seems a worthy friend/foil for either Cole or Pike or both. It struck me as I raced through this compulsive story that Crais has come a long way since The Monkey's Raincoat, and so have his characters. They've grown together and the books are better for it.

TAKEN by Robert Crais
Orion £12.99 ISBN 9781409116035

DON WINSLOW REACHES SATORI

Extending the careers of other novelists' memorable characters is a task which has defeated many big-name writers, some (like Sebastian Faulks with James Bond) almost before they've even started. On the other hand, there have been many characters written by ghost writers where no one has, at the time, noticed the difference (Ellery Queen springs to mind).

In the detective field, such franchises tend to be offered to likely suspects; Robert B Parker with Chandler, Joe Gores with Hammett, Max Allan Collins with Mickey Spillane; often writing sequels or finishing material left behind (see my take on Max's Mickey here). Recently Parker's work has been passed on, with Michael Brandman, who produced the Jesse Stone TV movies, writing new Stone novels (see my review here), and Ace Atkins a surprising choice to continue Spenser.

The difficulty is deciding how far to go on the road to pastiche. Can you remain true to the spirit of the writer while taking his character in new directions? Can you write in his style, or is it useless to avoid your own? The more distinctive the writer, and the character, the more difficult the task becomes.

On the surface, Don Winslow may have seemed an unusual choice to produce this prequel to Trevanian's Shibumi. Winslow is an immensely talented writer who has produced some fine, neo-noirish, California stories, a recent series of laid-back surfer detective novels, and two remarkable books centered on the drug wars, the majestic epic Power Of The Dog and the brilliantly bleak Savages. He may have been chosen because Hollywood has caught on; The Death and Life of Bobby Z has been, so to speak, filmed (see my take here); Robert De Niro and Michael Mann were at times attached to a film of The Winter Of Frankie Machine, Oliver Stone is adapting Savages. And you might argue his bittersweet novel Isle Of Joy (see my review here) showed a facility with spy tales that might have appealled to the Travanian estate.

What must be remembered is Shibumi, although Trevanian's most successful book by far, was an outgrowth of his earlier work, straight-forward Bondish stuff like The Eiger Sanction. He moved from them to The Main, a dark police procedural set in Montreal, which may be his best, but wasn't a best-seller, before simplifying his formula and hitting on a character, Nicholas Hel, who is, in effect a Super Hero, pitched beyond Bond and nothing like a Marlowe, Spade or Hammer. Hel beat Jason Bourne into print by a year, but whether there's any influence would be for the reader to decide.

The background was intricate, but the problem was that, as a super hero, Hel would always triumph in the ultimate shoot-out, and this is a dilemma that might constrain your story telling. As this is a prequel, Winslow has to conform to the Hel Trevanian created, but he is afforded some freedom in showing how he got to be who he is, and he uses this freedom well. After all, as the blurbs suggest, Hel is not only the 'world's most dangerous assassin', but a 'mystic, master of language and culture, and the world's most artful lover'--so Winslow gets to provide him with a French courtesan to instruct him in whatever he doesn't know, courtesy of the CIA. The multiple conflicts and contradictions implied are something Winslow has fun with, but his assignment, to kill a Soviet commissioner in China, becomes something more complicated.

This is where he is at his best, outlining multiple betrayals, warring loyalties, and as you might expect from the author of Power Of The Dog, following the drug trade through Asia alongside the budding conflicts in South East Asia. He is constrained, to an extent, by Hel's talents, the fact that he is a Superman, and at times the trying to draw all the strands together can have twists colliding with each other. But he manages to draw it all together in a climax that not only resolves his story but does leave Hel set up properly for Trevanian's own book from three decades earlier.

I think if you're a Winslow fan already you'll be impressed rather than enthralled. If you're a Hel fan you shouldn't be disappointed; the world may have caught up and passed Trevanian's super-assassin in 30 years, but Winslow, while taking him back in time, also brings him forward. The news that Leonardo di Caprio wants to play Hel in a movie makes a lot more sense than his playing J Edgar Hoover, and should help cement Winslow's name. Next he brings back Hel to the Manhattan setting of Isle Of Joy, say in the early 1960s, all hel breaks loose, and the adapters of Mad Men option the film rights.

SATORI by Don Winslow
Headline, £14.99 ISBN 9780755370207 (paperback published at £6.99)

THE DEATH AND LIFE OF BOBBY Z: Straight to death by video

It's not surprising I never came across the movie adaptation of Don Winslow's The Death And Life Of Bobby Z, as it went straight to video almost everywhere in the world (Japan, Egypt and Israel being a few of the exceptions) after Warner Bros. passed on the finished product. It isn't hard to see why—there were a lot of possibilities in Winslow's breakthrough 1997 novel, which was already somewhat tongue-in-cheek . Tim Kearney has had problems in the Marines and problems in prison, including a fatwa put on him by Hells Angels, so when the DEA offers him an out by impersonating the legendary drug dealer Bobby Z, he takes it. But when his handover to Bobby Z's Mexican connection goes wrong, it begins a story of pursuit that sees just about everyone chasing either Tim or Bobby...including the son Bobby never knew he had.

