I’ve never been on a surfboard, never even seen one up close, but after finally getting around to reading Don Winslow, I’m starting to dream about being able to hang 10, if only I was 40 years younger, and my twenty-something self was endowed with far more agility and upper-body strength than that wimpy-looking kid who stares out at me sullenly from the pages of my old photo albums. It isn’t that Winslow spends all that much time writing about actual surfing in The Gentlemen’s Hour, his new book, or in Dawn Patrol, its predecessor. Most of the action in these two dynamite crime novels takes place on shore, but it’s the portrait of surfer culture that’s so intoxicating.
There are plenty of loners in the crime genre, but there are also lots of groups, too—the kinds of groups that appeal to even those of us who, like Groucho Marx, would never join a group that would have us a member. I’m thinking of Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct boys, for example, or the gang of idlers at Bahia Mar, Fort Lauderdale, in John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee novels. But the group I’d most like to hang with is made up of the surfers who constitute Winslow’s Dawn Patrol, a rag-tag assemblage of iconoclasts who gather every morning at San Diego’s Pacific Beach to ride waves and “talk story” (surfer lingo for bull-shitting about whatever). Yes, the Dawn Patrollers all have jobs (lifeguard, cop, private detective, etc.), but they work to surf, keeping civilization at arm’s length whenever possible. As lifeguard Dave warns PI Boone about his increasingly serious relationship with a lawyer, “I guarantee you that one night you’re going to be lying there postcoit . . . and she’s going to ask you if you wouldn’t really be happier going to law school. On that day, my friend, you bail. You don’t even stop to get dressed or pick up your clothes—you can always get a new T-shirt. You backpaddle, flailing your arms like a drowning barney. We’ll come racing to your rescue.”
Civilization comes way too close to the water in The Gentlemen’s Hour, and, yes, Boone does contemplate law school. But don’t worry. This isn’t Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part One, in which Prince Hal abandons Falstaff and his fellow layabouts for the responsibilities of kingship. The Dawn Patrol, thankfully, is made of sterner stuff.
As it happens, most of Winslow’s fiction isn’t about surfing at all. In Savages and The Power of the Dog, he writes about the drug underworld, and in The Winter of Frankie Machine (film rights optioned to Robert De Niro), he tackles organized crime. Winslow is a true writers’ writer. Last May, as part of Booklist’s annual Mystery Month celebration, Keir Graff interviewed various crime authors for our blog Likely Stories, asking them, among other questions, what was the best crime novel they’d read in the last year. Winslow’s Savages was the choice of Gregg Hurwitz, Andrew Gross, and Marcus Sakey. That’s enough for me. Savages is up next in my Winslow queue, but no matter how great it is, I’ll still be looking forward to the next appearance of the Dawn Patrol.
BILL OTT is the editor and publisher of ALA’s Booklist.
