Don Winslow, a former private investigator and consultant, is the author of 12 novels, including The Dawn Patrol, The Winter of Frankie Machine, The Power of the Dog, California Fire and Life and the Death and Life of Bobby Z. His latest book is Savages (Simon & Schuster, July 13, 2010), a violent and often funny thriller about two Americans running a marijuana operation out of Laguna Beach, and what happens when they run afoul of a Mexican cartel. Winslow lives in Southern California.
On your nightstand now:
Thirteen Hours by Deon Meyer. I love Meyer, and I used to live in Africa, so this is a natural. It doesn't hurt that it's a terrific read, impossible to put down. The problem with having Meyer on your nightstand is that you don't get any sleep. So if I look like hell, it's Meyer's fault. The guy owes me.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Something of Value by Robert Ruark. My dad gave me this book when I was 11 and I read it all the time. I ended up spending five years as a safari guide, so there you go. At a younger age, I was obsessed with one of those Landmark biographies of Sam Houston. I wanted to be Sam Houston, but it didn't work out. There were also the You Were There books--You Were There at Gettysburg, You Were There at D-Day.... I was "there" a lot. If we go to even earlier, I guess it's Horton Hears a Who--very influential on my sense of ethics, such as they are. ("An elephant's faithful, one hundred per cent.")
Your top five authors:
Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Maupassant, Chandler, James Jones. Well, I'm only picking dead guys so as not to offend friends and colleagues. Shakespeare because you never get tired of him, Jones because he's under-rated. I laid flowers on Maupassant's grave. I should also add George Eliot, because Middlemarch might be the greatest novel ever written. If it isn't, then Anna Karenina (see supra) is.
Book you've faked reading:
The Fountainhead. Tried, couldn't do it. Was supposed to read it in high school. It fell off the bed-stand and cut me on the head. I flunked English that semester. Okay, I flunked English a lot of semesters. By the way, I think everyone has faked reading Finnegans Wake. Except me, of course.
Book you're an evangelist for:
The Guards by Ken Bruen. I tell everyone about it. It's more than a "crime" book. By the way, Bruen and I met when we literally collided coming out of adjacent elevators at the Edgars. We were on our knees, picking up our stuff, and did the introduction thing.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Boy Meets Grill by Bobby Flay. How can you not love that title? I cooked a meal from it just last night--mozzarella and prosciutto quesadillas with rosemary oil. Next week I'm going for the pork loin sandwiches with spicy mango ketchup. Book covers are dangerous and fattening. Someone needs to come up with a cover for "Boy Meets Treadmill."
Book that changed your life:
Goodbye, Darkness by William Manchester. I never understood my father until I read that book and got what he went through in the Pacific. And that's a life-changer.
Favorite line from a book:
"We all must be nice to each other. It's what we believe in place of God."
I think I got that quote right, and I'm pretty sure it's from The Sun Also Rises. Anyway, it's pretty much what I believe.
Or how about Chandler's opening line of The Big Sleep:
"It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills."
Try as we might, we're never going to do any better than that, are we?
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
All The Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy. I don't think I could discover that book more than once, and it's a shame. There were times I actually got dizzy from the sheer power and genius of the prose.