What's most interesting about the film, in retrospect, is how clear it seems that the characters of Bobby Z and his erstwhile partner Monk appear to be dry-runs or models for Ben and Chon in
Winslow's recent masterpiece, Savages (you can link to my review here), which Oliver Stone is making into a movie which ought to eclipse this one as Winslow's finest cinematic adaptation.

The problem with the film is it can't decide on how straight they want to play it, and frankly Paul Walker isn't a strong enough actor to be able to straddle approaches. This becomes painfully evident whenever he shares a scene with Laurence Fishburne, even though Larry seems to be sleepwalking through much of his menace. Walker's somewhere between Jason Statham and Chuck Norris, not as pretty as the former, not as tough-seeming as the latter (although, as an aside, it's it odd to see the curiously vertically-challenged Norris appearing smaller-than-life alongside various Tea Party bozos?). Oddly, the business with Walker reacting to Bobby's son is probably his strongest emoting, so perhaps there is hope. He isn't helped by his love interest, Olivia Wilde, who's painted-on face has a range of emotions that makes Walker look like Charles Laughton, if she were any more wooden she'd be outside cigar stores.

Walker's at his best when, in effect, playing straight man for his more talented adversaries: Fishburne of course, but also Joaquim de Almeda as the Mexican drug lord Don Huertero, Michael Bowen as the biker Duke, and most interestingly Keith Carradine as Huertero's foreman, Johnson, who is really the only one who gets the idea of balancing comedy and thriller absolutely right. It's a shame that two of the excellent stars of Justified, Margo Martindale and Raymond J Barry, don't get bigger parts, because they could put the whole thing on the right keel, as they've done in that great TV show (Timothy Olyphant is much more talented, but suffers from some of the same problems as Walker; his is a small screen talent).

The balance, however, is never right. The biker Boom Boom, a explosives 'expert' is played by MC Gainey with some seriousness, quickly seems to have drifted into the gang that chased Clint Eastwood in his orangutan flicks. Josh Stewart doesn't really have the menace to play Monk, Bobby's erstwhile partner. Jason Flemyng, as Huertero's right hand man, Brian, seems to have wandered in from one of those Brit gangster flicks. And it reaches an absurd conclusion when we see the real Bobby Z, and he looks about as much like Walker/Kearney as I do. Which helps deflate a really funny and clever ending, in which his presumptive fatherhood becomes his literal salvation. It's a sign that the screenplay adaptation was, at heart, a solid one, but either director Herzfeld couldn't take in the right way or, more likely, his actors couldn't cope. Having said that, the bookending sequences with Bruce Dern doing his best Dennis Hopper imitation as a crazy man on the beach, telling the legend of Bobby Z, make me wonder whose idea all this ill-judged zaniness might have been.

In the end, there enough action to cover most of the cracks, if little originality to reward you, though Carradine's expression just before his death is priceless. It's also interesting to see MMA star Chuck Liddel look less threatening than you might think in his role as a Hell's Angel heavy; look quick and you'll also spot Oleg Tartarov, Robbie Lawler, and Pat Miletich. When you're more curious about UFC fighters than the love interest, it may be the ultimate definition of straight to video.

The Death And Life Of Bobby Z (2007) directed by John Herzfeld
screenplay by Bob Krakower and Allen Lawrence, based on the novel by Don Winslow

DON WINSLOW GOES SAVAGE

Ben is a philanthropist, and his buddy Chon is a mercenary. Together they are purveyors of the finest weed in Laguna Beach, and with their mutual squeeze Ophelia they are enjoying the best laid-back life sunny California can offer. But their business is not, at heart, laid back, and when the Mexican Baja Cartel decides they need to diversify into businesses north of the border, they make Ben and Chon an offer they can't refuse. Only they do.

After his drug war tour-de-force The Hour of the Dog, Winslow down-shifted and published two novels about the surfer private detective Boone Daniels. Those books, which you'll find reviewed elsewhere at this site, are funny, sharp looks at the California Dream a marked contrast from their predecessor, which was comprehensive, violent, dark, and almost manic in its pace, which helped it in covering such vast scopes of greed, politics, and government corruption, in the US and in Mexico.

With Savages it's as if Winslow has decided to merge those two strands into one, reminding us that Ben may come off as a laid-back Boone Daniels-type, but his business is a violent one, which is part of the reason Chon is around, and the story of Savages is really the story of the reality of their work catching up to them.

