How Do You Live Decently In An Indecent World with Don Winslow

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1:35Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open Book, where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word, from authors and historians to figures in entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know I can roll with the punches, so let me know.

2:08Anyways, let's get to it.

2:16If you haven't read one of Don Winslow's novels yet, stop what you're doing and order one right now. I'm a huge fan of Don's, and I can assure you they are all unputdownable. In his latest bestseller, City of Dreams, he combines two of my favorite things, the classics and Italians. You could also say I-Talians, whatever suits your fancy, but I say Italians. Okay, the Irish are in there too, and I love them as well, but you know I'm partial to the Italians, and perhaps maybe Don Winslow is too. We'll have to find out, although Don himself is of Irish heritage. All jokes aside, Don is a master of his craft, and I was honored to speak with him on today's show.

2:58He's also particularly outspoken against Trump, something we've clashed about in the past, but Don was right all along, and we need to put an end to the Trump story.

3:15Joining us now on Open Book is Don Winslow, who is an international bestselling author and is writing a new crime trilogy, which is absolutely fabulous. The second book is out last week, City of Dreams. It is the sequel to City on Fire, but previous bestsellers include The Border, The Cartel, Savages. Don, a long time ago, I met you at one of those premieres. Oliver Sona had invited me. I took my daughter with me. It was a pretty intense movie. My daughter was yelling at me. I was probably 17 at the time. She got mad at me. But you don't need an introduction. You've written over 25 novels. You've won pretty much every award.

3:51You're also a former safari guide and a private investigator. So you've had this amazing life experience. How did you transition all this into becoming a novelist, sir? You know, Anthony, I've always wanted to be a novelist since I was about six years old, but it took the world a while to agree with that assessment, you know, and nobody stamps your passport to become a writer. So I just did a lot of other things that you alluded to, but all the time writing, trying to keep it up. My goal was to write five pages a day, no matter what. I wrote on buses, trains, tents, Buddhist monasteries in China when I was leading hiking trips up there, all over the place.

4:29I finally had a book. The first 15 publishers disagreed, but finally the 16th hit me and I was on my way. So first of all, I love your writing styles. I want to talk a little bit about that before we get into the specific book, you tap into a vein of human emotion and understanding about how human beings actually are. You know, we present ourselves to the world a certain way in terms of the way we would like people to see us, but there's a seemliness to all of us. I mean, let's just face it. There's truth to all of that. There's a carnal nature to all of us. Why are you so good at that? What is your gift, sir?

5:06Well, again, thanks. I don't know that I have a gift, you know, I think I've worked at it. I spent 15 years on and off as a private investigator, working all kinds of cases from arson cases through homicide, fraud, child sexual abuse. You get to know the, if you will, the darker side of people in that regard. You get to know that most people are neither all good or all bad, but you know, the famous shades of gray. The way I view my job is to bring the reader into worlds that he or she couldn't otherwise enter. And the way that I try to do that is to see it through those person's eyes, through the character's eyes.

5:44And that requires not objectivity, but subjectivity. I'm not trying to be objective when I'm writing a character. I'm trying to portray their point of view, however distasteful at times we might find that. And I appreciate it. And it's one of the reasons why I love reading your books. So you've been working on this trilogy for 28 years. Take us back to the initial inspiration. You know, the funny part about this is a year ago, I was steeped in the Iliad and the Odyssey. And the reason was one of my kids was in school and they were reading it. I was a classic minor at Tufts. So I had read the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Oresteia, all the plays of Sophocles, the Clytemnestra.

6:27I know what happened to Agamemnon's daughter at Ephigenia. I can take you through all that stuff because it was my studenthood at Tufts. Oh, yeah. But when I was reading your book, I said, okay, I've got to figure out who is who in the book. Okay, I figured out quickly that Danny was Aeneas, and obviously Liam was Paris, and we can go through the different characters. Sure. But why? What caused you to use the Homeric epic poem as the subtext for this? Yeah, unlike you, it was not my minor or my major in college. I majored in, of all things, African history. So I had this very kind of narrow education.

7:05Later in life, though, I decided to try to educate myself and go to the classics. And early on, obviously, you hit the Iliad and the Odyssey. It struck me so forcefully, Anthony, the similarities between incidents in those classics and real-life crime incidents that I grew up with growing up in Rhode Island. And so I started to wonder, you know, could I write a trilogy that would stand alone as a crime saga, you know, that you can read without any reference to the classics at all, but at the same time that tracked the stories and the characters and the themes of those great classics? Because I was so fascinated with them.

