The Daily Signal - Andrew Klavan Examines American Culture Through New Mystery Novel

Episode Date: October 29, 2024

Podcast host for The Daily Wire and bestselling author Andrew Klavan's newest mystery novel examines American culture without being a political book. "I've sort of taken the issues out so that I'm not lecturing people on what I think, how I think they should vote, or what I think they should think, and just describing the anger, the division, the ideological capture that's taking place," Klavan tells The Daily Signal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Tuesday, October 29th. I'm Elizabeth Mitchell. It's getting colder outside, and it's a good time to sit down on the couch with a good read. Luckily, Daily Wire podcast host and USA Today bestselling author, Andrew Claven, has a new mystery book perfect for that, titled A Woman Underground. Stay tuned for our conversation after this. Your government is out of control. It's doing things it has no business doing.

It spends way too much money. It gets involved in way too many wars. It not only tells you what you can and can't say, it actively censors you. And the things your government should do, it can't, or worse, won't, do it all. It can't keep your streets clean of crime and filth. It can't keep your neighborhoods safe enough for kids to play outside. It can't even prevent your country from being invaded by millions of illegal immigrants. Why is that?

Because your leaders no longer represent you, they represent themselves and their friends. In my new show, The Signal Sit Down, will expose how the the sausage really gets made in Washington, D.C., with guests who have experience on the inside. Fingers will be pointed. Names will be named. You ready? Thanks so much for joining the show today. It's a pleasure. Thanks for having me. Could you tell us a little bit about what your new book is about? Yes, it's a woman underground is the fourth book in the Cameron Winter series.

It's kind of the crisis book. It begins with Cameron Winter, my detective, kind of unraveling, having a nervous breakdown, which is spurred on by the fact that the, only woman he's ever loved has come back into his life, or at least is seen to be around somewhere. And he goes looking for her and finds that a killer is looking for at the same time. And basically, he's trying to find her before this killer does. And the search takes him into a kind of very recognizable America torn by extremist groups on both sides, rioting, taking over parts of cities. And he's trying to find her in this mess. How does the world in this book compare to America today?

Well, you know, the problem that I was trying to solve is how to write a book about America today without writing a political book, because you can't really describe America without talking about politics, where everything is politics, it takes up all our consciousness. It divides families. It divides friends. And so what I've done is I've sort of taken the issues out so that we're not, I'm not lecturing people on what I think, how I think they should vote or what I think they should think. And just describing the anger, the, uh, division, the ideological capture that's taking place so that my hero who is not a political guy, he's a guy who's seen too much of how government works, I actually believe in much of anything, can just observe it and live in it and live with the tensions that it causes and the distress that it causes. So at least I can give my readers a sense that they're getting a real vision of what America is like without being lectured, without having some kind of political agenda pushed on them which I'm not trying to do at all. I'm just trying to tell it. story that gives you a sense of where America is. Do you see pushing political agendas as something that is

too common in American entertainment today? Oh, yeah. It's everything, especially because so much of American entertainment is owned by the left, and they are always pushing their ideas. They can do it more subtly because they own so much of the entertainment terrain. They don't even have to lecture us. They can just make sure that, for instance, there's no such thing as a white country. And couple, every couple has to be mixed race. Obviously, we have no, I have no problem with mixed race couples. I have a problem with being preached to by the worst people in America who are the people in Hollywood and I don't see why their agenda should dominate every single thing. So the problem that the right has is in the rare times when we can overcome the blacklists

that keep us out and the censorship that tells us we can't say what we want to say, that we tend to want to preach back at them. We want to say, explain what they're doing and then tell people why it's wrong. It's just bad storytelling. So all I do is just assume that I assume that there's a moral universe. There's such a thing as good or bad. But I also assume that there are good people on both sides and there are people who believe different things for different reasons. And I just want to show what it's like to live in a country that's become so politicized and become so divided because in some ways it separates us from the things that matter, which are truth and beauty and love and art. And so I just want to create a work of art that

takes you into that world. Why is it important for Americans to have the option to read books like yours that don't push a political agenda but accurately reflect the world that we live in? Well, yeah, because that makes, it allows people to first expand their consciousness by entering the world without having to make any decisions about it. That's a really important thing. In politics, someone's always going to win, someone's always going to lose. And so you have to pour your whole heart into your side, even though you understand the issues are far, far more complicated than any political solution can ever say. The left doesn't believe that. The left believes there's a political solution for everything. Most of us who see the world honestly

understand that nothing can fix the brokenness and sinfulness of the human heart. So when you look at a, enter a work of art, it's an honest work of art, that's not a political work of art. You're getting a much more complex view of the world than you can ever get from politics or politicized art. And that complex view helps you return to the decisions you have to make a wiser person. And a lot of conservatives don't understand why they should read fiction at all. It's all made up, especially guys. They think it's all made up. Why should I read this? And the reason is it expands your heart. It expands your mind and gives you more experience than you can possibly get simply reading about politics. What can readers learn about how to live in America today from this new book?

