A Cool Breeze on the Underground (30 page)

A Biography of Don Winslow

Don Winslow is the
New York Times
bestselling author of thirteen crime and mystery novels as well as a number of short stories and screenplays. His first novel,
A Cool Breeze on the Underground
(1991), was nominated for an Edgar Award, and
California Fire and Life
(1999) received the Shamus Award, which honors the year’s best detective novel.

Winslow was born in 1953 in New York City, and he grew up in Perryville, Rhode Island, a small coastal town. His mother was a librarian and his father a Navy officer. Both parents instilled in Winslow a love of storytelling, and the bookshelves at home were well stocked with literary classics, which Winslow was encouraged to explore. When his father stayed up late swapping sailor stories with his buddies, Winslow would hide under the dining room table to eavesdrop.

Winslow had an unusually varied career before becoming a fulltime writer, beginning with a series of jobs as a child actor. After high school, he attended the University of Nebraska and majored in African history. He then moved back to New York City where he managed movie theaters and became a private investigator. Winslow moonlighted as a PI while pursuing a master’s degree in military history. He also lived for a time in Africa, where he worked as a safari guide, and in China, where he led hiking tours. Winslow completed
A Cool Breeze on the Underground
while in China.

A Cool Breeze
draws from Winslow’s experiences tracking missing persons while in New York. Protagonist Neal Carey is a graduate student studying English literature who is drawn by past underworld connections into a career as a private investigator. Winslow went on to write four other novels with Neal Carey as the main character, often set in locales where the author had resided at some point.
The Trail to Buddha’s Mirror
(1992) has Carey chasing a scientist through China.
Way Down on the High Lonely
(1993) and
While Drowning in the Desert
(1996) are set on the west coast of the United States, where Winslow moved after marrying his wife, Jean, and publishing his first novel.

Winslow’s recent fiction is often set in Southern California, where he currently lives. The cross-border drug war, California organized crime, and surf culture are common themes in his later work. His style bears the spirit of his settings, and his prose is notable for its spare dialogue and deadpan narration, as well as the technical accuracy that comes from his many years working as a private investigator.

A number of Winslow’s novels have been adapted for film. A 2007 movie based on
The Death and Life of Bobby Z
(1997) starred Laurence Fishburne, and
The Winter of Frankie Machine
(2006) is under production and set to star Robert DeNiro. Winslow’s latest novel,
Savages
(2010), has received stellar reviews, and the author is currently adapting the novel for film with Oliver Stone.

A Winslow family photo taken in Rhode Island in the 1960s. Winslow (front left) is seen here with his father, mother, both sets of grandparents, sister (Kristine Rolofson, also a novelist), and dog.

Winslow in his 1972 high school yearbook photo.

Winslow juggling at his nephew Ben’s birthday party in Beyond Hope, Idaho, where he lived off and on in the mid-1970s. He ran cattle but also “had a very macho job driving a salad-dressing truck. There would have been no Thousand Island dressing in Libby, Montana, without men like me.” It was in a cabin in Beyond Hope that Winslow started writing
Cool Breeze on the Underground
.

Winslow fishing on Sandy Brook, near his old home in Riverton, Connecticut, in the early 1990s. He says he was “lousy at it, but was an enthusiastic trout fisherman back in the day.” Winslow also claims that he “set a record of failing to catch a single fish on four continents in a single calendar year.”

Winslow with his two dogs, Bud and Lou, on the deck of his house in Riverton, Connecticut, in the early 1990s. Riverton, a small, postcard New England town, has one general store—the Riverton General Store—that, Winslow says, “made the best sandwiches in the world.”

Winslow with his late friend Quentin Keynes and his son at Christmas around 2003. Keynes was a safari guide, filmmaker, rare-book collector, and the great-grandson of Charles Darwin. The London flat in
Cool Breeze on the Underground
was based on Keynes’s, where Winslow lived for several summers in the 1970s while Keynes was away in Africa. One of the characters in the book—Simon Keyes—was also based on Keynes.

Winslow at a book signing for
The Winter of Frankie Machine
in 2006.

Winslow and his son playing roller hockey.

Once a safari guide in Africa, Winslow, seen here in Kenya in about 2007, poses with his son, wife, Jean, and two Samburu trackers, both of whom he has known since they were young. He once gave the trackers two camels to start a herd and says that now “there are apparently dozens of camels in North Kenya with the name Winslow.” Winslow’s connection to Kenya runs deep. He proposed to Jean on an island off the coast of Kenya, and when their son was born, he received spears and shields.