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)

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)