‘We Have to Speak Out’: Don Winslow on Fighting Trump and Coming Out of Retirement
Don Winslow can show you a pretty legit version of first position in ballet.
He’s demonstrating it right now, about an hour into our meet-up on a sunny January afternoon. He has risen from his seat in a beach-adjacent café overlooking an expanse of scrub and mudflats in this shore town of Cardiff in Southern California. He has made it plain that despite writing a raft of bestselling crime-fiction books studded with the toughest of tough guys, with the occasional “sprays of blood,” his daily life is that of a gentlemanly family man who stands just “five-six and a buck-thirty.” It’s the sort of ironic contrast that, at 72, Winslow can embrace.
“I walk like a broken duck,” he insists, though he hiked nearly two shoreline miles here from the pleasant if temporary rented condo he shares with his wife Jean. Later, when we amble some more, it turns out his slightly angular gait is smooth enough to expose the simile as part of his self-deprecating streak. Similarly, when he says something about finding new depths in his celebrated crime-fiction writing, he warns us both he doesn’t want it to “come off as bullshit.”On information and belief, as lawyers say, it seems there is zero bullshit to the man.
Our talk will be mostly about his new book, a novella collection called The Final Score, and a film, Crime 101 (out Feb. 13), based on a story from his 2020 collection, Broken. But it will also encompass the kaleidoscopic array of jobs Winslow has held in addition to being a chronicler of fictionalized tales of hardened cops and ruthless sicarios, all playing a part in his wide-ranging body of knowledge. His brief indoctrination, in the 1980s, as an anti-terrorist trainer for the U.S. State Department — armed with a master’s in military history, it seems he was instructed in a projected role spotting security threats — is the only one of his oft-changing jobs in England, China, Africa, and New York, that he will decline to detail. (It ended when he realized he wouldn’t be a good fit to serve in the Reagan administration.) But given the lurid taunts and threats that land on his X feed or are even shouted at him in the street — anger and abuse from the MAGA crowd, yawps that he’s triggered with his online slagging of Trump and the president’s minions — he’s hewn to certain cautious behaviors.
Of the tradecraft he did learn, Winslow says, “the most useful skill was — and is — what I think they now call ‘situational awareness.’ I was, and am, always conscious of who is around me. I don’t care if it’s the street, the grocery store, an airport, or a book event, I take note of everybody. I’m especially aware of movement. And if I see someone I don’t know more than twice in a day, I’ll be particularly aware of that person.”
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His tone is matter-of-fact, but the vitriol has heightened lately. Mere days after our chat, threats he will cite on social media as “serious and credible” will lead him to change course for what was a planned series of promotional dates in bookstores and cultural venues (e.g. Manhattan’s 92nd Street Y). Some that were listed as “open to the public” have been canceled; others will likely shift to virtual format.
But today, in his favorite funky beachside café, Winslow abides amidst the usual surfer clientele. His head is meticulously clean-shaven on top, and in his black, tight-fitting collared shirt and black jeans, he’s as taut as a chimney sweep. From the moment we meet up on the porch, his steady gaze is amiable. Still, to sit opposite him at a small table is just a bit like being hooked to a polygraph, despite his air of mannerly warmth.
As to the feet, of course, there’s a story. With Winslow, there’s always a story. It seems he was born with “a few extra bones” in his back, burdening him with a right foot that’s now resolutely pointing south while its mate aims east. Youthful pond hockey injuries and years of surfing scrapes have been absorbed as painful but far from disabling.
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He wasn’t aware of this genetic skeletal quirk until the Vietnam draft fixed its eye on this Rhode Islander whose lottery number was a vulnerable 10. Only then did his dad, Don Sr., a Navy medic who tended to wounded Marines in World War II on Guadalcanal and beyond (in what fellow troops later revealed was heroic fashion), share the early medical diagnosis to wife Virginia and the family. “The doctor said I’d probably be able to walk, but never run, never play sports. My dad said, ‘I never told your mother, I never told you, because I didn’t want you growing up thinking you couldn’t do those things, or your mother being terrified that you’d get hurt.’” On the paperwork stating young Don’s disability to serve in a war his father didn’t believe in, the examiners wrote “cripple.”
As the draft wound down in 1972, onward Winslow went in life, though not always unarmed. (This longtime advocate for stricter gun laws was trained, at an unidentified time, in combat arms.) He saw a few fracases while employed by a security service in New York, where his job description was “street rat” and his duties included trolling the 42nd Street movie house district luring pickpockets. At one point he would be suspended by his boss for knocking down and thrashing a punkish street tough who jumped him in a minor riot of punters outside the legendary Clash stand at Manhattan’s ad hoc punk venue Bond’s.
