The Trail to Buddha's Mirror (45 page)
Neal carried a bucket of water in each hand. The buckets were wooden and heavy, and the climb from the creek to the kitchen was steep. But he had made the trip twenty times a day for six months, and his leg and arm muscles were ropy and firm.
He didn’t even feel the cold of the snow as he crunched his way up the hill. His brown quilted jacket was warm, and the smell of the fir trees was wonderful. He passed through a side gate, across the small courtyard where some of the monks were sparring, and went into the kitchen. He poured the water into a large kettle suspended over a fire. Then he returned the buckets to the pantry, bowed to the head cook, and walked back through the courtyard.
He stepped outside and climbed the few steps up to a pagoda set on a small knoll. There were many such vistas in the Tiger Taming Monastery, but this was his favorite. The Himalayan peaks rose in the distance above a broad plain. To his left a rocky crag climbed toward the sunset. To his right a waterfall cascaded between groves of giant cedars.
He sat on a bench in the pagoda and watched the sun set. At first it was a fiery red ball above the Himalayas. Soon it fell behind the snowy peaks, leaving the sky a diaphanous sheet of scarlet, then rose, then orange.
He left before darkness fell, padding back through the snow into a long wooden building. He inhaled the incense smoldering by a statue of Buddha, then climbed the staircase and went into his cell, a ten-by-ten cubicle that smelled of pine, and sat down on his
kang.
He lit his kerosene lamp, took
Roderick Random
from under his sleeping mat, and started to read.
Don Winslow is the
New York Times
bestselling author of thirteen crime and mystery novels as well as a number of short stories and screenplays. His first novel,
A Cool Breeze on the Underground
(1991), was nominated for an Edgar Award, and
California Fire and Life
(1999) received the Shamus Award, which honors the year’s best detective novel.
Winslow was born in 1953 in New York City, and he grew up in Perryville, Rhode Island, a small coastal town. His mother was a librarian and his father a Navy officer. Both parents instilled in Winslow a love of storytelling, and the bookshelves at home were well stocked with literary classics, which Winslow was encouraged to explore. When his father stayed up late swapping sailor stories with his buddies, Winslow would hide under the dining room table to eavesdrop.
Winslow had an unusually varied career before becoming a fulltime writer, beginning with a series of jobs as a child actor. After high school, he attended the University of Nebraska and majored in African history. He then moved back to New York City where he managed movie theaters and became a private investigator. Winslow moonlighted as a PI while pursuing a master’s degree in military history. He also lived for a time in Africa, where he worked as a safari guide, and in China, where he led hiking tours. Winslow completed
A Cool Breeze on the Underground
while in China.
A Cool Breeze
draws from Winslow’s experiences tracking missing persons while in New York. Protagonist Neal Carey is a graduate student studying English literature who is drawn by past underworld connections into a career as a private investigator. Winslow went on to write four other novels with Neal Carey as the main character, often set in locales where the author had resided at some point.
The Trail to Buddha’s Mirror
(1992) has Carey chasing a scientist through China.
Way Down on the High Lonely
(1993) and
While Drowning in the Desert
(1996) are set on the west coast of the United States, where Winslow moved after marrying his wife, Jean, and publishing his first novel.
Winslow’s recent fiction is often set in Southern California, where he currently lives. The cross-border drug war, California organized crime, and surf culture are common themes in his later work. His style bears the spirit of his settings, and his prose is notable for its spare dialogue and deadpan narration, as well as the technical accuracy that comes from his many years working as a private investigator.
A number of Winslow’s novels have been adapted for film. A 2007 movie based on
The Death and Life of Bobby Z
(1997) starred Laurence Fishburne, and
The Winter of Frankie Machine
(2006) is under production and set to star Robert DeNiro. Winslow’s latest novel,
Savages
(2010), has received stellar reviews, and the author is currently adapting the novel for film with Oliver Stone.
A Winslow family photo taken in Rhode Island in the 1960s. Winslow (front left) is seen here with his father, mother, both sets of grandparents, sister (Kristine Rolofson, also a novelist), and dog.
Winslow in his 1972 high school yearbook photo.
Winslow juggling at his nephew Ben’s birthday party in Beyond Hope, Idaho, where he lived off and on in the mid-1970s. He ran cattle but also “had a very macho job driving a salad-dressing truck. There would have been no Thousand Island dressing in Libby, Montana, without men like me.” It was in a cabin in Beyond Hope that Winslow started writing
Cool Breeze on the Underground
.
Winslow fishing on Sandy Brook, near his old home in Riverton, Connecticut, in the early 1990s. He says he was “lousy at it, but was an enthusiastic trout fisherman back in the day.” Winslow also claims that he “set a record of failing to catch a single fish on four continents in a single calendar year.”
Winslow with his two dogs, Bud and Lou, on the deck of his house in Riverton, Connecticut, in the early 1990s. Riverton, a small, postcard New England town, has one general store—the Riverton General Store—that, Winslow says, “made the best sandwiches in the world.”
Winslow with his late friend Quentin Keynes and his son at Christmas around 2003. Keynes was a safari guide, filmmaker, rare-book collector, and the great-grandson of Charles Darwin. The London flat in
Cool Breeze on the Underground
was based on Keynes’s, where Winslow lived for several summers in the 1970s while Keynes was away in Africa. One of the characters in the book—Simon Keyes—was also based on Keynes.
Winslow at a book signing for
The Winter of Frankie Machine
in 2006.
