Of arms and the man he sings — no, seriously, he does. Don Winslow's latest novel, "City in Ruins," completes his Danny Ryan trilogy, the saga of a mid-level Irish-American mob soldier from Providence, Rhode Island, who flees across the country to build a new life, first in Hollywood and finally as an empire-builder in Las Vegas. Winslow says the trilogy took 30 years to complete — nearly his entire writing career, in other words — and also says it's his final work of fiction. We'll get to that. All three novels have been published in rapid sequence — the widely acclaimed "City on Fire" in 2022, followed by "City of Dreams" in 2023. They're loosely based, Winslow says, on the real-life gang war that paralyzed Providence in the late 1980s and early '90s, in which nearly 40 people died. (Someone in "City on Fire" observes that Providence tolerates only three religions: Irish Catholicism, Italian Catholicism and the Red Sox.)

But the Ryan trilogy is also based on "The Aeneid," the Homeric knockoff epic by the Latin poet Virgil that turns a minor figure from the tale of the Trojan War into the founder of Rome. Yeah, Winslow is a guy who writes hard-boiled crime fiction full of leggy, tough-talking dolls and guys with $70,000 watches and short, telegraphic sentences. ("First thing you learn in this kind of life: Never get in the car.") But he's also another kind of guy, a historian by training and inclination, as he told me during his recent visit to Salon's New York studio. He's not kidding about "The Aeneid": After our conversation, he sent me the "character key" for the Danny Ryan novels, which runs to three pages. So I could tell you who his cognates are for Achilles, Hector, Helen of Troy, Aphrodite, Odysseus and a whole bunch of others. But Winslow asked me not to share it, and as a character in his fiction might say, he seems like the kind of guy you don't want to cross.

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Well, OK, Danny Ryan is Aeneas, the wandering hero of Virgil's epic. That much is obvious. Like the Roman poet, Winslow takes this relatively ordinary figure — a working-class guy with decent intentions, who does bad things for bad people — and turns him into a highly resourceful if not entirely admirable protagonist, as well as a representative symbol of his time and place. Winslow had already become politicized while writing his trilogy about the drug war (beginning with "The Power of the Dog" in 2005), but while he was writing the Danny Ryan books, he says, he couldn't avoid noticing that America was changing, becoming increasingly divided, embittered and polarized.

Winslow is putting his fiction aside, after publishing 26 novels in 33 years, he says, because the times demand it. As a social media activist and anti-Trump propagandist — working in concert with screenwriter and filmmaker Shane Salerno, his close friend — he believes he can reach millions more people, potentially changing hearts and minds and moving the needle of history, than would be possible by spinning more gripping, surprising, economical yarns about men who kill each other. Virgil, I suspect, might disagree. We can't ask him about that, and we can't ask Danny Ryan whether he would have voted for Donald Trump in 2016. A lot of real-life Danny Ryans went down that road like Aeneas entering a really bad version of the underworld, chasing some absence or lack they felt in themselves or in life, and never came back. But Danny's creator stuck up for his boy: Absolutely not, Winslow told me, Danny would have spotted that "punk" miles away. We'll have to take his word for it.

This transcript of our interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I would describe you as one of the signature crime novelists or popular novelists of our age, but I don't know if you even like those labels. We could just say writer.

Writer is good. I've had so many labels and most of them have been negative. They tell me what I'm not. You're not a bestselling author. You're not an airport author. Cult writer was my favorite label over the years.

It's a friendly cult. It's not like the alleged cult associated with someone else with your first name, whom we might talk about later.

We could drop the alleged, I'm comfortable with that.

You say your new novel is your last novel.

It's the truth, actually.

Your new and final novel is “City in Ruins,” which is the conclusion of a trilogy that began with “City on Fire.” I understand you've been working on this trilogy for a long time.

30 years.

That's incredible. What took you so long?

"You have to go through 10 or 20 bad pages sometimes to get to that one good one."

Just lazy, I guess. No, 23 other books I think, kept me [busy]. To give you a serious answer, it was tough to do. I was trying to take the Greek and Roman classics and use all those characters and stories and themes, but write a completely modern contemporary crime epic........

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