IN THEIR WORDS
I’M SHARING A BOOTH with best-selling crime novelist Don Winslow at a diner on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, right before the toniest part of the neighborhood bleeds into Morningside Heights, home to Columbia University and public housing projects. He lived a few blocks from here in the 1970s and ’80s, in a ninth-floor apartment with a bathtub he’d hide in when gunfire popped outside.
“Back then, there was small-arms fire,” says Winslow, who’s tan, slight and dapper in a crisp white shirt and navy blazer. “That was the nadir of the city. Summer of Sam. Freeze to death in the dark. Go to hell. It was bad, and we were all poor, but I have a certain nostalgia for it.”