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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Weapons-Grade Fiction, March 13, 2000
Douglas Winter updates and deconstructs - nearly vivisects - the chiaroscuro of the classic noir style. The protagonist is gunrunner along Interstate 95. When a big shipment to a NYC gang goes haywire, an adrenaline surge propels the book - through the unraveling of scheme after scheme - to the necropolis of its cataclysmic conclusion. For good measure, a baroque quantity of minutia concerning firearms is peppered throughout. Suspenseful, stark, and startling, 'Run' includes the key hallmarks of the noir genre: taut, rapid-fire prose and an overarching existential nihilism. Like Highsmith's 'The Talented Mr. Ripley,' Goodis's 'Down There,' and Thompson's 'The Grifters,' Winter's neo-noir deserves to be put on screen, but get a copy of the book first - copies are disappearing faster than a pack of smokes at an AA meeting.
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7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
'Lock & Load/Welcome to the Bullet Festival', April 24, 2000
By A Customer
I could not better this excellent review by Kate Muir, as it distills the book to it's core With gunrunners, drug dealers, and a political assassination, lawyer Douglas E. Winter's powerful first novel is no courtroom drama. Kate Muir finds out why :- Shooting back Run by Douglas E. Winter Being trapped in an office with a pile of dry legal briefs tends to induce diversionary activity, which is why so many American lawyers have been forced to write popular novels on the side. Here comes another one: Douglas E. Winter and his speedy thriller, Run. The lawyer-turned-novelist, a late developer at 49, has a beard and a black turtleneck so we know he's not just another suit. And he has earned the right to jettison his tie: Run is a powerful all-nighter of a novel about a bunch of illegal arms dealers whose $2 million "milk run" between D.C. and New York becomes entangled in a political assassination and a bloodbath that Caligula would be proud of. Plots within plots open up like a set of Russian dolls, as the hero-of-sorts runs to save his life. Much of his book is unquotable in a family newspaper. Indeed, one American reviewer wrote that the book "reads like it was written from a prison cell" rather than a law office. It's an effect Winter sought out. "There is a commercial way of rendering dialogue in thrillers which is in fact not as spoken. So instead I listened to people talking here in the city." Dealing with white gunrunners who are forced to work alongside black drug dealers, Run pits gangsters v gangstas, and much of the dialogue also echoes the urban rhythms of hip-hop, pretty ambitious for a white guy from Granite City, Illinois. It is Winter's fine collection of rap music that let him pull it off. "Rap is often very angry, and I understand that, and Run is a very angry book. I wanted to borrow a little bit of that aesthetic, that feeling, that honesty. But I wonder now sometimes what people think when they read the book. There's a lot of very vicious, very nasty language right out of the gutter . . ." In some ways, though, the plot is appropriately thrilling. Run is a rant against guns: their power and the way Americans put them on a pedestal. The narrator, Burdon Lane, is a gunrunner whose cover is legitimate arms dealing and his description of various weapons borders on the lascivious. Winter, a former army officer in the reserves, understands this: "As a child growing up in America you could not help but be attracted to the romanticisation of the gunslinger that takes place: westerns, secret agents, etc. I wanted to embrace that element because the book is about the culture of guns and the whole romantic appeal of the weapon as the solution, as a signifier of power or cool." So although the book begins with the Second Amendment, "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed", it actually goes out of its way to show what happens when a bullet hits a body. Thus there are victims with their legs shredded, heads messily blasted off on trains and, in a particularly stomach-churning moment, our hero sticks his finger through his armpit to check that a bullet has come out the other side. "I wanted to show what really happened, not that TV thing where people are shot and remain in one piece." Accordingly, Winter made his final scene what he thought was shocking. But as he finished it, fact surpassed fiction when 15 schoolchildren died at Columbine. One reviewer did complain that Run was a "hardboiled thriller with a liberal agenda", but Winter is unrepentant. "I'm not a great sociopolitical thinker but I wanted to offer some fresh thought on the issues around us." Winter began his writing career as a critic, then wrote non-fiction, horror and suspense in the late Eighties, while continuing his legal work. Then, in 1987, Northwest Airlines Flight 225 crashed at Detroit airport, killing everyone except one four-year-old girl. It was the second worst air disaster on American soil and Winter was sent to defend McDonnell Douglas, the airline manufacturer, after Northwest denied liability. "It was an epic nightmare. I lived on the road for more than three years, and the jury trial went on for 19 months in Detroit. It was day in, day out emotional, psychological warfare. We won, but the appeals that followed went on for five years. Again we won but towards the end, I began to develop a very severe sleep disorder. Here was the pinnacle of any litigator's career, and personally I was devastated." He suffered from deep depression, "but in the law firm no one could understand this darkness I felt inside myself. But with a good doctor, a wonderful wife and . . ." he shrugs, almost embarrassed " . . . two great dogs, it got better. I decided that the only way out of it was to take the risk and spend time writing a novel which would in some strange way try to make sense of all this carnage and tragedy. That was Run." (c) 2000 Kate Muir
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9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best thriller of the 21st century . . . so far., March 22, 2000
Douglas E. Winter's RUN is indeed one of the best books so far this year. It took me 20 minutes to catch my breath after reading it. Winter's writing style takes on the speed of an action adventure movie--but faster. This book is the kind of action macho men dream about. Yet, more than that it is a superb story with masterful writing that anyone will appreciate. From page one, Winter pulls you into his story and never lets you go. His characters are fascinating, and though they seem superhuman, you can easily put yourself in their shoes. This novel, like so many great ones, is about the human condition--ugly as it may be. It is a cultural litmus test that digs into where we are as a society, and where we are going in the next millennium. Will our society of guns and violence and racism follow us into the 21st century, or will we see the light? You will laugh reading this book, and you may even cry, but most of all you'll feel exhilarated and you'll want to read it again. It's fun, it's fast, it tells a great story and has a wonderful meaning. So, chalk this one up on your grocery list of must-have books for your library.
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