What makes it work is the way Winslow writes it. The depths hidden beneath the above synopsis are belied by the book's very Californian style narrative and half-stoned tone. It is immensely funny at times, not least in the constant duel between Ophelia and her mom, whom she calls PAQU (for Passive Aggressive Queen of the Universe), which in its way stands for the sort of live our heroes are trying to avoid. But many books have been written, and many films have been made, about the dark side of the Dream where America melts into the sea, and few of them have done what Winslow has done, presenting the darkness as an integral part of the light, the happy life-style, mellow yin and violent yang, which Ben and Chon reflect, indeed parallel in their own existence.

If you're looking for a comparison with current crime writing, you won't really find one here. I'd liken it to two novels from a previous generation, both of which were made into seriously underrated neo-noir; Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone and, particularly in the baroque Jules et Jim aspects, Cutter And Bone by Newton Thornburg (Larry McMurtry's excellent Leaving Cheyenne sprang to mind too). The seeming casualness of the prose, and the seeming precision of the plot, leave the reader unprepared for the starkness of the denouement, which does on a micro level what Hour Of The Dog did on the macro. Instead of the manic drive which he needed to cover the scope of that book, full of corruption at the highest levels, here he brings the drug business into sharp personal and local focus. It's not didactic, but it makes the point clearly.

Oh, and did I mention Oliver Stone is going to make a movie of this? You can see where he'd want to, and if you can't see it you can probably still find a copy of my book The Pocket Essential Oliver Stone if you look for it! The themes of drugs, love, excess lifestyle, violence, and Mexico would be hard for the director to resist.

Pulling off the challenge of writing a deadly serious novel with a satiric and ironic comic tone is a huge accomplishment, but I believe Winslow has done this before. In fact, for all the comparisons with excellent work I've mentioned, I'm inclined to see this not only as a melding of his last three books, but as a bookend, East Coast and West, one era to another, to his magificent 1950s Manhattan period piece, Isle Of Joy (see my take on that here)...a book that catches the spirit of a time, uplifting and depressing as that may be. Winslow may well be the most versatile and interesting crime writer out there right now.

Savages by Don Winslow
William Heinemann £12.99 ISBN 9780434020829

NOTE: A slightly different version of this review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

DON WINSLOW SURFS THE GENTLEMAN'S HOUR

Boone Daniels, surfer and private eye, is back for a second novel, and The Gentleman's Hour is every bit as good as The Dawn Patrol (you can find my Crime Time review of that book here). This time, Boone is drawn into two cases, neither of which he wants--one in which he's supposed to help the self-confessed killer of a local surfing legend and father figure, and the other where one of the Gentleman's Hour surfers (the guys who come after the working men on the Dawn Patrol have left) who suspects his wife is having an affair wants Boone to investigate; sleazy divorce work makes Boone feel uncomfortable.

Meanwhile, Boone's trying to work out his relationship with Petra, the English lawyer who appeared in The Dawn Patrol just as Boone's old flame Sunny Day disappeared to go on the pro surf tour. Issues of committment are difficult for men committed to the surf, and Boone soon fines himself caught between Petra's law firm, defending the accused killer, and his surf buddy Johnny Banzai, the cop who got his confession.

It's a nicely complicated plot, and if one of its main twists seems fairly obvious, and helped by Boone's polite refusal to listen to his incriminating adultery tapes, Winslow handles it with a certain amount of brio, including local gang boss Red Eddie and Mexican drug lords (if you remember Winslow's brilliant The Power Of The Dog you'll know he knows whereof he speaks on that subejct).

But what makes The Gentleman's Hour work is the way Winslow's narration catches perfectly the laid-back nature of Boone and his milieu. It's accomplished through a flexible third-person voice, something completely different in tone than the dark confusions of Power Of The Dog, or the nostalgic pace of Isle Of Joy (see my review of that one here) and it's all the more impressive for that. Winslow is able to adapt form to function, and it makes it very easy to identify with Boone, to accept his world view, and to laugh with his world, where Sunny's replacement at the Sundowner bar is simply known as 'Not Sunny', and where the San Diego underworld is only marginally more evil than the property developers and speculators.

Winslow's new drug cartel novel Savages, which came out in the USA in April, has been optioned by Oliver Stone, with Winslow working with him on the screenplay. His earlier novel, The Winter Of Frankie Machine, has been in development with Robert De Niro's Tribeca Films, originally with Martin Scorsese mooted to direct, but now apparently set to go with Michael Mann; Winslow apparently was not involved with either of the screenplay versions.

