Tangled Web UK Review June 2008
The Dawn Patrol by
Don Winslow
pbk out June 08
(Heinemann)
at £12.99
The vigorous originality of this novel is both its greatest strength and most inimical weakness.
Boone Daniels is a surfer and private investigator - in that order - in the township of Pacific Beach - PB - in San Diego, California. He’s an ex-cop who isn’t particularly interested in being a PI or paying the rent, and spends most of his time with his five surfing buddies, known as the Dawn Patrol for their early morning ocean outings. Uptight English lawyer Petra Hall bursts into this ‘surfing is life, the rest is details’ milieu with a job for Daniels, hiring him to find a witness in case of arson involving local crime lord Dan Silver. Tamara Roddick, a stripper, disappeared shortly before she was due to give testimony against Silver, and the plot thickens when a woman using her name is murdered.
The term ‘surf noir’ has been coined to describe Kem Nunn’s novels (most recently Tijuana Straits in 2004), linking the traditional darkness and violence of noir to the spirituality associated with nature and the sea. All these elements are certainly present in The Dawn Patrol and if it is part of this subgenre, then its classification is perhaps the only aspect of the novel that is not entirely original.
To begin with, it is written in the present tense - an unusual narrative style very difficult to maintain, but executed with immaculate precision by Mr Winslow. The chapters are extremely short, reading like a newspaper report at times, and the paragraphs are commensurately reduced - often to single sentences. In addition, there are quirky features that shouldn’t work, like relatively long pieces of explication and back-story presented before the plot has developed. For example, there is a whole chapter on the sport-cum-art of surfing, and another on the history of PB; neither is essential or even necessary reading. While the characters have depth, they lack maturity, and tend to be full of ‘attitude’ and almost exclusively concerned with surfing, sex, and hanging out. The novel, sharp and fluent, however, is made compelling by its unyielding originality, and boasts a setting so authentic that readers will wonder if Mr Winslow has spent as long in PB as Daniels.
The idiosyncratic style and characters are unlikely to be to everyone’s taste, however. The extended use of the present tense can demand more attention than one is wont to give, the continual references to - and use of dialect associated with - surfing can become tedious, and the realistic portrayal of the characters can make them unsympathetic. Nonetheless, definitely recommended for all lovers of hardboiled and noir fiction, and also readers with an interest in either Southern California in general, or surfing in particular.
(
Rafe McGregor
Rafe's own site - www.rafemcgregor.co.uk)
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