Don Winslow's Savages: James Ellroy meets Woody Allen on dope

Don Winslow's 2010 novel Savages reads as if James Ellroy and Woody Allen were one person, and that person took careful notes while hanging around with people who did lots of drugs.

(Woody Allen, you ask? A bit of description on Page 30 could,  but for one word, have come straight from Allen's early comic crime parodies:

"John Sr. was a founding member of the Association, the legendary group of Laguna beach boys who made millions of dollars smuggling marijuana before they fucked up and went to prison.")

The social observation  in Savages is unbeatable, the characters managing at the same time to represent social types and to seem full-blooded, three-dimensional, and sympathetic, even the worst of them.

The satire of ruthless young entrepreneurs and their trickle-down moralizing is priceless ("Money isn't enough [says a multi-multi-multi-millionaire young drug dealer who spends his spare time working on Third World development projects], you have to commit your heart, soul, and body.")

My only gripe with Savages so far, other than that it ruined a trip I planned to New York today because I stayed up till 5:45 a.m. reading the damned thing, is that once that main conflicts have been set up and Winslow has to resolve them, the plot elements begin to fall into place just a bit too mechanically.  Now, let's go finish the novel and see if I can prove myself wrong.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Crime fiction and adventure fiction

Don Winslow's The Death and Life of Bobby Z, discovered on a post-Bouchercon expedition to Green Apple Books, reminds me that some of my favorite crime fiction is really adventure fiction.

Winslow's book, Adrian McKinty's novels and James R. Benn's Billy Boyle series owe more to Robert Louis Stevenson and Daniel Defoe than they do to Arthur Conan Doyle, and that's just great. When it comes to crime writing, let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred gats send hot lead pills past the hero's startled noggin. If it has a crime in it, it's crime writing, and here's a toast to the varieties of crime fiction that haven't been invented yet. I'll welcome them when they arrive.

Winslow's book is a story of intentionally mistaken identity with a nice twist at the end that you might figure out, but I did not. Among the chief virtues of its peril-fraught journey is its humor. My favorite example involves an evil German:

"A second later they hear the explosion, then see a tower of red-and-orange flame shoot up.

"Johnson can't help himself. `Your friend,' he says, `he wasn't one of them rocket scientists, was he?'

"`Shut up.'

"`I mean, back in the old country?'"

The Death and Life of Bobby Z is crime fiction because its protagonist, Tim Kearney, is a criminal, sprung from a long prison term and almost certain death on the condition that he impersonate the notorious drug dealer Bobby Z. It's an adventure story because he meets an even more notorious drug dealer, a ruthless cowboy, a degenerate people-smuggler, bikers who lack any sense of restraint, a herd of trumpeting elephants, and DEA officers you would not want to mess with. And yes, he gets the girl in the end.

What are your favorite crime stories that also make the grade as adventure tales? And what makes an exciting adventure story? Here's a clue to get you started: A good adventure story needs a righteous hero, and Tim Kearney is righteous, even though he has slit a Hell's Angels throat with a razor-sharp license plate as the story opens. (The guy deserved it.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010