Tag Archives: Andrew Klavan

Fiction, Reading, Religion, Writing

The mind of the Recruiter

Leave a comment

I’m still thinking about Andrew Klavan’s Find Me Nowhere, which I reviewed last night. It’s a tremendous novel, transcending its genre.

And I thought I might comment about one particular, evocative element in the Cameron Winter series.

I’ve often complained about how Christians are treated in most fiction. People who obviously know very few (especially evangelical) Christians put words into our mouths that none of us (at least those of us who are sane) would ever say in the real world.

Instead of complaining about this lazy habit, Klavan – himself a Christian – has opted to have fun with it. Being both a genuine artist and a bit of an imp, he turns it on his head.

In the Cameron Winter books, he gives us the enigmatic, seriocomic figure of the Recruiter.

The Recruiter was the head of the now-defunct top secret, ultimately deniable cadre of government assassins that once gave Winter purpose in his life, but also left him in need of extensive counseling.

The Recruiter seems to me to be a stand-in for God. He’s nosebleed-level smart, thinking five or six steps ahead of everyone, including his operatives, who never know quite what he’s up to. He’s ubiquitous and omnipotent and he moves in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform.

And he talks like a preacher in a snake-handler sect.

Here’s a sample from Find Me Nowhere:

“Oh, did I mention Tubman says he’ll kill me if I ever come back to Kinnecombe? I think he might actually do it too.”

“No, I don’t think he might,” said the shape of the Recruiter in the shadows. “I think he almost certainly will. The man’s a sniper, after all, and a very good one. On the positive side, you won’t even feel it happen. One minute, you’ll be standing in the middle of nowhere, the next, you’ll suddenly be at the foot of Christ’s throne, all your deepest misgivings confirmed as you become fully aware for the first time that you were wrong about everything, which you’ll then continue to be painfully aware of through an endless eternity of suffering and flames.”

“That’s the positive side?”

“Wisdom is pleasure to a man of understanding.”

The Recruiter is a conundrum to the modern reader. He talks like someone said reader has been taught to despise as an inbred idiot. But we know he’s the farthest thing from an idiot. On top of that, he’s black. There are no stupid black people in contemporary literature.

Winter himself never knows what to think of the Recruiter. Is he serious? Is he playing a game? Is it a psychological maneuver? That mystery helps to give the Recruiter power, both in the mundane world and in the mind.

It goes the same for the reader. The reader is forced to think about the Recruiter’s faith… probably the last thing most readers want to do.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Find Me Nowhere,’ by Andrew Klavan

1 Comment

He was the bigger one, really big, and heavy, a building of a man with a face like a sledgehammer.

I think I’ve made up my mind about where Cameron Winter, hero of Andrew Klavan’s outstanding ongoing series of mystery/thrillers, lives and works. Occasionally, reference is made in these books to the Minnesota border. It’s pretty clear that he lives in a state that borders mine. That means it’s one of four states – the two Dakotas, Iowa, or Wisconsin. One can write off the Dakotas, I think, because the Dakotas aren’t progressive enough. Iowa is a little more progressive, but not as progressive as Winter’s state seems to be, and it’s not sufficiently interesting topographically.

No, I’m pretty sure now that Winter teaches at a small university in Wisconsin. We’re also told it’s the capitol of the state, so it must be in Madison. But it can’t be the University of Wisconsin-Madison, because Winter’s school is small.

So it’s a small, independent university located in Madison. Doubtless a fictional one.

That settled, let’s go on to discuss the latest Cameron Winter book, Find Me Nowhere, which I preordered, and devoured almost the moment it was released.

We begin with a scene from a secret military operation in Afghanistan. The point of view character is thinking about an astonishingly beautiful woman he saw recently, when he witnesses his best buddy being blown to bits in a cave.

Then we switch to Cameron Winter’s world. He is now, for the first time in his life, a happy man. He’s blissfully in love with his girlfriend, Gwendolyn Lord, a born-again Christian (who, oddly, justifies going to bed with him out of wedlock). His therapy with his psychologist is going so well that they’re both considering ending the counseling.

