The City Trilogy

Don Winslow has said the three books are a retelling of the Iliad, with 'Helen of Troy' emerging from the sea one sunny day in New England, and attracting the attention of all the men on the beach. She’s the girlfriend of one of the two crime families that run that part of the state, and in the strange weird code of the Mob, you can steal and murder and rip off innocents, but you don’t mess with another man’s wife or girlfriend.

So when a member of the other family does just that, it ignites a war that leaves practically everyone dead - City on Fire - and our ‘hero’, our Odysseus, Danny Ryan, heading to California with what’s left of his crew. Where they end up involved in a Hollywood film - City of Dreams - about the war they left behind, before moving on to Las Vegas and making millions in real estate - City in Ruins.

These are three harsh, brutal, savage books – though not quite as harsh, brutal and savage as the same author’s Power of the Dog trilogy covering the drug war in Mexico – about a criminal who is actually a decent man. That may sound absurd, but it’s true. Danny Ryan is a criminal. He works for the New England Mob. He’s killed people.

But all the time, and through all the books, he’s trying to do the right thing, the decent thing, the thing most of his associates wouldn’t recognise if it stood up and punched them in the face. He wants a good life. An honest life. And he keeps trying to find it.

The only trouble is, he’s trying to find it in a world where betrayal and murder are the accepted tools of doing business when business doesn’t go the way the participants want it to go. So what does he do? What can he do? He uses them. To survive.

Films and TV have been packed with ‘good’ bad characters in recent years. Sons of Anarchy, The Shield, Deadwood, Boardwalk Empire: worlds where moral compromise is the rule, not the exception. Danny Ryan is the only character from all of these that I would be happy to meet. And not worry about turning my back on.