Winslow may be the most versatile of the elite crime writers in America, and I have no hesitation in putting him among the elite, he's that good. It's also interesting that his earlier, Neal Carey series, despite the first one being nominated for a first-novel Edgar, failed to make an impact. But after so many outstanding stand-alones, Winslow seems to have found a perfect change of pace series now. And I'm looking forward to the third Boone Daniels book, which must be coming, as much as to Savages.

The Gentleman's Hour by Don Winslow Arrow £7.99 ISBN9780099527565

NOTE: This review will also appear at www.crimetime.co.uk

DON WINSLOW'S ISLE OF JOY

I was impressed by the first Don Winslow novel I read, the excellent California Fire & Life, which I reviewed way back in 1999 for Crime Time 2.6 (number 18 if you're counting in decimals). The Power Of The Dog was one of the best books of 2005, a major novel that deserved mainstream attention. Since then he's published two well-crafted suspense novels, The Winter Of Frankie Machine (which Michael Mann is filming, starring Robert De Niro, for release next year) and The Dawn Patrol (which I reviewed last October for Crime Time, you can find that here), strong on characterization and setting, which I've compared elsewhere to T. Jefferson Parker's consistently successful Orange County stand-alones. But if Winslow has been strong on Californian background, it is nothing compared to this brilliant love-note to 1950s Manhattan.

I hadn't known what to expect when I uncovered a copy of the original Arrow edition, published two years before CF&L. Isle Of Joy, it turns out, is a small-scale tour de force. It should have made some reputation for Winslow, although I can see why it may have been overlooked at the time. A somewhat tongue-in-cheek spy thriller, it's not quite comic enough to be farce, but given the way the story proceeds to a most serious finish, one wonders if, had the overall tone been more serious throughout, it might have reached a bigger audience. I think the same fate has befallen a couple of Robert Littell's books, and it's a fine line to walk.

This one is a roman a clef, with a thinly-disguised John Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, who in this case is conflated with an earlier JFK lover into a spy. Walter Withers is an ex-CIA agent now working as a PI in late 1950s New York, when he is assigned to bodyguard Senator Joe Keneally's and his wife on Christmas Eve. But his real function is to act as beard when Kenneally needs to sneak off with actress Marta Marlund, and of course Marlund winds up dead, in Keneally's room. What follows is a story which twists and turns between the police, FBI, and CIA, with political capital up from grabs and betrayal suggested at every turn. There are more characters whose models are easily recognisable, not least a fiery Jack Kerouac. Everyone has secrets to hide, even Withers' erstwhile girlfriend, nightclub singer Anne Blanchard, whose life in the Village contrasts sharply with Walter's staid WASPy uptown.

That's important, because as I said the real beauty of this novel is its nostalgic portrayal of New York City in the late 1950s, when it was the center of the known universe, and when anything was possible. Winslow does as fine a job as anyone I've read at conveying the real feel of the era: if you've been watching Mad Men on television, you need to go back a few years before the really modern stuff started to take hold, before the fabric of life itself started to change. It's wonderfully evocative, while at the same time hinting that the betrayals and twists of the worlds of politics and spying were somehow part and parcel of the new world which was coming.

There's also a key scene set at the 1958 NFL championship game, between the New York Giants and Baltimore Colts, the so-called 'Greatest Game Ever Played', when pro football began to slip into the nation's consciousness to replace baseball. Although Winslow makes a couple of sporting errors (Jim Parker, not Joe; and New York wouldn't be talking about Mantle and Maris together in 1958, as Maris was in Kansas City) they're not serious (of course, not everyone is a sports pedant, luckily for them. I'd noticed a couple of baseball anachronisms, and a train-route problem, in the proofs of The Given Day, but according to Dennis Lehane they were caught before the book went to press) I hope they were corrected when Arrow reissued the book last year. The audience that lapped up Mad Men, which was enough for The Mendes Family to hack up Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road on their behalf, ought to lap this up too. It's Yates' era, but it's dealing with the Manhattan the characters in RR left behind. In fact, Winslow nails Yates' dilemma when Walter mulls over the impending death of the Manhattan bar.

'This new American dream, neither city nor country but a banal melange of the two. A society connected by television and automobile and little else except the desperate delusion...that we all want the same thing, a house in the suburbs...A few more years and the clubs will be dead...and I'll be one of the few mourners at the wake. The rest of America will be in their suburban bomb shelters sitting in the televised glow of the seemingly endless parade of cowboy shows.'

That's a brief contemplative pause in what's otherwise a fast and entertaining trip. Winslow deserves a wider audience, and this is the kind of book that, once he has that audience, would cement his reputation.

Isle Of Joy Don Winslow Arrow (1996) £6.99 ISBN 0099706415 reissued 2008 ISBN 9780099706410

DON WINSLOW SURFS WITH THE DAWN PATROL

My review of Don Winslow's new novel, The Dawn Patrol, is up at Crime Time, which you can find right here.