New York State of Mind: Don Winslow on The Force

There’s a certain symmetry to the two Skinny books interviews conducted over the last week. Both US authors of violent, technicolour crime novels. One East, one West. Ryan Gattis came first, and his LA gangster tale Safe is reflected in Don Winslow's New York cop epic The Force. Each novel an inverted negative of the other – both very much of and about their opposing cities. Gattis suggested that his work was informed by LA’s wide-open spaces – the narrative dictated by the need to drive. Winslow’s subject may be a more compact city, but his actual interview is informed by driving. He’s just come off a TV talk show set and hit the road to a book signing, chatting to The Skinny down the line from the back of a chauffeured car, cruising through the actual Harlem turf of the new book.

For a fan, that turf initially jars. Winslow admits he’s “pretty much known as a California guy and a California writer.” But he was born in New York, lived and worked there for years. His first book was set there, and his fifth. But no matter how thrilling those earlier works are, they live in the shadow of his more recent duo, the stone-cold classics The Power of the Dog and The Cartel; the latter termed ‘the War and Peace of dope-war books’ by none other than James Ellroy.

After The Power... and The Cartel's combined 1200 pages set across the US/Mexico borderland, New York and The Force seems like quite a change-up – a city with a different rhythm and poetry to its streets. “The way people talk about architecture – that form follows function – I think style follows story, and it certainly follows location,” Winslow answers, “…so, it required a whole different idiom, you know, that I had to rediscover.” Still, he suggests, “it’s more of a homecoming than a departure.”

The city has changed since his days. The neighbourhood he lived in “was poor and troubled and violent.” Now nannies roll double strollers down the sidewalk for pampered middle-class parents. But then gentrification can be as terrifyingly disruptive a force as any criminal activity, no? A laugh that sounds like a shrug from Winslow: “In many ways it is.” Even four years ago, horror B-movie maestro Frank Henenlotter lamented to us that the city he loved doesn’t exist anymore, the New York of the early 80’s. He described the sound effects under his feet when he walked down to the set of his film Braindead as “…either a gushy sound from stepping on a used condom or a crunching from crack vials.”

Winslow offers a more poetic depiction of this time, when the city was broke in more ways than one: “Yeah, you know, I used to say it felt like walking on the beach, except it wasn’t seashells, it was crack vials. Listen, on an objective basis, things are certainly better, there’s really no question about that. Though there was a grittiness and a soulfulness about the city in those days that parts of me miss.”

But the character of that unrepentant New York still ingrains The Force, drawn at times from 70’s cinema – classics such as Serpico and The French Connection. “Sure, I’ve been very influenced by film and I think it would be very disingenuous for any writer of my generation to say they weren’t.” The Force knowingly plays on those silver screen stereotypes, but evolves well beyond them. Its central character is Denny Malone, a bribe-taking, pill-popping, drug-dealing kinda cop, with his finger in every pie possible. But if you dare to accuse Winslow of exaggeration for dramatic effect, just watch the documentary Precinct Seven Five then apologise. What Winslow has done is modernise.

The Force: a post-Ferguson police thriller

NYC may have sanitised itself after the zero-tolerance approach of Mayor Giuliani, but there are complex new issues to face. This means that while Winslow has always wanted to write this book, it would have been a very different beast if penned at any other time. This is a post-Ferguson thriller, set against a backdrop of Black Lives Matter and bubbling racial tension. “In terms of current affairs, that’s the reason I wanted to write this book now. I felt that it could be relevant,” he says. As ever, Winslow’s new work moulds the truth of newspaper headlines into the guise of a thriller. “Not one headline, but a number of them. It was police shootings, particularly of young American black men. But also, I just felt that the time was right for me… the Eric Garner case and some others led me to think this was the moment.”

We pitch a Robert F. Kennedy quote his way: ‘Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves. What is equally true is that every community gets the kind of law enforcement it insists on.’ Winslow agrees only in part. “But here’s what I would say. We tend sometimes to look at police departments as if they’re separate from the society that creates them and surrounds them, and they’re not. They’re mirrors of that society. So, whether we get the ones we deserve or not is another issue, but I think we get the departments that look like us to a great extent.”

