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The Cartel novelist has no fear of death threats.
He’s had many lives already.
Credit: Jacopo Raule/Getty Images
What scares him is ceasing to be shocked at what humans do to each other.
Everyone in this small mountain town in Southern California knowsDon Winslow unless you show up asking about him.
Then youre more likely to find blank stares, shrugged shoulders, shaking heads.
HarperCollins
Never heard of him.
So hes not hiding, but that doesnt mean hes easy to find.
Then the smile fades and he adds dryly: Fk you, youre going to come and kill me.
Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
Im a small, old guy, but I can take care of myself.
On the cover, Stephen King supplies the vouch: The Forceis mesmerizing, a triumph.
ThinkThe Godfather, only with cops.
Simon & Schuster
These guys are not naive.
I use the line, Look, Im here to get it right, and Im here to listen.
So talk to me, Winslow says of recruiting sources.
I think, on some level, most people want to tell their stories.
Cops feel very misunderstood.
Increasingly so, and increasingly unappreciated.
Peaceful in the extreme.
He connects dots in terms of the history of our war on drugs better than anyone.
He also humanizes characters who, in a lesser authors hands, would be cardboard monsters.
His authorial voice is very sly and bemused.
The Forceattempts to link the good along with the bad.
Police trying to do the right thing find it isnt enough.
And some of them break.
People dont see these connections, Winslow says.
When you stop and cut community police funds and then you watch violence go up.
When you slash social services and then you watch violence go up.
And you’re able to track it virtually with the dates.
Theyre going send the Feds in and theyre going do this and that in Chicago.
They dont care where the guns come from, you see.
The guns come from Alabama and Virginia and Texas.
He leans back in his chair, coiled for a fight.
And when you talk to cops, thats their huge concern: Guns.
I had a cop call me the other day.
I cant tell you from where.
Its a high ranking cop in a big city.
Then theres the way the job warps even well-meaning souls.
Its a mortal danger of that kind of work.
And cops can start hating the general public, you know, on one level or another.
I was talking to a guy, and he was saying, I spend my whole day with animals.
How can people do this sort of thing?
A similar question inspiredThe Force.
What makes a good person stay good?
And what makes another fall into the abyss?
I call it The Macbeth Syndrome, Winslow says.
You know, you meet Macbeth and hes this nice loyal guy.
And then he kills the King.
And then he kills his best friend.
And then he kills innocent children and… step by step.
The Forceis the story of a once-good man who has simply taken too many steps in the other direction.
There is the corruption of taking money or taking bribes or whatever.
Thats one thing, Winslow says.
But theres another kind of corruption that is the shortcut.
I wanna put that bad guy away, but I cant do it playing by the rules.
Then the little shortcuts become big shortcuts.
So you have [police] Ive talked to them that really do start out to do good.
And they are highly motivated.
So maybe instead of getting a warrant, an officer claims to hear a scream from inside the house.
The next thing they know, theyre lying in court about that.
I gotta tell you, I understand it, Winslow says.
Ive worked for prosecutors.
Ive done civil cases.
I spent an awful two years doing child sexual abuse cases.
There are some temptations there.
This brings up just one of Winslows many past lives: private investigator.
I was in South Africa.
What was then Rhodesia.
Then I left all that and became a safari guide in a relatively peaceful Kenya, he says.
Hes still an avid bird watcher.
Winslow is a little chagrined by his hobby.
(We joke that he should just use the excuse: Cartel business.
You dont want to know.)
Eventually, the darkness of his day-job overtook him.
I was looking at a file: a woman whos husband had burned her to death.
Strangled her and then lit her on fire.
And our job was to show that he had killed her before the fire broke out.
So, Im sitting there looking at the photos.
Didnt have much time to go out for lunch.
He pauses, staring.
I mean nothing, he says finally.
All I was doing was getting technical information.
I was looking at the blistering.
I was looking at the way her hands were.
His fingers make claws.
I was taking notes and checking those against other peoples reports and opinions to get ready for trial.
And it meant nothing to me.
In other words, he was horrified not to be horrified.
Later, a walk around the home he shares with his wife, Jean, reveals other surprises.
Theres a framed picture of 44 and his boy in the living room.
If Winslow didnt really exist, youd swear Elmore Leonard made him up.
The filmmaker describes the author this way: Don is a cat.
Creating art isnt about whats in the personality, its about whats in the person.
Maybe thats why those death threats dont bother him.
His whole career as a writer and investigator is about staring down the worst and not blinking.
I think theyre pranks.
I think theyre some idiot, he says of the were-going-to-come-fking-kill-you calls.
Also, he points out he has gotten unexpectedlypositivemessages from the people he writes about, too.
Like anyone, they want their story to be told.
Some are simply better at acknowledging the truth than others.
I get calls from cartel people who tell me, Yeah, man you got this right.
You nailed it, Winslow says with a laugh.
So I get fan calls from drug traffickers!
But I also get hate mail and the occasional threat.
It comes with the territory.
