“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.)