Coastal Noir + the Overlapping Worlds of Vice + Surf w/ a Real Writer/Surfer
As writers it should be no surprise that we’re mildly obsessed with writers – who can actually write – and surf. We’re not talking about ‘surf writers’ here to be clear. Pulitzer winner William Finnegan is one of those cats as is Don Winslow, who was interviewed in the last Surfers Journal.
Sample:
How did the move to California and coming back in contact with surfing influence your writing?
I kind of reinvented myself in California. It changed my writing a lot. Until then I had a very traditional style in my fiction: third person, past tense. I realized how bored I was by that. I began to think that instead of writing from overhead, where you can see everything, I’d write from the perspective of a surfer, where everything is unfolding right in front of you. I threw out 300 pages of the book I was working on at the time and the one I ended up producing, The Death and Life of Bobby Z, allowed me to become a full-time writer. It’s a point of pride and prejudice to remind my friends from Los Angeles that Raymond Chandler wrote some of his greatest Los Angeles novels while living in San Diego. His writing, and this area, have been huge for me. I just re-read all of Chandler’s work last year, and I continually read Ross Macdonald as well. Noir is really formed out of the conditions of California, where you have beautiful towns and beautiful women, Hollywood, celebrities, and wealth, but an underworld along with them, which felt very natural for me to write about. With crime stories, there’s another analogy available with the ocean that I find helpful, which is thinking about the causes of what you see on the surface. Something that happened hundreds of miles away could produce the conditions you see at Swamis. That’s the heart of crime fiction: looking at what’s happening in that underworld. It could be caused by something that occurred hundreds of miles away and years prior. Or it’s beneath the surface and it might kill you. No one ever died just being on top of the water.
What elements of that underworld do you draw on in your books about surfing?
There was a moment I wrote about in The Kings of Cool, when drug culture and The Brotherhood of Eternal Love was formed in 1960s Laguna Beach. Surfers were running drugs up from Mexico and then, of course, they started running in opium from Afghanistan. When you look back at The Brotherhood, there’s almost an innocence there. I don’t want to overstate that. It was definitely criminal, but there was some of that early counter-cultural innocence. One of the reasons The Brotherhood started running weed up from Mexico, for example, was that they wanted to build a bookstore in Laguna Beach. That was one of the larger organizations at the time, but it’s miniscule compared to the drug operations I write about now, which are fueled by hyper-violent Mexican cartels that are antithetical to anything we think of as surf culture. Yet they still have an enormous effect on coastal California today. Take the 2008 financial crisis: What were the first areas to recover? They were all areas on the border. The Mexican drug cartels were liquid, and their investments laundering money through real estate allowed the economy to move along again—jobs, construction, finance. The economic recovery started in places like San Diego, and other surf towns, which has per force changed surf culture.
Click to THE SURFERS JOURNAL for the interview with writer/surfer Don Winslow
Follow BOARD RAP on Insta for more updates.
