The weekend went fine. Tiring but fine. My presentation to the Sverdrup Society in Fargo was well received (though I think I ran over my time). It did snow on us for the Viking exhibit in Bloomington, but we set up inside the museum, so it didn’t bother us much.

I’m not a great re-reader. I do re-read books that I especially like, but I usually wait at least a couple years before doing it, to give myself time to forget plot elements.

So I was surprised that a little voice in my head kept nagging me to re-read Andrew Klavan’s Weiss and Bishop trilogy. “It’s still got things to teach you,” it told me.

So I started the three books again, Dynamite Road, Shotgun Alley and Damnation Street.

I’m glad I did.

What Klavan is doing here, I think, is unprecedented. I don’t think there’s ever been a detective epic before—a trilogy of free-standing books that are nevertheless bound together by a single overarching theme.

I can’t summarize the theme—or if I can, I think it would give too much away for those of you who haven’t enjoyed the books yet.

But it has to do with love. Not just love as romance and a plot device, but love as the clue to the meaning of everything in our lives. The whole complicated nexus of love and sex and maleness and femaleness and idealism and disillusionment.

Klavan himself has said, in an NRO interview (this link is to the first in the series; I’m not sure which of the five contains the anecdote) that his journey to faith began with an act of voyeurism. He and his girlfriend (now his wife) lived in an apartment that looked directly into the windows of a neighboring apartment. A couple moved in who were exhibitionists, performing their private acts in full light, with the shades open. As Klavan discussed the situation with his girlfriend, it occurred to him that there’s a difference between the simple, physical act of sex (as when, for instance, one observes other people doing it) and the experience of sex when enjoyed with someone you love. He began to wonder what made the difference, and that led him into a spiritual search that culminated in his conversion.

The Weiss-Bishop trilogy, on close examination, is entirely about this issue. Each book has a main plot, at least one subplot, and at least one lesser subplot as well. And almost without exception, all these plots concern what men and women seek in each other. Weiss, the wise old detective, is, in spite of all the ugliness he’s seen, a romantic who looks for perfect love. Bishop, his operative, is a user who wants women for one thing only, while they look to him for things he can’t give. And the unnamed narrator (who speaks as if he’s Klavan himself) is too young to be sure what he’s looking for yet.

I was especially impressed with Shotgun Alley, the second book in the trilogy. In a way, it’s the most important of the three books, because it explains most clearly what Klavan’s trying to tell us.

Its main plot involves Bishop going undercover with an extremely dangerous motorcycle gang. He’s been assigned to try to bring out a young girl who has become the leader’s girlfriend. As he gets close to her, Bishop finds himself in the unaccustomed position of wanting a woman more than she wants him, of being the usee instead of the user.

The chief subplot involves a radical feminist professor at Berkeley, and her relationship with a ’60s radical professor, an advocate of free love, whom she’d gotten fired from his post. These characters start as caricatures, but are humanized as Weiss unravels their convoluted story—not only because the reader understands them better, but because they come to understand themselves better.

And finally there’s the subplot of the narrator’s own discovery of a girl who, he is convinced, is his soulmate. They’re brought together in an utterly delightful scene in a campus pizza joint, where they discover they have the same opinion of contemporary literary criticism.

“I love David Copperfield,” I said rather dreamily.

“Yes, said Emma McNair, setting down her glass. “It’s the great, good thing, isn’t it? Nowadays, you can’t get anyone around here to even talk about Dickens, unless it’s Hard Times. That’s the only book boring enough for them to take seriously.”

What these two young people seem to understand is that there’s no essential difference between the motorcycle gang Bishop is investigating and the English scholars Weiss is investigating. The English scholars are forever talking about “deconstruction.” “Cobra,” the leader of the biker gang, sits disassembling his carburetor while explaining to his followers that it’s all about “taking things apart.” By which he means people, laws, civilization and property, to his own profit. We’re even told his last name is Tweedy, which, when used as an adjective, is a word almost exclusively employed to describe academicians.

All these people are deluding themselves, Klavan is saying. They’re trying to deconstruct things that are based on love, and love is more than an inventory of its parts. Those who don’t experience it don’t understand it, whatever impressive words they use.

When the narrator meets Emma McNair, it’s a moment of incarnation, the moment when things he’s read about and studied suddenly become realities in his life. Although he makes himself a small part of the story, his journey is really the center of the books’ narrative.

I want people to read this trilogy very much. Be warned, there’s lots of foul language, as well as intense scenes of sex and violence. But if you can handle them, they’re rewarding to experience.

More than once.