Then he’s approached by the Recruiter, his old mentor from his days as a deniable/expendable government assassin. The Recruiter asks him, just as a favor, to investigate the fatal stabbing of a man in a dying Pennsylvania town. Since it’s the Recruiter asking, Winter knows there’s a deeper agenda here, but it never crosses his mind to say no.

The Pennsylvania town is a victim of globalization. Once it was a factory town, but all the jobs were offshored. Now the main sources of income are welfare, collected by the multitudes of immigrants the government has imported, and drug dealing. The dead man was the father of the soldier we saw killed at the beginning of the book. Winter starts asking questions, which leads to his being attacked by thugs, repeatedly. But he learns that the murder victim had been saying that his son was still alive, that he had seen and talked to him.

The quality that struck me most, as I read Find Me Nowhere, was its density. I don’t mean that in a negative way at all. I’m talking density in the sense of texture and weight. Every line in this book has heft. There is no fluff. Several things were always going on at once, and there were layers of meaning and revelation at every point.

Find Me Nowhere is a transcendent book, full of love and joy and tragedy and despair. I’ll be reading it again soon, because I always do that with this series. A lot of books lag in places – even if I love the writer and enjoy the book, there are moments when reading feels like a bit of work. Reading this book was like bingeing chocolate, a decadent pleasure I’ve recently had to give up for my health.

My highest recommendation on this one.

Fiction, Reading, Reviews

Quixotic beauty

2 Comments

My opinion of Miguel de Cervantes’ classic novel, Don Quixote, based on reading a condensed version long ago, has always been that it’s a very long, difficult book that people read out of a sense of duty, but that few actually enjoy much.

I’m almost 70% through reading it now, and to be honest my opinion hasn’t changed a lot. It was a hilarious book by 17th Century standards, but it’s mostly plain hard work today. Despite amusing moments.

Today’s reading was highlighted by two major scenes. In the first, Don Quixote wishes to view a famous cave, and is lowered into its mouth on a rope by his servant Sancho Panza and their guide. While in the cave, the knight apparently loses consciousness and has a vivid hallucination, which he afterwards relates to his companions. It involves – of course – a castle and a couple famous knights, along with a brief vision of his own lady fair, Dulcinea.

Another big scene is a puppet show presented in an inn (I wish the author had described it in more detail – I couldn’t figure out whether the puppets were marionettes, hand puppets, or shadow puppets. No doubt Cervantes scholars have worked it out). Don Quixote, overwhelmed by the excitement of the drama, comes to the main characters’ rescue, smashing several puppets with his sword. He lives his life poised on the knife edge of delusion.

A topic I meant to discuss in an earlier post, but lost track of, was that of beauty. In a scene in Book 1, Don Quixote discusses with his friend the curate whether books of Chivalric Romance were true stories or not. The curate points out that the books are full of impossible creatures and incidents. Don Quixote’s response appeals to the spiritual – the stories must be true, he argues, because they’re so beautiful.

That’s a fascinating point, so packed that I can’t begin to deal with it here.

Keats wrote in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn” that “beauty is truth, truth beauty.” All my life I took that as a poet’s hyperbole. More recently I’ve been thinking there’s more to it.

Andrew Klavan’s book, The Truth and Beauty is one I’ve read several times without entirely figuring its point out. But it’s something to do with the idea that Beauty is a real expression of God Himself. In our mundane world, many beautiful things are corrupted by sin, but Beauty in itself is always a pointer to the Gospel. This is particularly notable in the experience of transcendent beauty, as when Wordsworth beheld a field of daffodils, or when Keats contemplated his Grecian urn. Wordsworth’s ecstatic experience of the daffodils actually led him on the road to Christian faith. Klavan thinks Keats would have become a Christian if he’d lived longer.

