Don Winslow's Official Website
Don Winslow's Top 5 Crime Novels
‘What’s the best private eye novel ever written?’ The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
“A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness. It all depends on where you sit and what your own private score is. I didn't have one. I didn't care. I finished the drink and went to bed.”
Featured Author Interview: Don Winslow
LS: The scope of the publishing industry is changing. What is your opinion of the evolution of the e-book and self-publishing and their impact on the industry?
It’s enormous, of course, and I don’t know that anyone has really figured out its full impact yet. As long as people are reading, I’m not sure that the format matters, except I do worry about the impact on bookstores. I’m of that generation for whom prowling a bookstore is a wonderful thing, and I would hate to lose that.
LS: On your website you mention growing up around story tellers. What other influences (such as novels you read as a kid) impacted your decision to become a writer?
I don’t think I read fiction until I was twelve or so. Before that, I only read histories and biographies. Then I discovered Dickens – Oliver Twist and David Copperfield. I think Dickens is one of the progenitors of noir fiction, writing as he did about the criminal underclass. I also read a lot of Shakespeare. Then I started reading novels by Michener, Uris and Ruark and thought, “That’s what I want to do.”
LS: Every writer experiences a moment when they decide if they want to be married to writing or just fool around with it. When did that decision come to you?
I was sitting in Oxford (sounds so snooty, doesn’t it) with my friend Jim Basker, a professor of literature at Barnard, and he said, ‘You’ve been talking about writing a novel for years. Why don’t you just do it?’ A few weeks later I was in Kenya, leading a photographic safari, sitting in front of a fire before dawn, and thought, ‘He’s right. I should just up and do it.’ I had heard an interview with Joseph Wambaugh who said that when he was still a cop he decided to write ten pages a day. I didn’t think I could do ten, but I could do five. So I decided that before the sun came up and stuck to it.
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