7:45You mentioned the Orsteia. That's a noir plot. If you just look at it, you put a trumpet behind that and put it in black and white. You know, you've got a noir movie. Guy comes home from the war, His wife blames him for their daughter's death, as you alluded to. They kill him in the bathtub. She and her lover, you know, the son comes home and kills them in revenge. Absolutely noir. And so that launched this 28 year odyssey, no pun intended, to try to accomplish that. You know, I'm obviously, I mean, I did the DNA test. I'm 87 % Southern Italian. And apparently I'm about 13 % Greek. Of course, my mother says that has to be from your father's side.

8:29But, you know, this area that you're talking about is laden with Irish and Italian immigrants. The underworld is in Rhode Island. There's a major underworld in Boston and New York and, you know, some parts of Philly. But Rhode Island really has a undercurrent of the underworld. You grew up with this. So how much of this is based on your real life experience? You know, experience would be an exaggeration, I think. You know, I was a kid. I grew up around it. I knew some of these guys. They were always around. You know, Rhode Island, as you know, is about the size of a Walmart parking lot. And, you know, I've always thought that the state motto should be, I know a guy.

9:08You wrote that. I think that City on Fire, I think you put I know a guy in there, which made me laugh because we all know a guy from the neighborhood I grew up in. Right, exactly. So, you know, it was always around. Listen, I mean, we're not Italian, but I grew up in an Irish-Italian neighborhood. My parents used to joke we were the only family, you know, in five blocks that didn't have a vowel at the beginning or the ends of the game. And so I was very familiar with the culture, you know, and loved it, loved both of those cultures. And so Danny Ryan, the protagonist of this, look, I've known the likes of Danny my whole life.

9:42And I played hockey with them, surfed, went to the beach, went to the bars. So this was really familiar to me. You know, the beginning of the book captures everybody's imagination. The first sentence is Danny Ryan watches the woman come out of the water like a vision emerging from his dreams of the sea. That's in City of Fire, of course. That's the first book. And this is the precursor to City of Dreams, which we'll get to. But that is, he's describing Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in the world. Right. And of course, she has her misfiring. Helen, the famous Helen, she leaves with Paris.

10:17She breaks off with her husband, Menelaus, the brother of the king of Greece, of at least the Federation of Kingdoms. And she leaves for Troy. And so this is sort of the mix up that happens. The Italians think she's dating one of the Italian princes, mafia princes. But she ends up with Liam, who's pretty self-centered, like our famous Paris from years ago. So let's talk a little bit about this. Danny wants an ordinary life, but he's not allowed to have one, is he? No. No, and that's all he wants. You know, Danny's a pretty normal guy and he just wants normal, but he wasn't born into that. You know, his mom abandons him when he was two weeks old.

10:54By the way, the same as Aphrodite abandoned Aeneas. He's left with his very alcoholic and distant father. His extended family is this Irish crime family, but all he wants is his wife and his kid in a home somewhere. But, you know, the conflict between the two mobs takes over. He ends up being a soldier and then eventually, not to give too much away, a leader in a losing war. Yeah, you write about him. And again, I don't want to give away the plot because it's just so enjoyable. But I want to talk more generally about life. We're planning our lives, Don, and then other things happen to us, right?

11:28We're expecting something to happen and then we get punched in the face. It's like Mike Tyson says, or you're making plans, God's laughing. Your book is really about this, isn't it? Isn't the Iliad, when you think about the guidebook that the Iliad is or the guidebook that City on Fire or City of Dreams happens to be, it's about unplanned lives and your reaction to that? Is that fair to say? Is that true for all of us? Yeah, I think it's true for all of us. I think it's absolutely fair to say that the first person actually has picked up on that that I've talked to about these books. You know, as were Greek and Roman literature, largely about fate, largely about our arguments, if you will, with the gods, you know, and what happens to us in our life and how we literally in those classics get blown from place to place, you know, with no control.

12:17I always think about this, you know, when we're making prognostications on politics or the future or even sports, we always kind of think we know what's going to happen based on what has happened. Right. And then something just comes out of the sky. Right. You know, whether it's COVID or whatever and changes everything. And that's certainly what happens to Danny. You know, he's laying on that beach. It's a beach I grew up on. That first sentence, by the way, hasn't changed in 28 years. and he sees this woman come out of the water and sort of unconsciously knows nothing's ever going to be the same.

12:50Right. There you go. And that's how our lives go. Certainly that happened to us with COVID. The Godfather, The Sopranos, Goodfellas. It's hard to make a gangster story fresh these days. You know, you also, I went back and looked at some of your interviews. I think you were one of the journalists compared The Godfather to Henry IV, which is Shakespearean play. And so I actually did not catch that. And I've read The Godfather five times. I had to go back and read Henry IV. And of course, it's right there. All of the hidden totems are in there. You also said that there's about 12 or so storylines that we have in life that we have a tendency to remanufacture.