And it occurs to me that when a sinner repents and turns to Christ during an altar call, breaking down in remorse and suddenly in love with Christ, he’s having an experience not entirely different from those.

Nevertheless, Cervantes insists Don Quixote is wrong. In this world we live in, a thing can be both beautiful and bad. Beauty can be seductive, in a woman or in a story, or in an ideology. Socialism, for instance, is a beautiful ideology that springs from Romantic aspirations. But it leads away from God, and ends in death.

Authors, Fiction, Reading, Reviews

My top ten mystery list

4 Comments
Photo credit, Getty Images via Unsplash license.

Today is my birthday. Don’t ask which one. If anybody out there wants a birthday, you can have one of mine. I have a lot more than I need.

My friend Hunter Baker, of North Greenville University, has given tongue to the voice of multitudes, thus: “When, oh when,” those multitudes ask, “will Lars Walker offer a Top Ten list of his favorite mystery novels?”

To which I reply, “Why would anybody care what my favorite mystery novels are?”

Nevertheless, the challenge has been delivered, and I shall endeavor to give satisfaction.

First, some clarifications.

This list is not, and does not purport to be, an actual list of Best Books. There are whole swathes (I’ve grown uncertain how to pronounce that word: I’ve always rhymed it with “moths,” but other people rhyme it was “lathes.” Most troubling) of the mystery genre which I’ve rarely or never tried. Especially in the Cozy vein. Many passionate (sometimes frightening) people are devoted to Cozies; I haven’t got the nerve to laugh at them. I’ll just note that Cozy is not my cuppa arsenic-laced tea and, having writ, move on.

Agatha Christie remains, I believe, the most popular mystery writer in the world. I’ve read some Christie, but was not won over. Her focus is on the puzzle, not on the characters. Her readers delight in following clues and trying to figure out whodunnit before the Big Reveal at the end.

Me, I gave up solving mysteries long ago. On the rare occasions when I’m able to outthink the sleuth in a story, it’s usually because the author tipped his/her hand through trying to misdirect me in some way, and I caught him/her at it. I’m a better storyteller than a detective.

I read mysteries mostly to live vicariously through the characters and to observe them acting in extreme situations. I am not a man of action; I’ve managed to cram, I’d estimate, ten or twelve years of living into my three-score and several years of life.

With all this understood, here’s my Top Ten list. Purely personal, biased and subjective. Delivered with no authority whatever.

Continue reading My top ten mystery list →
Fiction, Non-fiction

New Culture Commentary from Klavans

1 Comment

There’s a new show on movies, games, books, and other cultural artifacts, and it’s hosted by Andrew and Spencer Klavan. Episode two Klavans on the Culture dropped yesterday on a subtle horror movie based on a small, popular game, Exit 8.

The movie doesn’t have much to talk about. Like the game, it’s more of a feeling than a story. The hosts spend half of this episode talking about ghost stories and recommending a couples recent books.

Uncategorized

Time lost on the road

Leave a comment
Photo credit: Claudio Schwarz. Unsplash license.

Today was one of those days where life reaches down into your calendar and reminds you that there are bigger priorities than the ones you’ve scrawled on your schedule. I went to a funeral today. It was the funeral of my uncle Ralph, not a blood uncle but the husband of one of my mother’s sisters. In terms of our family tree, this leaves but one survivor standing – also an uncle by marriage – in his generation.

Ralph was a plain, cheerful, energetic man who seemed to have discovered the fountain of youth until almost the very end. He worked as a telephone lineman, one of those guys who climb the poles at any time of the day, in any kind of weather. He owned every hand tool known to man, and his eidetic memory knew precisely where they could be located (often in the trunk of his car). If somebody needed something fixed, it was his great joy to jump in and help – and he knew how to do it right, too.

I don’t recall ever hearing a word said against Ralph. He lived into his 90s.

I must confess I was late to the funeral. My brain was absolutely convinced that to travel 2 ½ hours and arrive at 10:00 a.m., I needed to set out around 8:30. The logic of this calculation seems just as unassailable to me as it is wrong in reality.

