The View from Middle Spunk Creek

Close to the Bone

When you get the opportunity to listen, and chat a bit, with one of the great fiction writers of our time, you should shrug off inertia and do it. Even if you’re not an author, or even a reader for that matter. Particularly if the fiction writer is as affable and entertaining as Don Winslow.

Winslow writes historical thrillers (the same genre I pretend to write), and in the listening and the reading, you will learn a great deal about the historical roots of the world we live in, of the lessons we have or haven’t learned, and the social and political state in which we find ourselves as a result.

It is always the intent of the writer of historical fiction, historical mysteries, or historical thrillers to both entertain and educate.  Winslow excels at this because of  exhaustive research and writing that, while fictional, walks a narrow path close to the edge of real life, or, as he describes it, writing “close to the bone”.

Don Winslow and Rob

Winslow’s most recent book, The Border, is the final chapter of a trilogy about the Mexican drug pipeline into the U.S. The first book in the series is Power of the Dog, followed by Cartel.  The three books have been favorably compared to the Godfather trilogy.

If you’re looking for a really good read I recommend all three, and in the process you’ll learn about the how and the why of illegal drugs in the United States. Yes, it’s fiction, and sometimes its brutal, but what you learn will be accurate because Winslow writes “close to the bone.”

***

And speaking of historical thrillers, please squeeze Cloud Warriors into your reading list. It also has lessons about (legal) drugs and the greed that underlies the pharmaceutical industry.

***

Finally, for this week, thanks to my long-time friend, Barefoot Bud Whillock, for his guest blogs the last two weeks.  You can see Bud’s blogs, or any of the previous blogs from Middle Spunk Creek, in the archives.