{"id":21435,"date":"2025-12-15T18:16:23","date_gmt":"2025-12-15T23:16:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=21435"},"modified":"2025-12-15T18:16:23","modified_gmt":"2025-12-15T23:16:23","slug":"dynamite-road-and-shotgun-alley-by-andrew-klavan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=21435","title":{"rendered":"‘Dynamite Road,’ and ‘Shotgun Alley,’ by Andrew Klavan"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n

\u201cShe changed things,\u201d Whip Pomeroy went on in that same overly sweet, overly elevated tone. \u201cShe changed\u2026 everything. Everyone. She was like\u2026oh\u2014oh, an unreal creature. Like paintings you see. Or daydreams you have. She was the way people never are. You know? You can\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The time comes, periodically,<\/strong> when I know I need to re-read Andrew Klavan\u2019s Weiss and Bishop trilogy again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think we\u2019re 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\u2019t seem to be going that way at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I get the feeling Andrew Klavan has been feeling like that too. I like to watch his podcasts \u2013 delayed, of course, on YouTube, because I\u2019m too cheap to spring for a Daily Wire subscription. But Klavan seems a little tetchy lately. I get the feeling he\u2019s 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\u2019t lose him over that, because we need him badly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I\u2019ll supplement my previous reviews of the Weiss-Bishop books on this blog, and the one I wrote years back for The American Spectator<\/em>, by again reviewing the two books I\u2019ve read so far this time around \u2013 Dynamite Road<\/a><\/em> and Shotgun Alley<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The heroes of these books are a pair of San Francisco private detectives \u2013 Scott Weiss and Jim Bishop. The names themselves are suggestive \u2013 \u201cWeiss<\/em>\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scott Weiss is a former cop, big, sad-faced, overweight, and middle aged. He foreshadows Klavan\u2019s current character Cameron Winter in being an intuitive detective. He has a knack for getting into people\u2019s heads, for discerning their motivations and fears, predicting their next moves. His ability to track down fugitives is legendary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s a valuable operative, but it\u2019s largely due to his willingness to break the rules, while Weiss looks the other way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Dynamite Road<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, Weiss has fallen in love. A woman shows up in an associated investigation \u2013 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\u2019s The Thin Man<\/em>.) He gradually becomes aware that he\u2019s not the only man hunting this woman. The other is a mysterious, legendary killer known as The Shadowman, perhaps the most dangerous \u2013 and relentless \u2013 criminal in the world. (Continued on next page.<\/em>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Shotgun Alley<\/em> further illuminates our heroes\u2019 characters. This time Bishop goes undercover in a motorcycle gang, to rescue a girl who ran off with them \u2013 the beautiful daughter of a wealthy, aspiring politician. Once again, the plot is motivated by romantic obsession, the things men and women will do for love, or lust, or whatever they conceive as love.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Each character, no matter how good they are at what they do, is searching for something more. For most of them, it\u2019s love, a dream of love as romantic and mystic as any poem by Shelley or Keats. It\u2019s the juxtaposition of this extreme romanticism with the gritty world of hardboiled detective fiction that makes these books shocking and unforgettable. A bloody, bullet-riddled kind of incarnation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I love these books. I think that, regardless of all the great stuff Andrew Klavan has written \u2013 and continues to write \u2013 the Weiss and Bishop trilogy will stand as a classic for a (hopefully) wiser generation of future readers and critics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cautions for very gritty, adult themes, and a whole lot of dirty words.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cShe changed things,\u201d Whip Pomeroy went on in that same overly sweet, overly elevated tone. \u201cShe changed\u2026 everything. Everyone. She was like\u2026oh\u2014oh, an unreal creature. Like paintings you see. Or daydreams you have. She was the way people never are. You know? You can\u2019t know.\u201d The time comes, periodically, when I know I need to … Continue reading ‘Dynamite Road,’ and ‘Shotgun Alley,’ by Andrew Klavan<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7,15],"tags":[183,5805,5806,5804],"class_list":["post-21435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","category-reviews","tag-andrew-klavan","tag-dynamite-road","tag-shotgun-alley","tag-weiss-and-bishop"],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21435"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21439,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21435\/revisions\/21439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}