Don Winslow's Top 5 Crime Novels

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.