And so, we ask, has a country that has built a legacy of foreign wars had that reflected in their law enforcement? “The real problem lies in training,” Winslow suggests. “You’ve got a lot of these smaller town departments. That don’t have the funding for proper training so they hire former military guys, usually young men, without a lot of experience in the real world, except for the military. They give them a couple of weeks training, they throw a uniform on them, give them a gun and say ‘go to it’. And then we’re surprised when bad things happen.”

But Winslow is not about taking sides or offering easy answers. He seems to revel in placing the reader on morally ambiguous ground, looking over the shoulders of a police team (Da Force) who prefer violent direct action to red tape and who sweeten their pay packet with drug money into the bargain. “Yeah, it was absolutely intentional. What I want to do is bring the reader into a world that they couldn’t otherwise enter, and let them see through that character’s eyes.” It’s often uncomfortable, the novel weighing the pressures the team are put under against the illicit deeds they commit; incidents that in this modern age are increasingly caught on camera: “What I think about these issues is that they are far more nuanced, far more complicated than we’re going to get from a news bite or a video clip, running on social media.”

Visibility means these now become international news and the whole world understands what the local community often knew all along. But Winslow is about balance. The Force’s Commissioner and a lawyer have a media tête-à-tête in the book, debating cops risking their own lives against taking those of others. The growing politicisation of the role was what initially stood out during the extensive interviews Winslow conducted with working and ex-cops. The second point was how deeply these cops care about victims. “We tend to think of the principal relationship between cops and the community as between cops and criminals," he says. "It isn’t.

“The principal relationship is between cops and victims. When a cop goes to a crime scene they don’t necessarily see the perpetrator, but they sure as hell see the victim. And when cops talk to you about their cases and about their lives, I bet 75% of the time what they’re talking about is the victims. And that really stays with them. Let’s remember it’s the cop that goes to the emergency room, the cop that goes to the morgue, the cop that goes to the victims’ families to say 'your loved one’s never coming home'. And while they tend to adopt this pretence of cynicism and toughness, believe me they take it home with them, and they take it home with them for years.”

"There’s a couple of times I’ve had guns pulled on me..."

One poignant scene of the book has the team drag a rookie officer out for drinks after he’s shot at earlier in the day. Making him talk, telling stories, letting off steam – on the job self-therapy. It demonstrates the severe psychological impact of a single near-miss, refreshing in a world where TV cop shows play gun battles seemingly on loop, like it’s everyday rather than the significant life and death experience it actually is. “It absolutely is,” Winslow agrees. “I don’t know if you’ve ever had a gun pointed at you or been shot at?” In Scotland? No. “I have, and you instantly develop a new world view.” Was this during a research ride-along for The Force? “No no no, it was long ago in a galaxy far away. There’s a couple of times as a PI I’ve had guns pulled on me and I spent some time in Africa and elsewhere when people were shooting at each other in anger.”

Winslow pauses the interview, excitement evident in his voice. The Force visit a favourite restaurant early in the book, self-service, so the owners can’t spit in their orders. By coincidence, Winslow’s driver is just passing the very same Harlem diner that influenced the scene. “Sylvia’s… a very famous soul food place up in Harlem. I wish we had the time to pull over, [but] we have to go to a book signing out in Long Island… I’ve been at this a long time today.” And you just know this is true. A mammoth promotional tour, multiple interviews across all media – befitting a book Lee Child calls ‘probably the best cop novel ever written,’ and for which Stephen King suggests, ‘Think The Godfather, only with cops. It’s that good.’

This tightly packed schedule may be the reason his words today are so succinct and weighted, trimmed of any fat. The same might be said for his novels, mind you – no small feat for books that hit around 500 pages a piece, yet are so streamlined and addictive they steal days from your life. And that’s only one connection The Force has with his borderlands books. Another is the 'war on drugs'. 

The Cartel is the tip of this pyramid, where vast quantities of cash and narcotics are exchanged by the game’s top players. The Force exists on the ground level, where ill-advised government policy seeps down to poison those on the streets of New York, a reality set to the rapid tempo of gunfire. “Yeah, absolutely,” Winslow agrees. “I think in many ways it is a pyramid scheme. And this is no new story. You could write this in Greek or Latin or Hebrew, or carve it on cave walls. I mean it’s always the poorest people who suffer the most. And it’s why the alienation between police and minority communities is especially tragic, because they should be allies.”