Well, you know, it's not, the book doesn't have a lesson, but it does show the efforts of a single man to move from being an anti-hero to being a hero. This is the issue that Cameron Winter has been dealing with since the series began with its first book for books ago. He's a guy who has done some pretty awful and ugly things in the service of his country. And he's returned to find a country that is not what he thought it was. It's more politicized. It's more corrupt. It's elites don't really care about the people. Its government is not operating in the people's interest.

And so he has to ask himself, well, what have I done? Did I do something wrong? that I do, you know, did I take on my patriotism too seriously? And he has to try and reconstruct his life so he can become a better man. And I think following that journey, especially in this moment of chaos and a moment of transition, is something that I think we can learn from in a bigger way that maybe all of us are in this position. Because in a time when maybe nobody's got it all right and nobody's got it all wrong,

the question is, who are you going to be? Who are you going to be when things fall apart, when your country, doesn't live up to its ideals when your country is not the country you want it to be, who are you going to be in that situation and what price are you willing to pay to become that person? And so that's really the journey he's on. And by going on that journey, maybe you learn something that you can take with you. Could you further describe the main character, Cameron Winter? Yeah, he's an interesting guy because at a point in his life early on as a young man,

disappointed in love, he started looking for something that might be suitable for a man to do. what was it that was going to constitute his manhood? And he kind of wandered in to this business of working for the government, arranging the deaths of bad people. And he's not the kind of assassin who knows about every gun and all this stuff. He's just the kind of guy who knows how to manipulate people to get them to do what he wants them to do. And that's what he's been doing for the government. But deep down, he's a guy who loves the arts. He's a guy who loves poetry. And he's tried to escape this old life by taking a job at a university teaching English lit, basically. That's what he is.

He's a professor of English literature. And one of the kind of running gags is when people ask him, why it is he knows how to fight so well and how to do all these kind of spy things. And he keeps saying, well, I'm just an English professor. But the fact is he's still the person he was when he joined the government. And so he still has this strain of toughness about him that is not typical of your average English professor. And so he keeps being sucked out of the world that he's trying to enter and sucked back into the world that he's trying to leave. And Winter has a history of investigating

a Turkish sex trafficker in the book. What inspired you to focus on that? Well, I think this is an issue that permeates American life and Western life and that nobody, it's not that nobody pays attention to it when it becomes a lurid news story. We know about Jeffrey Epstein. We know the at Abercrombie and Fitch just got arrested. We've seen the Catholic Church exposed and some of its sex abuses. But this is really widespread among the powerful in America. You know, the conspiracy theory Q&ONON is complete nonsense, but the thing that it's based on is not nonsense. The idea that powerful people are using young people for their sexual pleasure in ways that should be illegal and are certainly immoral is just so widespread. I worked out in Hollywood for years. It's going on out

there. It's obviously going on in New York and it's obviously widespread throughout our political class or Jeffrey Epstein would still be alive to talk about it. And I think that the fact that this abuse of young people for the pleasure of powerful people is so widespread and he's getting so little coverage and we're holding so few people to account. Yes, Jeffrey Epstein was arrested. Delane Maxwell was arrested. But what about all the guys who are on his island? How come they haven't even been named or exposed? The fact that that's so widespread, and so little covered and so little exposed really speaks to a kind of decadence in our society.

So one of the things that Cameron Winter in this book discovers is that there is this widespread decadence and corruption that centers around sex in our society and he has to figure out what he's going to do about it, if anything. What research did you do on that terrible industry to prepare to include that in the story? I read a lot more about this industry than I wanted. to read and I've spoken to people about it. I've spoken to people who've investigated it

and you know gotten their inside stories which are quite shocked. You know it's really shocking how widespread this is. You know, the sex tourism, the people who travel to other countries to abuse underage people, the fact that this stuff comes up in Hollywood. When I worked in Hollywood every three years or so, this story would rise to the surface and it would start to be reported on the inside pages of variety, which is the trade paper. in Hollywood for show business, and then it would disappear every single time. It would get to a certain level where you start to see it and people would start to sweat and then it would vanish.

And so I've been talking to people, but there's a lot of people who won't talk to me and a lot of people who actually don't want to think about it at all. And so it's a hard thing to get to. But you can, if you research it enough, you can find out how it works. And that's what I've tried to do. Just find out the mechanics of it. I'm no more capable of finding out who I'm, I'm not. should be accusing than anybody else. That's going to require investigative reporting and law

enforcement. But I've tried to investigate the how of it as much as I possibly can. How is this book different from other works of fiction that you've written? Well, I mean, I've returned after a long time to the mystery story. I've always been a mystery and suspense writer. But this is the first time I've ever written a series character. I've written trilogies and, you know, which are a three-book story. But this is the first time I ever had an open-ended character that was going to go in to, I hope, at least 10 stories. And the reason for that is I never found a character who was not only complex enough in himself, but linked into the culture as I perceive it as much as this character did. I almost stumbled on him, just inventing a story. And so taking on the chore, the task of a series has been a first for me.