I’ve done this sort of thing before. I don’t know what my problem is. Certainly it must be partly due to my functional innumeracy. Also I blame my difficulty in visualizing spatial relationships. I need to teach myself (even at this advanced age) to sit down and draw a clock face, and then shade in the hours, when I’m planning a trip.

On the drive I listened to the audiobook of Klavan’s When Christmas Comes. Almost wished the drive was longer.

The same goes for life.

Fiction, Religion, Reviews

‘Man and Wife,’ by Andrew Klavan

Leave a comment

And that’s how we really expose ourselves. Not in what we say but in the imagination we lay over the face of things. Because we can choose our words, strike our poses, but our delusions—no, these are wallpapered to our souls.

Andrew Klavan informs us in his autobiography, The Great Good Thing, that he once wrote a novel about Jesus. He’s not very proud of it; it was the sort of sophomoric story that young agnostics are prone to tell, once they’ve “figured everything out.”

But he wrote another novel about Jesus – in a sense. Man and Wife is not a Christian book, but its central character is a very evident Christ figure. And while the author did not quite understand yet when he wrote the book, you can tell he was asking the right questions.

Cal Bradley, the narrator, is a psychiatrist, chief administrator of a private mental facility in Connecticut which was originally endowed by his wealthy family. He’s good at what he does, but the real joys of his life are his wife and children.

His wife Marie came out of nowhere, it seemed, a simple-hearted, uneducated former waitress. She’s beautiful and she’s devoted to her husband, her children, and her church, joyfully serving them all. As far as Cal is concerned, she’s a miracle.

Then, one day while hiking near a local waterfall, Cal spies a woman who looks like Marie down in the gorge, talking to a strange man who seems oddly intimate with her. When he asks her about it, she cheerfully denies being anywhere near the place.

Meanwhile, Cal has admitted a 19-year-old man named Peter Blue to his facility. Peter is charged with striking his girlfriend, setting fire to a church, and assaulting a police officer. But the priest of the church begs Cal to help this boy. There’s something astonishing about his spirit, he says.

And Peter Blue does indeed seem remarkable. Not only is he a cooperative counseling subject, he exerts a healthy influence on the other patients. They follow him like disciples, and their symptoms are improving.

Only Peter Blue turns out to be connected to that same strange man Cal thought he saw with Marie at the waterfall. And Cal starts receiving threats, which he’s sure come from that same man. Is it possible Marie has been lying to him all these years? Can love and untruth exist together?

From a Christian point of view, Man and Wife offers a number of serious problems. But it should be remembered that author Klavan was working his way to faith when he wrote the book. The story is suspenseful and exciting and challenging; also moving and heartbreaking. I recommend it for thoughtful adults. Cautions for language and mature themes.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Damnation Street,’ by Andrew Klavan

Leave a comment

Bishop looked the man over. He was a big, evil chuckle-head. A white guy approximately the size of Denver. He had short blond hair and stupid eyes and a vague pharmaceutical smile. He had a voice so deep it sounded like an earth tremor.

Andrew Klavan’s Weiss-Bishop trilogy comes to a thundering conclusion in Damnation Street. I’m pretty good with words, but I struggle to express how much I enjoyed it. And I’ve read it before.

Quick background: Big, sad, middle-aged San Francisco private eye Scott Weiss has fallen in love with a woman he’s never even met – a prostitute who calls herself Julie Wyant. He also knows that she’s living on the run, in fear of the Shadow-man, a legendary professional assassin. The Shadow-man has a chameleon-like gift for disguise, and is an utter sadist. His dream for Julie is to catch her and torture her to death. That’s his idea of love.

This dynamic has formed a subplot in the first two books, but it takes center stage in Damnation Street, as very different obsessions draw these two men into a final showdown. In some ways they are mirror images of one another – so which force will prevail? Empathy or diabolic hate?

