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Don Winslow’s California characters
by Valerio Calzolaio |
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| 03/12/2012 |
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Born in New York on October 31, 1953, Don Winslow has for years been living in San Diego, where almost all of his novels are set. In California, with its 37 million people and 482 cities, but not in colorful San Francisco (Hammett) or sprawling Los Angeles (Chandler and Hollywood, Ellroy, Connelly). Rather, in San Diego, which is even farther south on the Pacific Ocean, just north of Mexico. The second largest city in California by population, and the eighth largest in the nation, San Diego has a mild climate year-round, which means summers are never too hot and winters never too cold (average January temperatures are 60 degrees). As well as miles and miles of beaches; numerous traffickers, Navy personnel and surfers; and urban lives lived on the borders.
Since 1991, Winslow has written 16 novels, half of which were translated into Italian. The following are the titles and characters of the six California-set novels published in Italy, in chronological order.
California Fire and Life is set in the summer of 1997 in Dana Strands, the last untouched part of the south coast. Crimes, deceit and trickery in the world of arson.
Born to a construction company owner and a housewife, tall and brawny Jack Wade has no children or girlfriends, works to live and lives to surf. For seven years he worked as a fire investigator in the Sheriff’s Department until, happy and in love, he was caught planting evidence to protect a witness, and fired. He became a claims adjuster for the insurance company California Fire and Life twelve years ago. Says Jack: “Arson is a crime that consumes its own evidence.”
The Power of the Dog spans from 1975 to May 2004 – though most of the action takes place in 1997 – in Mexico, New York, San Diego, El Salvador, Honduras, Colombia, and elsewhere. Stories of drug trafficking begin to intertwine in 1975 but ultimately Art, Adan, Sean and Nora are still alive. Thousands upon thousands die by their hand or because of them.
Tortured soul Art Keller (born in 1950) is an intelligent Catholic raised in a California barrio to a white father and a mother as good-looking as her son; he has a mop of dark hair and a prominent nose. He took part in Operation Condor in Vietnam before becoming a DEA agent. He has a tall, slender, blond, green-eyed and liberal wife, two great kids, and has dedicated his life and career to the War on Drugs.
Adan Barrera is slightly younger, short, lean, brown eyes, black hair; a great accountant entrepreneur; and brother of the violent, powerful Raul. Their uncle is a crooked cop who from his small Mexican district of Badiraguato assumed control of all criminal activities along the 2000-mile US-Mexico border, to hand it over to his nephews.
Sean “Billy the Kid” Callan: Born 1960, in the Irish part of Hell’s Kitchen, tall, dark. He kills a “boss” to protect a friend and gets involved in the Mafia, black market racketeering, loan sharking and trafficking. He is a cold, ruthless, infallible hitman for hire. When he falls in love and wants out of the mafia, he’s forced to pull off one last big hit and flee to South America.
Nora Hayden: born in 1963; alluring and seductive, blond hair, blue eyes, daughter of separating parents. At the age of 14 she realized that helping men have sex guarantees other pleasures, and after meeting the madam of an upscale brothel transforms herself into a high-class call girl. The evening of her first job, she sees Sean but is given to another man. A master faker of orgasms, she can make herself come, becomes wealthy, frequents powerful rich men, then at a certain point only Barrera (who for years was faithful to his wife and handicapped daughter) and a sweet, chaste priest.
The book begins: The baby is dead in his mother’s arms. Art Keller can tell from the way the bodies lie – her on top, the baby underneath her – that she tried to shield her child.… Did she really think that she could save the child? Maybe she didn’t, Art thinks. Maybe she just didn’t want the baby to see death blaze out from the barrel of the gun… Nineteen bodies. Nineteen more casualties in the War on Drugs, Art thinks. He’s used to looking at the bodies from his fourteen-year war with Adan Barrera – he’s looked at many. But not nineteen. Not women, children, babies. Not this. Ten men, three women, six children.
The Winter of Frankie Machine is set in January 2006 in San Diego and Hawaii. Everyone loves the prudent and meticulous retired mafia hitman. When he unexpectedly discovers that someone is out to kill him, he tells the women in his life to run, and starts poring over his decades-long past as a Mafioso to figure out who wants him dead. Including in 1963, when he took his life into his own hands and refused to become a fisherman in Italy (like his father, grandfather and great-grandfather before him) and instead became the chauffer of a mafia don; his return from Vietnam with a medal of honor; the birth of his daughter; how he got his nickname, as a killing machine; and meeting Nixon and other leaders. In other words, how he survived among numerous mafia wars and the deaths of various friends.