If you look closely, he almost seems abashed that such an account spilled out, and he reverts to the mild-mannered and cordial gentleman who might be happiest doing good works in nearby Julian, just over an hour inland from San Diego. The onetime Gold Rush town — population around 1,000 — is where, some three decades ago, he and Jean found a peaceful retreat of a ranch home perched on 30 acres. He finds great reward in bringing his own cultural touchstones to the youth there. Having directed Shakespeare productions in Oxford, England, he volunteered time to the school system to guide the younger citizenry in safecracking the Bard’s works: “For 28 years, doing cut-down productions of Shakespeare for elementary kids — the Globe Theater comes to Julian.” He pauses. Clearly, he’d rather choke than be seen as bragging on this. “And then we directed high school musicals, which is why I’m going to do 300 years less time in purgatory,” he adds, flashing his Irish Catholic upbringing. He pauses again. “You try to show them, if it’s a bigger world, and there’s stuff you can do, don’t be intimidated by anybody, because, you know, you’re the guys who do Shakespeare.”
If America had a national uncle, Winslow might be a good choice.
Especially since Daddy just keeps getting crazier. Winslow’s notable public enmity toward the current president, whose name will not cross his lips today, has been evident ever since the two-time destroyer of worlds first sought power. In recent months and days, right up though the current authoritarian auto-da-fé that’s taking apart the Constitution, Winslow has become ever more choleric in his public comments. His X audience hovers near a million — and as to the haters among them, he offers, “Bring it on,” drawing in the balmy Southern California air with both hands. He’s clearly referring to online squabbles, though it is perhaps not random that Winslow chose a seat facing the door.
He has been not just a symbolic opponent of the administration but a practical one. We may see another round of the sort of videos he co-produced during the 2020 campaign in an attempt to blunt Trump’s surge in that election cycle. On Oct. 13 of that year, the nascent Don Winslow Films released a video upbraiding Trump with negative imagery edited to Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Philadelphia.” In short order it was viewed 10 million times, followed by similar shorts meant to garner votes in Georgia and Michigan. Over time, many more tens of millions saw them. Winslow split the cost with his production partner, agent, creative confidant, and best friend, the contrarian Hollywood writer-producer Shane Salerno.
As we sit in the shore breeze while surfers pass by lugging their boards, the country has just been stunned by the killing of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE detachment in Minneapolis. One wonders if resistance fatigue threatens to settle in. Indeed not, says Winslow: “I have moments of despair and moments of rage, as we all do, and we all should. But despair doesn’t get you anywhere. What are we supposed to do, curl up on the couch in a fetal position and let them take the country? We can’t do that. We might feel, at times, despair or pessimism and all of that. To me, that’s a ‘So, what?’ OK, I’m pissed off today. I’m sad today. This is bad. So what? We still have to (nodding to an internal march cadence) left, right, left, right… So let’s speak out on the large things but also act as individuals and inspire.”
The shrug he finishes with is not a capitulation, more of a resettling of his shoulders, and it advances the talk to the day’s business, a new book and a film based on an older one. His standing army of readers will recall the scare they suffered in April of 2022, when Winslow stepped away from several decades of sending forth his near-peerless crime fiction to focus on his anti-Trump resistance.
Amidst promoting the third novel in his Danny Ryan Irish-gangster trilogy, City in Ruins, he announced his retirement from writing. “I wanted in the fight,” he told an NPR interviewer. “I didn’t want to be writing a fiction obituary of America losing democracy.” He’d been stirred also by the experience of his son Thomas, then in his mid-thirties and a deputy to the Biden campaign chief of staff after serving in the Biden-Harris White House. The ragged demise of the Biden campaign was as a “tough” one, says Winslow with terse empathy. (Later today, he’ll call Thomas in D.C. to mark the first birthday of his grandson, Perry, to whom The Final Score is dedicated.)
But just months into walking away from his writing métier, Winslow discovered, somewhat to his surprise, the same creative urgings that long served to motor his craft. “I don’t know if I am back for one more book or more,” Winslow told Deadline last May. “One day I just started writing again and I couldn’t stop. I wrote all of these stories in secret and for the first time in decades without a deadline.”
This month, Winslow’s publishers re-issued Broken as a paperback under the new title Crime 101, just in time for the star-fueled film of the same name. (The cast is led by Chris Hemsworth and Halle Berry, and also features Oscar nominees Mark Ruffalo, Monica Barbaro, and Barry Keoghan.) While this is one adaptation that made it to screen, the lengthening history of Winslow-tied film projects expiring in development hell spurred an announcement from him and Salerno that they’d soon be grappling back various rights that studios and streamers had optioned without mounting actual product. (Tellingly, neither partner was very fond of Savages, one of just two films made based on Winslow tales. Plucked at a budget price for Oliver Stone to direct, it arrived onscreen in 2012 as what even its writer Salerno dismisses now as “a ride at 300 miles an hour on a dune buggy.”)
One can’t consider Winslow’s once-improbable rise to 26 critically lauded volumes, including seven New York Times Number One bestsellers, without paying heed to the irrepressible Salerno — “the guy I’d take a bullet for,” says Winslow. He’s a film industry force who penned scripts for Armageddon and Shaft and has co-writing credits on two Avatar iterations thus far. The tag of irrepressible barely does justice to the wunderkind, now 54, who added agentry and promotion to his skill set specifically to supercharge Winslow’s career. They’d met circa 2001 on a TV cop show called U.C. Undercover, and as Salerno advanced in wealth and industry clout, they rekindled the connection, linked fates, and began to advance the now-familiar saga of Winslow going from $37 in the bank to, the author says with a confessional air, income showing “lots of zeroes.”