13:25So how did you make this so fresh and so compelling given that? Man, again, thank you. That's why it took 28 years, you know, because I kept failing at it, Anthony. You know, I doubted my ability to do it for a long time. And for a long time, I was right about that, you know, because I wasn't getting it done. The issue was trying to figure out what are the contemporary, what are the modern equivalents of these ancient events? You can't have a Trojan horse being pulled into Providence. I don't know who Aphrodite, a Greek goddess would be in Providence, Rhode Island in 1988. And so, it was a matter of trying to find the very modern and very human aspects of those stories to try to make it fresh.

14:09I had a test. I would reread a chapter after I thought it was finished. And if you could read it with no reference to the classics at all, then it passed and I put it in the book. But if I couldn't, if I thought, ah, this does not making sense without reference to the Iliad or the Odyssey, then it had to be rewritten. All right. So I'm going to test myself here with the very famous Don Winslow. Okay. Sal in the book is Achilles. Yep. Pat is Hector. Yes. Okay. Danny is Aeneas. Yes. Liam is Paris. Yes. Okay. Who is Odysseus in this book? Chris Palumbo. Okay. There you go. Okay. I think you've figured out that I'm an aficionado of the classics and I've read all of these.

14:56Apparently. And it's important. I teach my kids. I force my son who absolutely hated me for it. I forced him to take a course on Dante, Dante Alighieri. I forced him to read all three books. And there was a professor at Tufts, who's a very famous professor. He went to Tufts after me. I said, you got to take this course. And he hated me for it. And he's now about 10 years out of school. And I was in his apartment and he had the Inferno open. Oh my gosh. And he had it earmarked. And I said, what is this? He says, well, I'm going back into the Inferno because of Dante's description of human beings and what human beings are actually really like and what the layers are of the human beings.

15:38You mentioned Dante in book one, the seventh circle of hell. You had that spot for certain people. Of course, we know the ninth circle is where Judas and Brutus lived, the betrayer of the state and God. They live on that frozen lake. If I'm going to ask you, this is a little bit of a weird question, but thinking about this is a release of Don Winslow. You are doing something, at least I think, one of your legacies will be you're a great storyteller, but I think there's something else here. Your legacy is you're taking these stories and you're making them contemporary. And there's a message in these stories.

16:12I think I know what the message is, but I want to hear the message from you. It is about the unplanned life. It is about fate, but there's something else going on. So what is it, Don? I think it's about sin, if you will. You still believe in that concept and And the possibility of redemption. I think, you know, listen, I was raised Catholic, sort of the Irish branch of that. I think that, you know, however you feel about that later in life, you never leave it, really. Well, you know what the Italians say about the Irish, right? I mean, they took the Catholicism way more seriously. I mean, when we were kids growing up, you guys were doing everything, you know?

16:53Yeah. We were half faking it most of the time, you know? Right. Well, you know what I said about the Irish, looking forward to our next defeat. Yeah, you said that. I think that was in book one as well. Yeah. But I think that there's always that thought about what have I done? Should I have done it? And if I did it and it was wrong, can I ever come back? Can you find forgiveness? But I think that the major question of crime fiction, and maybe the major question in my fiction, without getting too heavy about this, is the question, how do you live decently in an indecent world? Yeah, exactly. I mean, and ultimately, where are your morals?

17:29If they're not coming from God, is there something internally about yourself that's going to allow you to have certain morals? Right. And can you navigate that world that often is not always that easy of black and white and what's right or wrong? Yeah, no question. So I have a lot of young listeners, and so hopefully we'll get a group of young listeners introduced to your books, and not only these two, but others. But for the young listeners, the Aeneid is an interesting book because Augustus didn't like the idea that the Greeks had these two wonderful tomes, the Iliad and the Odyssey, several thousand years old.

18:06And so he went to Virgil, who was his poet laureate, if you will. He was really the government's poet. He was always pissed at Ovid. If you remember the acts of love, he banished Ovid. He didn't like the immorality in the acts of love or the metamorphosis, but he liked Virgil. I mean, he had ups and downs with Virgil. And he said, you have to create a epic about Rome. And so he tied it back to Troy. And so I have to ask you this question, because when I read the Iliad, the Trojans seem more valorous than the Greeks. The Trojans, particularly Hector, as more of a moral integrity to his personality.