Weiss could use his partner, Jim Bishop, at a time like this, but Bishop failed him badly in Shotgun Alley. Bishop has always been the kind of man who lives on the edge, and he may have fallen beyond redemption now.

There is one more character in play, though. One I didn’t mention in the previous review.

The narrator of the trilogy is actually one of its most interesting characters. He’s clearly a fictionalized portrait of the author himself in his post-college days. He tells us he took a job with Weiss and Bishop because he’d always loved detective fiction, and wanted to learn about it first-hand, so he could write hard-boiled books himself.

In Dynamite Road, the narrator met Emma McNair, the girl of his dreams. But he was prevented from calling her because – with all the idiocy of young, horny men – he stumbled that very night into a sexual relationship with an older woman, and has been too cowardly to break it off since. In Damnation Street, he encounters Emma once again, and she gives him an ultimatum – “I want a man I can look up to and admire. Don’t come back until you are one.”

Which is how he comes to find himself in a fistfight outside of a brothel, giving Weiss the best backup he’s capable of.

But it all finally culminates in a showdown in a lonely house, where Weiss entices the Shadow-man. Author Klavan sets the scene like Hitchcock, letting us know everything there is to know about the Shadow-man’s plans, dangers Weiss can’t know. Time slows down, and the dramatic tension is exquisite, even after multiple readings.

These books can be taken on several levels. On the surface, they’re well-crafted hard-boiled mysteries. On a deeper level, they’re chivalric romances, transposed into a modern key. And – perhaps – on the deepest level, they’re meditations on that mystery of love and idealism that motivates all of Klavan’s work.

The publishers made a serious error in the Kindle edition, by placing their “Thank you for reading” message after the last numbered chapter, but before the Epilogue. Don’t miss the Epilogue, though. It’s important.

The Weiss-Bishop books are, I contend, an apotheosis of the hard-boiled genre. I recommend them, and even urge them upon you. But cautions are in order for violence, sexual situations, and very rough language.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dynamite Road,’ and ‘Shotgun Alley,’ by Andrew Klavan

Leave a comment

“She changed things,” Whip Pomeroy went on in that same overly sweet, overly elevated tone. “She changed… everything. Everyone. She was like…oh—oh, an unreal creature. Like paintings you see. Or daydreams you have. She was the way people never are. You know? You can’t know.”

The time comes, periodically, when I know I need to re-read Andrew Klavan’s Weiss and Bishop trilogy again.

I think we’re all feeling a little out of sorts lately. The news has been pretty awful. Whatever way one feels the world ought to be going, it doesn’t seem to be going that way at all.

I get the feeling Andrew Klavan has been feeling like that too. I like to watch his podcasts – delayed, of course, on YouTube, because I’m too cheap to spring for a Daily Wire subscription. But Klavan seems a little tetchy lately. I get the feeling he’s getting fed up with the community he joined when he chose, some years back, to be baptized. Tired of e-mails from earnest souls asking how he can call himself a Christian when he writes about such awful topics, using such dirty language. I hope we don’t lose him over that, because we need him badly.

So I’ll supplement my previous reviews of the Weiss-Bishop books on this blog, and the one I wrote years back for The American Spectator, by again reviewing the two books I’ve read so far this time around – Dynamite Road and Shotgun Alley.

The heroes of these books are a pair of San Francisco private detectives – Scott Weiss and Jim Bishop. The names themselves are suggestive – “Weiss” means white, suggesting the proverbial White Knight. And if Weiss takes that role, then Bishop suggests another chess man, the oblique piece that never moves in a straight line.

Scott Weiss is a former cop, big, sad-faced, overweight, and middle aged. He foreshadows Klavan’s current character Cameron Winter in being an intuitive detective. He has a knack for getting into people’s heads, for discerning their motivations and fears, predicting their next moves. His ability to track down fugitives is legendary.