A specimen moment in their teamwork came when Winslow, amid the exhaustion of deeply researching and writing his Cartel trilogy, admitted he was “tired of so much cartel stuff, and Shane said, ‘Well, you know, you’ve never written the big New York cop book.’ And I said, ‘Oh, I could write the shit out of that.’” The Force, clocking in around 500 pages, arrived in 2017 as the story of rogue detective Denny Malone and what the New York Times review termed “a wild pack of alphas.”
Winslow’s latest effort, The Final Score, is a hardbound collection of six short novels. The concluding piece, “Collision,” contains brutal notes of prison savagery even as it ponders more random disasters, what Winslow warns in its opening lines are “collisions between who we want to be and who we are.” We’ve been speaking of a certain contemplative distance from violence and brokenness, a shift that’s palpable as Winslow’s work matures. He says one of his favorite tales in the new book is “The Sunday List,” what he calls a “little harmless story” chronicling the booze runs a lad perhaps not so unlike the author made for the Rhode Island burghers circa 1970. “There’s redemption in that story,” he says.
In the re-issued collection, time is an avenger and spiritual goad. A mother in lethal New Orleans circles finds some respite in knowing “the world is a broken place”; careers, whether in thievery or law enforcement, approach their endings. Crime 101 the movie, nominally centered on high-end jewel thief Davis (Hemsworth, in a brooding and precisely measured performance), spins up a credible recruitment of Berry as his accomplice Sharon, then hands us over to the procedural doings of an obsessive, nearly aged-out detective named Lou Lubesnik (Ruffalo). Add in Keoghan’s hyperkinetic, sociopathic droog, a gruffly menacing Nick Nolte, and an array of compromised characters who recall the morality plays of multiple 1970s films (Steve McQueen’s immortal cool is the tonal touchstone), and the storyline hews to the book’s attentive study of Lubesnik’s almost Willy Loman-style midlife crisis.
Corey Hawkins and Mark Ruffalo in Crime 101
Merrick Morton/Amazon MGM
British writer-director Bart Layton, who attracted good notices with 2018’s American Animals, came on to adapt the project. He joined Winslow in California for a few trips up and down the coastal environs where parts of the story unfold, and they proved of like mind. Winslow would kibitz on drafts of the script as the settings turned more urban, with glitzy L.A. taking over for Winslow’s original southerly coast towns. Layton sought to probe, as he puts it, “the currency in L.A. — youth and beauty and wealth and status. And when that starts to expire, what have you got?”
After the session by the mudflats, as the tidal flow recedes, we head a few blocks south to grab coffees at another Winslow go-to spot and then stroll to his nearby rental where Jean, with her easy smile and mane of golden-blonde ringlets, presides. A Nebraska native Winslow met while studying at the state university there, she took the dare to join him on his recurring gig running photo safaris in Kenya. At the end of one season, Winslow recalls, “this seventysomething-year-old African man who I would have trusted with my life” picked up Jean in Nairobi and brought her north to a camp by a river. “And the first night she arrives, a stampede of five enraged mother elephants come driving through this camp. And we’re standing up in this tent in the middle of the night, having almost been killed. ‘Welcome!’ And so I figured, ‘Well, there’s that relationship.’ And her eyes are as big as a plate, and she looks at me and she says, ‘That was so cool.‘”
Winslow glances off to the flats where a lone heron catches his eye sitting sentry on a post, then adds his thought that went unuttered at the time: “Marry me.” But later in the trip, he says, he made the wish real. “We were at a place called Lamu Island, off the coast of Kenya, no motor vehicles allowed — you go everywhere by foot or donkey or sailboat. So I proposed to her on the beach one night, with a string of beads worth about five bucks. Which was about what I was worth. For some reason, she said yes.”
The couple’s condo is humble but from the balcony faces a broad foam-fringed expanse of ocean, sparkling as it stretches grandly from La Jolla to Dana Point. It’s clearly a favored view. Winslow divulges how earlier today he worked a bit on how to describe the sea color that had buoyed his morning. He’s not ready to share that, but he does have a sentence he’s found to be a provisional start of something, a sentence that he ventures is the seed of the next spate of writing: “Beach towns are quieter in winter.”
Winslow’s smile is well contained when it’s noted the fan base will be leaning in to whatever that seed becomes: “I want to read it, too, but at first I have to figure out what it is. But that’s the fun of it, that’s why we love this work, right? Because I’ve never been afraid of the empty page.”
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He’s also keen to reconnoiter certain shifts in his approach, he says, squinting as he surveys the sunstruck surf line: “lf you look at my later work, there is more redemption and more forgiveness in it. Maybe that is a process of aging. You know, I’m 72. I don’t feel 72, whatever that’s supposed to feel like. I do virtually everything I used to do — sure, the recovery times are a little longer. But I’m still out there, you know.
“I think may be doing my best work now.”
已发布: 2026-01-26 16:52:00