On the war on drugs, and Trump

Winslow has been vocal in his challenge to the war on drugs for many years, among the most dangerous issues affecting the world, he feels. “Without question… because it militarised the police. It turned the police into occupying armies and again did further damage between those communities and the police.” So, in the week of our interview, he put his money where his mouth, taking out his third full-page ad in the New York Times, using a prose format the United States President understands, Twitter: ‘@realDonaldTrump wants to drag us back into one of the most catastrophic policies in this nation’s history: #TheWarOnDrugs’.

Winslow also heavily criticised Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions in a recent essay on Time.com as being “either woefully or wilfully ignorant of the facts” in relation to drugs. “The problem is,” Winslow adds down the phone “… now we have an administration that want to return to this very simple sort of soundbite, law and order, lock-‘em-up and throw away the key, justice system. To use [that term] loosely.” A vast border wall seems to wilfully misinterpret the history of a war that after five decades has left drugs cheaper, more plentiful and more potent. His essay comes to the conclusion: “If that’s Trump’s idea of success, I’d hate to see his version of failure.”

It’s simplistic to assume that The Force also implicates the current Commander in Chief; that when confronting the issue of corruption, Winslow is stalking bigger game than the cop on the beat. “Well you know I finished the book prior to the election. Certainly I had those things in mind. Look, it’s easy to talk about police corruption, they’re easy targets… Having said that I think far worse crimes are committed in the halls of congress. And so, you said corruption is a fish that rots from the head down? I absolutely agree, and I think cops are rightfully resentful when the fingers get pointed just at them, because exchanges of favours and money and everything runs through the entire system.”

Although works of fiction, The Power of the Dog and The Cartel – products of Winslow’s 20 years researching the subject – plot the drug war’s timeline accurately and at length, yet it’s his hip and rhythmical earlier work, Savages, that somehow puts it in offhand but concise context. “It’s about hemispheres,” offers weed dealer Chon, analogising the globe as the human psyche: “The northern hemisphere is like the head, the brain, the centre of intellectual, philosophical, superego activity. The southern hemisphere is down there near the groin and the anus, where we do all those dirty, shameful, pleasurable id things.”  Where are most of those drugs produced Chon asks? The southern hemisphere. I’m sure I don’t need to prompt you on where they’re mostly consumed.

“Hehe, yeah. I was being fairly glib in those passages, but I think there’s a certain truth to it,” Winslow responds. “We tend to literally look down to those societies and those cultures, because that’s the way the maps and the globes are organised, and yet we sort of overlook our own role in all of that… It’s not the Mexican drug problem; it’s the American drug problem, it’s the European problem, but it's Mexico and Central American countries that suffer the most from it.”

But not only. Winslow opens The Force with a list of US Law Enforcement personnel killed during the time he wrote the book.  It stretches to a sobering two-and-a-half pages of names, many who would have died directly or indirectly as a result of drugs policy. The Cartel opens with a similar list. 131 men and women – journalists murdered or disappeared in Mexico during his work on that novel. Even more outragous – journalism should not be a profession where people die so readily in the line of duty. “Well, it shouldn’t be, but it sure is down in Mexico,” Winslow adds. “Since I wrote that book 39 more reporters have been murdered there covering the drug situation. I felt ethically bound to print those lists on both those books because I’m sitting safely behind my desk writing about this world and these issues, while these folks are out there dying. I thought that they needed to be acknowledged and acknowledged by name.”

Winslow has attracted his own unwanted attention. “Because of The Cartel, I now get death threats and all that kind of happy crap,” he told Newsweek recently. It’s possibly testament to the power of his work, but you have to imagine this is not a compliment that would sit easy with him. The glare of publicity will only grow though, as adaptations of both The Force and The Cartel begin production for the screen. Ridley Scott is attached to both, and a recent announcement revealed David Mamet as screenwriter for The Force.

“Incredible huh?” asks Winslow. “Isn’t that amazing? I’m thrilled beyond measure. That’s one of the great American writers.” And after landing the job, James Mangold seems an ideal fit to direct. His recent Wolverine outing Logan had obvious western leanings, and The Force feels very much like an urban version of that same genre. “I think that all crime fiction has its origins in the western,” Winslow ponders. “I think what happened is that the cowboy rode as far west as he could ride, hit the Pacific Ocean, turned around and became the cop and the private eye… Dirty Harry, instead of watching it as a cop film, watch it as a western. And by the way, it has exactly the same ending as High Noon.”