Jim Bishop is younger, a handsome, buff risk-taker, a natural outlaw. He treats women like disposable objects, and they love him for it. (Weiss envies him this talent, with guilt.) Weiss pulled him out of the gutter and gave him a second chance. Saw potential in him. He’s a valuable operative, but it’s largely due to his willingness to break the rules, while Weiss looks the other way.

In Dynamite Road, Bishop is sent to a small town aviation company, where one of the owners suspects his partner is using their planes for illegal activities. Bishop, an expert combat pilot, goes to work for them, with a plan to replace the pilot the criminals have selected for their coming operation, incidentally seducing his wife so he can pump her for information.

Meanwhile, Weiss has fallen in love. A woman shows up in an associated investigation – a prostitute with the face of an angel. He grows obsessed with this woman, Julie Wyant. (Her name is reminiscent of Clyde Wynant, the subject of the manhunt in Dashiel Hammet’s The Thin Man.) He gradually becomes aware that he’s not the only man hunting this woman. The other is a mysterious, legendary killer known as The Shadowman, perhaps the most dangerous – and relentless – criminal in the world. (Continued on next page.)

Pages: 1 2
Fiction, Reviews

Second review: ‘After That the Dark,’ by Andrew Klavan

2 Comments

“I don’t think there is a middle ground. I have a job here. I teach poetry to young people. Poetry is a thing. It’s a thing that does a thing, or tries to do it. It tries to use words to unite the material world with its greater meanings….”

Because I love Andrew Klavan’s Cameron Winter novels so, I make it my custom to read each one twice (when they’re new; no doubt there will be further readings down the road). So this is my second review of the fifth book in the series, After That the Dark.

Our hero, secret government assassin turned English professor Cameron Winter, finally has his first date with Gwendolyn Lord, the woman he’s been dancing around over the course of the two previous books. And it’s good. It’s more than good. They click. They complement each other. They seem to have very little in common in terms of tastes, but they fill each other’s empty spaces. It all rather scares him.

Just to make conversation, she tells him a story she figures is right up his alley. A friend of hers, who works at a penitentiary in Oklahoma, has witnessed a “locked door mystery.” A prisoner, a man who went crazy and murdered his wife and little son, had been locked into a padded cell, wearing only his underwear. A few hours later he was found dead, killed with a nail gun. Officially, it’s listed as a suicide, but where did he get the nail gun?

Just to please Gwendolyn, Winter goes to Oklahoma to ask questions. He does not expect that his questions will lead him to a confrontation with one of the most powerful men in the world, and with a nightmarish assassin he’s already tangled with once before.

On this second reading, I think I understand better what After That the Dark is all about. The heart of the thing is the body-soul nexus, the way flesh and spirit coexist. The dark conspiracy Winter uncovers and fights involves an attempt to overcome the problem of crime through purely mechanistic means. The scene where (spoiler alert) Winter goes to bed with Gwendolyn is a counterpoint, illustrating the truth that flesh and spirit are reconciled through love, not through man’s reason or technology.

I suppose that’s Klavan’s reason for putting the two of them in bed together – in spite of the fact that Gwendolyn is supposed to be a faithful, born-again Christian. It still bothers me, not because I demand stories where Christians are perfect, but because it seems to ignore Christian sexual morality altogether. Still, even fornication is “becoming one flesh” according to Scripture, so it works thematically.

An amusing continuing element in each of these books is the character of “Stan-stan Stankowski,” the ultimate undercover operative. Stan-stan always shows up at some point to pass on information, either from the government or from Winters’ old superior. The thing about Stan-stan is that he seems to have no personal identity, or even a body of his own. In the previous book he was passing as a large, burly wilderness guide. In this book, he appears as a tiny, delicate Asian woman. He’s literally impossible – if the books are ever filmed, they’ll have to use a different actor each time out. But it’s a funny plot device, and suggestive of the flesh/spirit conundrum that is this book’s theme.

All in all, I really enjoyed After That the Dark, like all the books in the series. I haven’t reconciled myself to the sex scene, but it’s not enough to turn me against this fascinating series.