The Dawn Patrol

The Dawn Patrol is Winslow’s fifth book set in Southern California and comes one book back from Savages, which, you may recall, I liked a bit. It’s less experimental than Savages, which by definition makes it more accessible, but the sensibility and style is much the same.

This one actually has a hero of sorts, though ex-cop Boone Daniels is an unrepentant surf bum in every way someone can be a surf bum. He ekes out a living in San Diego-adjacent Pacific Beach by being a sort-of PI, guest-bouncing at his favorite watering hole, and generally doing as little as possible in order to get away with surfing with his buds at sunrise (thus the title). Trouble comes to this slacker paradise in the form of an outwardly simple job offer extended by an annoying-yet-hot lawyer named Petra that leads Boone down the rabbit hole into the sort of depravity Winslow does so well.

Boone isn’t bad company at all, although you’ll want to slap him more than once for the heedless way he screws up pretty much everything in his life. His attitude and philosophy seems authentic enough for a creature such as he, and Winslow has internalized the language and ethos of the 21st-Century surf culture in a way that makes us believe Boone and his homies have grown up in it. Several of Boone’s pack grow into being real people and not just the supporting cast, embarking on their own arcs that sometimes intersect with the main action and sometimes spin off into their own thing, either way being pretty entertaining.

The settings are atmospheric enough to enable even flatlanders to see where the characters are hanging. The main plot holds together and even makes a certain amount of sense once Boone puts together the pieces. The real star here, though, is the author himself. Writing in present tense, his prose is sharp, immediate, attitudinal, slangy, sometimes poetic, and often funny. He gives us extended riffs on the sociology of strippers, high-end cosmetic surgeons, and expat Pacific Islanders. While he doesn’t launch into the wilder flights of fancy here that he does in Savages, the book is perhaps the stronger for it.

Like getting wilted cabbage in your fish taco, the good comes with the less good here. The two primary figures of mainstream badassery are each fairly one-dimensional in their own ways. The main heavy is flabby, nasty, brutal, bigoted, and misogynistic because that’s what he is, with no clue given as to why or how; the megarich borderline-manic kidlike dope kingpin is a junior-league version of the screwed-up megarich dope kingpins Winslow gave us in Savages. Boone’s brutal, procedure-busting cop nemesis is similarly a type rather than a person. And annoying-yet-hot lawyer Petra ends up being another type; she starts out promisingly sharp-tongued and understandably disdainful of Boone’s general existence, then melts under the influence of his slacker charms (not a spoiler – you’ll figure it out pretty quickly), even though he’d given no good reason for someone like her to want to get involved with someone like him. That I’m still willing to give this four stars makes me wonder what this book could’ve been had Winslow given these characters the same room to develop as he has Boone, Johnny Banzai, High Tide, and Sunny Day.

There’s a sequel (The Gentleman’s Hour) I’ll get around to; stay tuned for those developments. You can read The Dawn Patrol as either a pretty-good SoCal Noir crime story, or as a master’s class in style and attitude. It works well either way. Whichever way you take it, if you haven’t tried Winslow yet and/or any of this sounds at all interesting, give the book a spin.

Always on the edge of my seat!

lovely. funny. enjoyable. well written. fun to read even there a bit to much historical info on places, or too many surfers names which i do not know if they are real names or not. so i felt it is ok to skip here and there some pages. great hard boiled with fun atmosphere.

I grew up surfing Pacific Beach, great read

Years later and a second reading, Don Winslow rocks the SoCal scene.