Julian makes an interesting background for crime author Don Winslow to create his latest, "The Winter of Frankie Machine" (Knopf, $24).

"It's a great place to write," Winslow said. Written in his mountain home there, the book has recently been purchased by Robert De Niro's Tribeca Films for release next year.

For years, De Niro has refused to revisit his past Mafia characters. But the emotional depth of Winslow#,s Frankie "Machine" Machianno was all De Niro needed to recant his own "no gangsters" mantra.

"I didn't know that until after I sent it to him," Winslow said of the book.

Another Winslow book, "The Life and Death of Bobby Z," has also been turned into a film, starring Laurence Fishburne.

Frankie Machine is a 60something former hit man who has spent his last several years surfing and making a name for himself as having the best bait on the Ocean Beach Pier. When the son of a mob boss asks for his help, the dominos quickly fall, revealing that the entire escapade is payback for something from Frankie's past.

"It's a character who has to account for his own life in a very real sense," Winslow said.

Winslow came West as a private investigator working for law firms after a rash of arson fires in the late '80s. Flying west from his Connecticut home became so frequent that his wife, Jean, quit her job and with their newborn, Thomas, they moved to California.

"After a while and with a baby, I began turning down work just to be close to home," Winslow said. After three years of "luxurious hotel gypsy living" all over Southern California, they settled in Dana Point, then moved to Julian 10 years ago.

Their mountain home is a long way from the Kenyan beach where Winslow asked Jean to marry him. It was in Africa that he channeled his life passion into a vocation. While recovering from a mild case of malaria, he remembered what a friend at Oxford University had said.

"James Basker, who's now the Barnard University English department chairman, told me to quit screwing around and write. So sitting there at 5 a.m. recovering in my tent, listening to hyenas, I figured Jim had laid down the gauntlet for me, and I started to write.

"I wanted to be a writer since I can remember. My dad was a sailor and one of the great raconteurs. I grew up around storytellers with his buddies, and Mom was a librarian, so we always had a great respect and regard for reading. I thought a writer would be the best thing in the world to be."

The first task of composing "The Winter of Frankie Machine" was subverting the world's pop-culture awareness of everything Mafia.

"One of the hardest things I had to do in this book was to come up with the realistic names," Winslow said. Frankie "Machine" Machianno escapes those stereotypes, he said. The author admits the moniker did not come from nowhere. "'Frankie the Machine' was the nickname for a Nelson Algren character in the book and famous movie 'The Man With the Golden Arm.'"

Most mob stories are centered on the East Coast, and that was the next aspect Winslow changed. This is purely a Southern California, and specifically a San Diego, mob story. The city serves as a character itself.

"It was a deliberate choice," Winslow said. "The West in legend and folklore is where things go to die, to make a transition into something different. I wanted a sunset book, as opposed to a sun-rising book. That's why Frankie is a little older. It's about the end of the mob and how the mob dissolved. I wanted to also write a historical book. The San Diego mob is fascinating - they were quintessentially California."

Tribeca and Paramount are producing the film, and Winslow knows he is in no position to demand a San Diego shoot. "There is no way in a contract with Robert De Niro you are going to make any demands," Winslow said, but he has hope. "There have been a lot of conversations about setting it here."

Locations such as the Ocean Beach Pier, where Frankie sells bait, are as much a part of the story as the hit men and vendettas that illustrate the deliberateness of Winslow's winter landscape.

"I picked that pier deliberately, because it is at the end of America. It finishes right there. Again, that sunset feeling, that's why I took it back there at the ending. To me, the locale is a character. I'm hoping they film it here."

The author never sees a film when putting pen to paper. "I didn't write the book with a movie in mind. When you go to write a mob book, you can't escape the ghosts of your own culture. I very deliberately pushed that out of my mind," Winslow said.

Within days of sending it to Tribeca, he received a call. "Tribeca asked that I don't send it to anyone else for a few weeks," he said. "When De Niro said to me, 'This is my "Unforgiven"' - I was flattered, honored and scared."

What is it about his titular character that made a noted movie star change his view on a film genre?

"I don't think it's good enough for a writer to step out and look at the character and say he's bad, he's good," Winslow said. "You have to get inside their head and see the world through their eyes. That brings the reader along on Frankie's trip. I am thrilled De Niro wanted to do it."

The author is now "finishing the next thing and thinking about the next-next thing," he says. Winslow's next book is "The Dog Patrol" about surfers in Pacific Beach, and the "next-next" book is "National City." When asked about these future novels, Winslow demurs.

"I'm a crime writer. That's really what I do. Look, I'd be happy today leading safaris. What's not to love about it? But it wasn't the thing and this - writing - is the thing."

Joel D. Amos is a freelance writer. Contact him at joeldamos@yahoo.com.