Don Winslow, Don Quixote and his four favorite books

Don Winslow (New York, 68 years old) has not been able to complete his love letter to Barcelona, ​​a city he adores and where he has found recognition.

In a world accustomed to absences and presences on screens, distance and last-minute changes, the author of

has received the Pepe Carvalho Award from BCNegra, but had to participate in the award ceremony on Thursday from the USA and by videoconference.

He was unable to travel due to health problems, but his speech was a tribute to the noir genre, to literature, to Don Quixote as the beginning and end of everything, including Philip Marlowe.

A proud member of the criminal gang, Winslow has closed his trilogy on drug traffickers (the aforementioned

,

Y

) to return to his origins, to Providence, where he grew up and where his new saga begins with

, which Harper Collins will publish in April in Spain, a novel about the Irish and Italian mafia in Rhode Island in 1987. “It's a story I've been working on for the last thirty years.

The book is set on the same beach I grew up on, which gives it a certain richness, maybe even some intimacy.

Now I live there half the year and I pass by the beach where the novel begins practically every day.

I know each wave, how the colors change, ”he confessed this Friday by email.

His traditional meticulousness in investigating every detail of his narconovelas has now led him to an introspection in his past.

“Writing about your childhood is a path full of dangers.

The challenge is to do it honestly”, he commented.

Winslow's best-known novels allow the reader access to a complex world, minutely detailed but without giving up spectacle or political analysis.

“Winslow's scalpel is political without being demagogic.

He tells us things to our faces, without morality”, summarized Carlos Zanón, curator of the festival.

But Winslow's literary world goes further.

EL PAÍS has asked him to choose and comment on the four novels that he likes the most from his entire career.

This is the result.

The cartel

(RBA, 2015)

“Probably the book on which my career has pivoted, of which I am most proud, the one that I resisted writing, the one that has cost me the most.

After

, I swore to myself that I would never return to the subject of the Mexican drug cartels.

It was just too violent and too sad.

My agent and friend, Shane Salerno, kept pushing me to write the book that would end up being

, and I literally hung up the phone.

But as I stood on the sidelines, watching things deteriorate in Mexico and seeing how my compatriots profoundly misunderstood what was going on, I understood that I knew how to explain it, albeit in fiction, and that I had a responsibility to do so."

“It was a difficult book to write because of all the murders, the death of journalists, the martyrdom of social workers, especially women.

There is practically nothing in the book that did not happen.

Just organizing the massive amount of research material (the timeline ran to 156 pages) was daunting, and shaping it all into a coherent story that was accessible to readers was a challenge that at times seemed impossible.

Just mentally living in that world day after day was exhausting.

That said, I'm glad I wrote it.

I think it faithfully tells the true story.”

Don Winslow during the reception, on Thursday, of the Pepe Carvalho Award in Barcelona.BCNEGRA (BCNEGRA)

Savages

(Martínez Roca, 2011)

“This book started with a now-famous chapter made up of two words and then wrote itself.

It was an experiment with language: I started writing and instantly found myself writing in the voice of a twentysomething Californian.

I sent the first 14 pages to Shane [Salerno, his agent] with a note saying I didn't know if it was a particularly good thing or if I had lost my mind.

His answer was: leave what you have and get with this.

I did it with a waste of energy that I still can't explain."

“I wanted to see if I could do the same thing as the directors of the French

but with the story of a trio of marijuana growers.

The story between the three of them was somewhat inspired by

.

The book is also an act of rebellion at a time when my career was in transition and I was fed up with calls to create "a brand," definitions of subcategories of the genre, and arbitrary rules about what was a

, what was procedural, what was

, or what was soft literature.

I decided to do without all that, stop the machines and start writing what I really felt.

Like a savage, I guess."

Police corruption

(RBA, 2017)

“One day the phone rang at seven in the morning.

It was Shane, who wanted us to talk about my next project.

We discussed several ideas and then he asked: 'How about a book about the police in New York?'

To which I immediately replied: 'I could write a lot about that'.

“But actually, I wasn't so sure.

He had always wanted to write that book, but he didn't know if he had the quality to do it.

When you talk about New York you either blow or fail, there is no middle ground.

But I grew up with

,

, which shaped my professional choice.

I remember watching those movies like it was yesterday.

So I wanted to do a contemporary approach and in the end I got it.

I wanted to talk about a basically decent man – a cop named Danny Malone – who loses his moral compass, becomes corrupted, and faces his inner dilemmas.

I also wanted to turn the city into a character, to take the reader to the streets where I have lived and worked or for which I still have great affection.”

A breath of fresh air

(Mondadori, 2013)

“I don't know if it's one of my best books, but you always feel a certain fondness for the first one.

I had no idea how to write a book.

I had read the inspiring works of Elmore Leonard, Lawrence Block, Charles Willeford, and of course Raymond Chandler and others, but I didn't know how to execute the narrative structure or mechanism."

“I also put it off for a long time.

For one simple reason: I was too busy making a living.

But to be honest, I think I was scared that I didn't have the talent.

When I finally finished it, he was in Kenya, where he was working as a photo guide for tourists.

I was improvising with my life, playing detective and directing Shakespeare plays in England, so

it was written around the world in three years, in tents, hotels, planes, trains and buses.

I wrote the manuscript, typed it on typewriters and laptops until finally I considered I had a book.

The first 15 publishers did not think the same.

But while I was receiving those rejections I was already working on the second one.

I guess it has something to do with persistence, and as I always say to young authors, don't give up."