Fiction

Don Winslow, City in Ruins (William Morrow), 400 pp. Hardback, $32.00.

City in Ruins is a culminating effort. It is the last of a trilogy of novels centered upon the Providence-born mobster Danny Ryan, and—according to the author—it serves as the final novel for Don Winslow, who has announced his retirement from the book business after several decades penning bestsellers.

The Danny Ryan trilogy—which began with City on Fire (2022) and continued with City of Dreams (2023)—is essentially a thousand-page retelling of the Trojan War, recast as a battle between Irish and Italian crime families for control of the streets of Providence, Rhode Island, in the 1980s. Winslow takes Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Aeschylus’s Oresteia, and—especially—Virgil’s Aeneid and translates them into the modern American crime genre for which he has been known. The Irish are the Trojans here, and Danny Ryan is a late-twentieth-century Aeneas, exiled from his home but destined to build a new empire in the West. (Winslow, it seems, will get to enjoy his retirement, unlike Virgil, who died before putting the final touches on the Aeneid.)

Part of the fun here is simply in seeing how Winslow adapts classical mythology to our contemporary milieu. The warrior Achilles, for example, becomes an imposing (and closeted) hitman named Sal Antonucci, while the crafty Odysseus becomes a banished consigliere called Chris Palumbo. The gods are here exceptionally powerful humans; Apollo is a semi-retired mob boss who moves to Florida, and Venus is a wealthy socialite with Washington connections.

Aeneas is an interesting choice for a leading role. The wrathful Achilles and the cunning Odysseus have tended to be more attractive for modern remakes; the dutiful Aeneas, meanwhile, typically comes across as less compelling and exciting. For Virgil, Aeneas chiefly embodied pietas, a kind of piety or devotedness. He was a good son, a good father, and a good countryman, earnest and steadfast. For the protagonist of a crime novel, he turns out to be an excellent choice. Danny is a simple man who wants to protect his family, but he is surrounded by chaotic and deadly forces. He wants to escape the dangerous culture into which he was born, but—like another fictional mobster—just when he thinks he gets out, they pull him back in. Part Michael Corleone and part Jay Gatsby, he is a tragic American hero who wants “to live decently in an indecent world.” And perhaps Hollywood will catch onto this appeal: the actor Austin Butler has reportedly agreed to portray Danny Ryan in a screen adaption of City on Fire.

Part Michael Corleone and part Jay Gatsby, Danny Ryan is a tragic American hero who wants “to live decently in an indecent world.”

In one of the trilogy’s highlights, echoing the arrival of Aeneas’s Trojan men upon the shores of Carthage, Danny Ryan and his gang flee to California after losing the turf war in Rhode Island. After lying low for a few years, they discover that a film script based on their Providence exploits is now in production in a studio in Los Angeles. Just as Aeneas’s men found scenes of their actions in the recent Trojan War painted on the walls of Dido’s temple in Carthage, Danny’s men see themselves being portrayed by actors in a Hollywood movie—and they arrange to get themselves hired as consultants!

As one might expect, things don’t end well for the Dido character in City of Dreams (in this case, a beautiful starlet with substance abuse issues). In City in Ruins, set a few years later, Danny is running casinos and building a new empire in Las Vegas. It’s the 1990s, and he’s leading the way to replace cheap, hokey hotels with world-class resorts, catering to a more sophisticated clientele. His investment group represents “the better-heeled, the high rollers, who came for the luxurious rooms and gourmet meals and the table games.” He must compete against Vern Winegard, a casino owner with a more populist outlook, for control of the Strip.

Vegas readers might appreciate nods to local life—Danny, for example, dates a UNLV psychology professor and sends his son to school at The Meadows (“where all the major players send their kids”). And, in addition to the Greek mythology, Winslow also clearly draws on the actual history of Rhode Island, especially with the issues surrounding the Patriarca crime family in the 1980s and 1990s. (This trilogy, as a whole, may especially appeal to fans of Season One of the Crimetown podcast, which traces the history of organized crime and mafia activity in Providence.) One real-life person who clearly became a character in City in Ruins is Arlene Violet, the former Sister of Mercy who became a formidable Rhode Island prosecutor (and the first woman to serve as a state attorney general in the United States); her nickname, which Winslow borrows, was “Attila the Nun.” In City in Ruins, she is a furious legal opponent bent on punishing a young murderer, modeled on Orestes.

The drive to create modern correspondences for all the events in the Greek mythology of Troy sometimes pushes Winslow to add more than is really necessary to his story. Here in City in Ruins, for example, the subplot following The Eumenides feels extraneous, essentially unrelated to the other chapters. But the adaptation is mostly a lot of fun and works surprisingly well. Perhaps the history of organized crime is the most authentic American epic.

And for a thousand-page epic, Winslow’s trilogy turns out to be a quick read—a page-turner that holds your attention. His well-honed crime-writing style is both breezy and blunt. Instead of the stately grandeur of the Aeneid’s Latin, we get wise-guy wisecracks: “Native New Englanders tend to like their food neatly separated. Into meat and potatoes.” The language suits the aging Irish toughs propelling the plot, and Virgil likely would have appreciated the tension Winslow preserves between recalling former glory days and forecasting more prosperous times ahead. As Danny Ryan dismantles the old Vegas of the Rat Pack to replace it with a more profitable corporate structure, he nevertheless clearly understands the charm of a bygone era. Looking down upon the dilapidated Lavinia Hotel he has snatched away from Winegard (and plans to demolish), he imagines the building’s storied past. “If those walls could talk, Danny thinks, they’d take the Fifth.”