Tall and heavyset, with cropped silvery hair, 62-year-old Frank Machianno sells bait, lives alone, loves his kitchen and is a great cook. He owns an ocean side bait shop, relaxes with crossword puzzles, is always in a good mood, with the wisdom of a sheriff solves everyone’s problems on the pier, is a great swimmer and never misses surfing with his friends (one of whom is a cop) every morning. At his age, he’s realized that the less he kills, the better: In the past he was a hired gun, California’s best hitman. A stone cold killer with principles he says proudly: “I’d never kill a civilian – only other players.”
Frankie’s friend Dave Hansen is an FBI agent who has an attractive Italian ex-wife, Patty; a daughter, Jill, a vegetarian who wants to become an oncologist (who the couple had after nine years of trying, then separating, because Dave has a condition that made it hard to get Patty pregnant); and Donna, his independent companion. Secondary work (like managing apartment buildings and selling fish to restaurants) allows him to live his life peacefully.
The Dawn Patrol is set in October 2006, in San Diego and along Pacific Beach. The six members of the self-proclaimed Dawn Patrol have been waiting for days for the “showdown”, i.e. an infamous sea storm on its way. All diehard surfers, the six friends (two of whom are a couple, more or less) are just entering their 30s (with one exception). At dawn, they list the things worth living for, a game that Boone, Dave and Johnny began in school. The other “dawn patrol” is made up of little girls being trafficked down the beach.
Group leader Boone BD Daniels lives to ride the waves. A former cop (who went up against a pedophile ring), he’s a private eye (in his spare time, just enough to stay afloat).
The daughter of a hippy father and absent mother, with a wise grandmother to boot, the six-foot tall Sunny Day is the best surfer of the bunch and lights up the sea with her long blond hair and perfect legs. The tanned Buddhist waits tables at the beach bar, in anticipation of turning pro. She and Boone have been together for a decade.
Dave “the Love God” is always on the beach. An exceptional lifeguard (four failures that were not his fault), he’s blond, chiseled (body and face) and is a legendary “black belt” of casual sex tourism (no failures there).
Josiah “High Tide” Pamavatuu literally raises the tide with his 375 pounds. Hairy, of Indonesian decent, the former gang member and football star is a supervisor at the San Diego Public Works Department. He has a Samoan wife and three children.
Of Japanese origin, John “Johnny Banzai” Kodani is a great athlete, true judoka, and a loyal homicide detective for the local police force. His happy family consists of his doctor wife and two children.
At 21, the youngest of the bunch, Brian “Hang Twelve” Brousseau is a pale, white Rastafarian who works at a sporting goods store, has a goatee and six toes on each foot, and is an insatiable eater.
From the book:
It’s surreal. What Johnny sees through the reeds. Boone Daniels staggers toward him, a girl in his arms, his chest soaked with blood, more blood running down the side of his head. “Boone!” Johnny yells. Boone looks at Johnny with glassy-eyed, faint recognition and stumbles toward him, holding the girl out like a drowning man lifting a child up toward a lifeboat. Now Johnny can see Boone’s thumb pressed deep into a wound on the child’s neck. Johnny takes the little girl from him, replacing his own thumb for Boone’s. Boone looks at him, says, “Thanks, Johnny,” and then crashes, face-first, to the ground.”
Savages and The Kings of Cool are set, respectively, in 2009 in the beautiful town of Laguna Beach (population 24,000) near San Diego, and in 2005 in Mexico, more or less Calexico. Two young men and a younger woman are friends. They love another, form a makeshift family, have lots of sex and smoke lots of weed, and are getting filthy rich from selling copious amounts of great hydroponic Cannabis in various blends of indica and sativa. They find their old biological parents (criminals and hippies), and join forces (and battle) with corruption and drug lords.
O (Ophelia) was born August 28, 1986. Loyal, nearly six feet tall, good-looking, blonde hair and blue eyes, pierced belly, lots of tattoos, small breasts. Explosive in bed, she has no job or interests other than pot and sex. Raised by a partying mother and a series of passing men, she fucks Chon and makes love to Ben. And seems happy.
Chon/John is the son of a drug-dealing father who served a long jail sentence (and knew Frankie Machine) and a mother who left them. He’s skinny, tall, angular, muscular, ripped, disciplined, shaved head. A violent, silent nihilist. Abroad he was a hero of the Special Forces (Navy Seal in Afghanistan), on the beach he reads books, plays volleyball and screws trophy wives.
Born to two Jewish psychiatrists (former left-wing environmentalists), Ben Carver has degrees in botany and marketing from Berkeley. Tall, lean, brown-haired, loquacious, a chess player with a hyperactive brain, a non-violent radical, he wants to use the money he earns selling drugs to help the developing world.
From O’s POV: “A camera slowly pans across what looks like the interior of a warehouse at a line of seven severed heads set on the floor. The faces – all male, all with unkempt black hair – bear expressions of shock, sorrow, grief, and even resignation. Then the camera tilts up to the wall, where the trunks of decapitated bodies hang neatly from hooks, as if the heads had placed them in a locker room before going to work.”
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