And it's, I really, you know, I think kind of my valedictory address to this genre that I love so much and have been writing in for so long. And it's really been interesting to work in the genre as closely as I'm working and you're trying to invent something new within that genre. And I think I've been really happy with that the sales and the reactions have been virtually ecstatic. They've been really, really gratifying how much people love these books and how well they're doing. So I'm really happy I've done it, but I sort of stumbled into it step by step, and now I have a vision for the whole series that I'm trying to work out. And that's different than anything I've ever done. It's really interesting. Could you describe the process of creating a complex character like this one?

Well, part of it is organic. I mean, you start out with certain things that you know about the guy, what he does for a living, where you get his backstory. I've written very long outlines of people's backstories, of characters' backstories. Somewhere along in the process, early on, maybe about 30, 40 pages into the writing, the character comes to life. And it really is a weird, magical kind of thing. He stops doing what you want him to do. You can have an outline, every scene outlined, and I do extensive outlines, and find that about 40 pages in, the character just goes, no, you know, this is just not the sort of thing I would do. And somehow you just know that. It's not like you can compute it.

It's just like if you and I got to know each other, I might say, oh, yeah, I'll listen. Elizabeth is the sort of person who does this, but won't do that. You know, it's just the kind of thing you sense about someone after you get to know them. And that's what happens with the character. So you start out with an outline and you start out with certain facts about them. But then somehow all those things sort of congeal into a living person. And it's kind of a wonderful process. When it happens, it's so interesting and it usually does happen within each book.

But you can't really describe it because it's so organic. And once it gets going, people keep asking me, for instance, do I know who, how this series is going to end, where this character is going to end up. And what I say is I don't know exactly where it's going to end up, but I know he's going to end up somewhere in keeping with his character, and he will tell me what to do even more than I will tell him what to do. That's a really cool to hear about, really interesting process. What do you love most about writing mystery?

That's a really good question. You know, I grew up with this genre. I just fell in love with it really young. And for some reason, there were two parts of my falling in love with it. One was my love for Alfred Hitchcock films. I just loved the suspense of them and the tautness of them. They're kind of like a sonnet. You have to put everything in a certain place and you don't have a lot of room to move.

And so you have to be very well structured. But the other thing was in looking for male role models when I was a boy, I started reading tough guy fiction. And the books of Raymond Chandler, his famous detective, Tough Guy Detective Philip Mark, Marlow really spoke to me. The idea, he wrote an essay, Raymond Chandler wrote an essay from which we get the phrase mean streets. And he said, down these mean streets, a man must go who is not himself mean. And when I was 15 years old, I read that and I thought, yes, that is who I want to be in the world. I know the world can be corrupt.

I will not be corrupted by it. I want to walk in the world and try and tell the truth and search for the truth. And so I think what resonates with me and still sticks with me is the idea of that kind of story, the search for truth. And sometimes the guy doing who's searching for truth is not a good person. Sometimes he is. Cameron Winter is a person trying to become a good person. But just that tension that comes from trying to discover the truth in a world that doesn't want you to know it, which is, I think, something we're all living with all the time.

The world is a corrupt place. The people with power become corrupt. They want to protect their power. And the simple act of speaking the truth can get you canceled, can get you killed. And I think that that's an amazing fact about our world. than I don't think it ever changes. I don't think it's any different today than it was in ancient Greece or ancient Rome. And I think it is going to be that way until the end of time.

And so I think it's something we all deal with. And I think I love examining that through this genre, which was built for that purpose. For our readers listening to this who are getting excited about a woman underground, but maybe haven't read the first few books yet, would you recommend going back to book one? Or can you kind of start in the middle of the series? I have purposely written them so that each one can be read on its own. And I've purposely written them so that if you pick it up here and then go back to the first one, you will get something out of it that you wouldn't get if you started with the first one and vice versa.

And the reason I do that is when I read a series, I usually pick up the book in the series that I think will interest me the most. And then if I like that book, I go back to number one. And so I've written them so you can do that, basically. That's really cool. Thanks so much for joining us. It's been wonderful to hear about this new book. I'm excited to read. Yeah, it's really nice talking to you, Lizzie. Thanks for having me on. Thanks. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Daily Signal podcast where I sat down with Andrew

Klayman about his new mystery novel, A Woman Underground. Be sure to listen to our evening show, where we bring you the top news of the day. Also, please subscribe to the Daily Signal where you listen to podcasts. And leave us a five-star rating interview to help us reach a wider audience. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful. rest of your day and we'll be back with you at 5 p.m. for top news. The Daily Signal podcast is made possible because of listeners like you. Executive producers are Rob Bluey and Katrina Trinko. Hosts are Virginia Allen, Brian Gottstein, Tyler O'Neill, and Elizabeth Mitchell.

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