It would be misleading to describe Andrew Klavan as a neglected
novelist. He’s doing very well, thank you, turning out thrillers
for adults and young adults, and snagging the occasional movie
deal. But there was a time when he was one of America’s hottest
thriller writers, seeing two of his best novels (True
Crime and Don’t Say a Word) made into major motion
pictures (neither of them nearly as good as the books).
Has his career suffered from his two conversions, first to
conservatism and then to Christianity? That’s a question I’m not in
a position to answer.
What I can say is that he’s produced recent work that surpasses
even his earlier “big” commercial novels. I’m thinking in
particular of his detective trilogy, which I consider one of the
finest achievements in the genre of our time. Too few people have
read these books, and I’m here to do what I can to change that.
The trilogy consists of the novels
Dynamite Road,
Shotgun Alley, and
Damnation Street. The books star Scott Weiss, head of
a San Francisco private detective agency, tall, fat, and
melancholy; Jim Bishop, his operative, short, strong, borderline
sociopathic; and the unnamed narrator, whom we are welcome to think
of as Klavan himself, as a young man.
What the author does here, I think, is unprecedented. I don’t
believe there’s ever been a detective epic before — a
trilogy of free-standing books bound together by a single
transcendent theme.
It has to do with love. Not just love as romance and a plot
device, but love as the clue to the meaning of our entire lives.
The whole complex nexus of devotion and sex and masculinity and
femininity and idealism and disillusionment.
Klavan has said that his journey to faith began with an act of
voyeurism, when a couple moved into the next apartment building.
They were exhibitionists and liked to perform with the lights on
and the shades open. As Klavan discussed their antics with his
girlfriend, it occurred to him that there’s a real difference
between the simple physical act of sex (as when, for instance, one
watches pornography) and the experience of sex enjoyed with someone
you love. He began to wonder what made that difference, which led
him into a spiritual search that culminated in his conversion.
Each book in the Weiss-Bishop trilogy has a main plot and at
least a couple subplots. Almost without exception, these plots
explore what men and women seek in each other. Weiss is, in spite
of all the ugliness he’s seen, a romantic looking for perfect love.
Bishop 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 is
too young to be sure yet what he’s looking for.
I was especially impressed with Shotgun Alley, the
middle book in the trilogy. In a way it’s the most important of the
three, because it best epitomizes Klavan’s theme.
Its main plot involves Bishop going undercover with an extremely
dangerous motorcycle gang. He’s been assigned to bring out a young
female runaway 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 used instead
of the user.
The chief subplot involves a radical feminist professor at
Berkeley and her relationship with an old radical professor, an
advocate of free love, whom she’s gotten fired from his post. These
characters seem like caricatures at first, but get 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 a delightful scene in a campus pizza joint, where they
learn they share the same opinion on 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.”
These two young people show the reader, through contrast, 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 biker leader, sits disassembling his carburetor while
explaining to his followers that it’s all about “taking things
apart.” By which he means laws, civilization, property, and people,
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.
Both groups are deluding themselves. They’re trying to
deconstruct things that are based in love, and love is more than an
inventory of its parts. Those who don’t experience it can’t
understand it, whatever impressive words they use.
When the narrator meets Emma McNair, it’s a moment of
incarnation, a moment when things he’s read about and studied
suddenly become realities in his life. Although he makes himself
only a small part of the story, his journey is the center of the
whole trilogy’s narrative.
I want very much for people to read these books. Be warned,
there’s lots of foul language, as well as intense scenes of sex and
violence. But, in my opinion, the Weiss-Bishop novels are among the
best things done in the mystery genre since Travis McGee sailed off
into a chromatic sunset.