18:44You know, there's a scene in your book where I guess the Hector figure, his kid is frightened of him. It's very famous in the Iliad as well. It's from the Iliad, yes. But I guess the question I have for you related to this is, is there a tome for America? We know now there's a tome for the Greek civilization. There's a tome for the Roman civilization. if you said it's a thousand years from now, Don, and somebody was looking back at the American era, is there a piece of literature that you could look to and say, well, that's going to get to the pantheon of the Iliad, the Odyssey, or the Aeneid?

19:23I don't know if there is an epic. I think if we look at a trilogy by John Dos Passos, the 49th parallel and the two books that surround it, might be the closest to that. Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah. I think in terms of sort of larger history of a certain era, if I were to look at certain American authors that I think best describe in a way our history and culture, it would be the late Jim Harrison. Sure. And I think one of the most underrated novels ever, The Road Home. And also maybe the collective writings of Richard Russo. Sure. Who I think's written about a certain aspect of America, of a sort of northeast small town, you know, but I think those would be my - Did you ever read Winesburg, Ohio?

20:11Of course, sure. Yeah. And a lot of people would, I think, talk about Philip Roth. Yep. But for me, I think that Dos Passos and Russo and Harrison really stand out. But in terms of a fictional work that would be analogous to the Iliad or the Odyssey or the Aeneid, I don't think that there is one. And I think there was something about epic poetry that's so particular and so specific. And as you alluded to, I mean, the Aeneid was basically written for political purposes. Yes. You know, to justify the Augustan reign. Yeah. And certainly did that. Yeah, but it's interesting, you know, because Virgil in his off writings from the Aeneid, why did he pick Troy?

20:52Again, one he felt was valorous. The other one was being driven by ego. Achilles, Agamemnon, the rivalry. the wrath of Achilles, ultimately him not fighting. I don't want to give away too much of this book, but this book, the second book is equally phenomenal because he's now your protagonist, who is Danny. He's now transforming. There's some tragedy that he's had to face in his life. He's had the crimes and the situation that happened to him in Providence. And now he's seeking an escape. The same way Aeneas was running through the tunnels of Troy as Troy was burning. And of course, it was Aeneas himself that had to explain to everybody what happened at Troy with the Trojan horse, how they got fooled.

21:33It was never in the Iliad. Thank you for saying that. Thank you. No one knows that. Yes, thanks. Yeah, you see that? It's not just the hair and the face, Winslow. I actually have read a lot of bullshit in my life. You see that? You know this stuff inside and out. Everyone thinks it's in the Iliad, and it's not. It's Aeneas talking to Dido, and he says, sorrow, unspeakable sorrow, you ask me to bring to life once more, my queen. So here he is. This is a righteous, he is a moral guy that has done immoral things, your protagonist, but he's primarily righteous and he's in search of something. What is he searching for in City of Dreams without giving up the plot?

22:12A place to put his feet, you know, a place to finally put his feet. He's got a senile father He needs to take care of. He has an infant son that he needs to take care of. And so his dream is as modest as it is impossible. He wants a normal life. He wants some security for those two people in his life. And that's what he's looking for. And he accidentally finds love. So it's an amazing story. It's one that you can't stop reading. America loves a criminal, Don. Mm-hmm. That's my reaction to America. I want to get your reaction. You're a crime writer. There are so many different criminals. Why does America love a rogue, love a criminal?

22:55Listen, we are famously a country of people who fled from other places for a variety of reasons, whether it was economic or legal or religious. So I think in America, there's always been an affinity toward the rebel soul. You know, that's certainly true of the Irish. I think it's probably also true of the Southern Italians as well. And so, you know, a big part of our culture, at least from the Anglo perspective, comes from the Robin Hood stories and then Cowboys and all of that. I also think that there's a wishful film that we all have. You know what I mean? You've got a big problem. Be nice to go to some guy with a white cat on his lap and have him take care of it.

23:38You know, you want to get that ticket fixed. There's the noisy neighbors. Sometimes there's, you know, far more serious problems that, thank God, most of us don't take those solutions. But I think there's a wish fulfillment, you know, and there's a part of us, let's be honest, that would like to. And so I think that reading about people who do it is on some level attractive. I also think that crime fiction talks about humanity in extremis. It's so often about life and death. It's so often about serious issues of right and wrong that I think people find compelling. It's interesting. You know, it would be remiss of me not to talk about the former president.

24:18I think that you and I at one point had our signals crossed, but I think you finally got my vibe. I was trying to help him and I did make a mistake, which I have apologized to the American public for. we, through cognitive dissonance, we let too many things go, but at least I have been man enough to admit that and apologize for them. You know, many, many of my peers, which would include Pompeo or Nikki Haley or any of these, these other acolytes have not been willing, they will not admit the mistake that was made. I guess the question I have for you, because you're a crime writer, you know, Trump is a fully frontal criminal.