Crime Writer Don Winslow Working On Sequel To 'The Cartel'

The Washington Times offers a report on crime novelist Don Winslow's next book.

Crime writer Don Winslow just can’t leave the drug wars alone.

A year after he swore there’d be no sequel to “The Cartel,” his acclaimed follow-up to “The Power of the Dog,” Winslow tweeted Wednesday he’s begun a third volume.

His literary agent, Shane Salerno, confirmed the news to The Associated Press and said the book currently has no title or release date. The first two novels center on the drug trade in Mexico and feature maverick drug law enforcement agent Art Keller and a cartel boss modeled on the notorious Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera, otherwise known as El Chapo.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jun/1/back-in-business-winslow-working-on-sequel-to-the-/

‘Cartel’ Author Don Winslow Responds To Sean Penn: “Call It Anything You Want – Except Journalism”

Don Winslow, the author of The Cartel, offers his view of Sean Penn's so-called interview with a Mexican drug lord fugitive in a piece for Deadline.com.

Bestselling novelist Don Winslow has written two epics about the Drug War: 2005’s The Power of The Dog and The Cartel, the latter of which was one of the best reviewed novels of 2015 and sold to Fox for a film that will be directed by Ridley Scott. Winslow has spent nearly 20 years researching the Mexican cartels, and the most of the violence in The Cartel is based on real events. He dedicated the book to the more than 100 journalists killed in cartel violence, and named every slain reporter in his intro. He agreed to write for Deadline why he was so appalled by Sean Penn’s El Chapo encounter and subsequent 60 Minutes interview.

“My article failed.”

So Sean Penn tells Charlie Rose.

Well, yes.

As someone who has researched and written about the Mexican cartels and the futile ‘war on drugs’ for coming on twenty years, I know how tough a subject it is. Mind-bending, soul-warping, heartbreaking, it challenges your intellect, your beliefs, your faith in humanity and God. No journalist or writer who has ever tackled it has emerged quite the same – and all too many have not survived at all, but been tortured, mutilated and killed on the orders of such as Joaquin Guzman. (I resist the cute sobriquet of ‘Chapo.’ He is not one of the Seven Dwarfs – not Dopey, or Sneezy or Bashful. He’s a mass murderer.)

When I first heard that Penn had done an interview with Guzman, I was wondering what terms were demanded to grant that interview. Penn has a reputation of not shying away from controversy or hard, unpopular stances. I was hoping that he would ask Guzman questions that would matter.

Mr. Penn tells Charlie Rose that he considers the article a failure because it did not succeed in addressing his real issue – our policies of the ‘war on drugs.’ But in an article of 10,500 words, the phrase ‘war on drugs’ appears three times. It was not the purpose or focus of Penn’s horribly misguided piece.

Penn’s article had nothing to do with the forty year, trillion dollar failure that is the ‘war on drugs’ — it was instead a brutally simplistic and unfortunately sympathetic portrait of a mass murderer. Penn thought he had scored a journalistic coup – instead his interview was the by-product of Guzman’s infatuation with a soap-opera actress (Guzman didn’t even know who Penn was) and told the exact story that Guzman wanted – with line by line editorial approval courtesy of Penn and Rolling Stone.

Guzman was never called to answer the hard questions. That’s a shame, because these questions need answers.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://deadline.com/2016/01/sean-penn-el-chapo-don-winslow-response-the-cartel-1201685328/

You can also read my Crime Beat column on Don Winslow's crime novel Savages via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2010/08/on-crime-thrillers-don-winslows-savages.html  

Don Winslow Returns To Drug Wars In Thriller 'The Cartel'

Hillel Italie offers a piece in the Washington Times on Don Winslow and his new crime thriller, The Cartel.  

“People refer to this as the ‘Mexican drug problem’ and it’s NOT the Mexican drug problem. It’s the American drug problem. It’s the European drug problem,” the crime novelist says during a recent interview at the Landmark Tavern in Hell’s Kitchen, where he’s eating a late breakfast and discussing the events that inspired his new novel, “The Cartel.”

“We spend billions of dollars buying these drugs at the same time we spend billions of dollars a year trying to keep them from coming in. It’s that conflict, that schizophrenia, it’s that insanity that not only created the cartels but keeps them in business.”

The 61-year-old Winslow, bald and dark-eyed with a deliberate, focused speaking style, has become an unintentional expert on a subject that sickens him. Admittedly prone to “rant” once he gets started, he will invoke everything from philosophy books to World War II as he explains the long history of drugs in this hemisphere and how the U.S. got caught up in a conflict it doesn’t know how to stop.

In 2005, he published the 500-page “The Power of the Dog,” his brutal and acclaimed saga about the drug war and the rare honest man trying to end it - a maverick DEA agent named Art Keller.

Convinced, like Keller, the story was told, Winslow moved on to other projects, including Oliver Stone’s adaptation of his novel “Savages.” But he never stopped keeping an eye on the latest in Mexico and was horrified as the casualties and the cruelties only accumulated. More than 100,000 people have been killed because of the wars among the drug cartels, according to some studies.
“I started reading again and watching again and talking to people, and I think for probably a year or more denying to myself and everybody else that I was going to do that book,” he says. “The more I read the angrier I got.”

Blurbed by James Ellroy as the “‘War and Peace’ of dope war books,” the 600-page “The Cartel,” like “Power of the Dog,” is an intricately detailed narrative of the cartel life - where they live, the cars they drive, the clothes they wear. Winslow’s editor, Alfred A. Knopf publisher Sonny Mehta, said at times the author seemed so immersed in the world of his book he worried that Winslow might have “crossed some lines” and put himself in danger.

 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

 

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jun/22/don-winslow-returns-to-drug-wars-in-thriller-the-c/ 

 

You can also read my Crime Beat column on Don Winslow and his earlier crime thriller, Savages, via the below link:

 

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2010/08/on-crime-thrillers-don-winslows-savages.html