After That, the Dark: Andrew Klavan Unpacks His New Novel

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Halloween is just days away, and we are entering peak cozy mystery season.

In this episode, we speak to author and Daily Wire host Andrew Clavin about the latest installment in his beloved Cameron Winter mystery series. After that, the dark out on October 28th.

I'm Georgia Howe and this is a weekend edition of Morningwire.

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Andrew, thank you so much for coming on. Oh, it's great to see you, Georgia.
So first off, a more challenging question off the top of your head. What books are on your nightstand right now?

What books are on my nightstand right now? I am reading an old, a fairly old novel called The Wasp Factory, which I'm not enjoying at all. I'm reading an Imbokov

memoir that is actually very beautiful.

And I'm reading a book about the liturgy, the medieval liturgy and how it affected the consciousness of people and how it basically imbued the medieval consciousness with Christianity through its rites and standards.

So it's a pretty good selection. All right.
And what books are you embarrassed that you've not read yet that maybe are to be read?

Let's see. What books am I embarrassed that I haven't read yet? You know,

there's probably some classics I wish I'd read. I'd wish I'd read more French novels like, you know, Balzac and people like that.
I've read some, you know, I've read a few, but not a lot.

I always think that I haven't read any science fiction, but then when I see lists of great science fiction books, I actually have read most of the big ones. But I'm

a little bit bad about stuff like that. Science fiction and the French, who I

just don't think should have been writing or saying. I think they should have just sat quietly in a corner and waited for European history to be over.

All right. Well, you have a new installment in the Cameron Winter mystery series.

And I'm actually a mystery lover, and I have not read your series yet, but it has been recommended to me, not just by people who work here, but actually by a neighbor of mine.

So people are talking about it, and I've heard excellent things. So

before I ask about this newest book, can you just tell us about the Cameron Winter series and maybe compare it to some other books that we might recognize?

Yeah, you know, Cameron Winter was invented for a Christmas novel that an editor, my old friend Otto Penzler, who was the great mystery editor of his day,

really the central figure in the mystery writing

world,

he asked me to write a Christmas novella, and I had had one in my mind for decades, and I just had had never gotten around to figuring it out.

And when I figured it out, I kind of invented the character to go with that story.

And he's a character who is a professor, he teaches English literature, but it slowly becomes clear that he has a very dark past, working for the government, doing very nasty things, and he's kind of trying to run away from that.

And so, I had invented a character who represented something that mattered a lot to me, which was the role of men in the world, the way that we no longer can write about male heroes, but all the really masculine guys on TV and in books are anti-heroes.

And they're all, you know, the sopranos and breaking bad and one bad, you know, one bad guy after another, because when you outlaw masculinity, only outlaws can be masculine.

And so I wanted to take a guy who really was a sort of, you know, a guy who was maybe morally questionable and watch as he tried to make his way back into being a hero.

And that's what these books have turned out to be about, because after I finished the first one, I realized it was a very complex story.

And so Cameron Winter is what you would call an amateur detective.

And that is a very real

sub-genre in the genre of detectives. There are private eye stories and there are police stories and then there are the stories of just people who know how to do this thing.

And in a way I wanted to do that because in some ways that's the least realistic mystery of all because most crimes are solved by police officers.

But in another way it also represents the way that ordinary people address the problem of of evil.

So I just have to ask, what is a Christmas novella?

Well, Christmas mysteries, you know,

Christmas mysteries are the best. I mean they're mysteries that take place during Christmas.

They have to have a sort of Christmasy feel at the same time deal with a body in the library or something like that. And I took a very,

as you'll see, I mean that book was, I think,

has been a big success and it's still doing very well. And it takes a different tack.
It has a lot of Christmas feeling in it, but it also has a kind of dark underpinning.

So it's different than most of them. I love that about the mystery genre is that there are these really granular niche categories.
Yes. Okay, so tell us about this most recent installment.

Is this going to satisfy fans of Cameron Winter novels, or is it something new?

I think it's the best Cameron Winter novel by far. First of all, it's a love story.
He falls in love, and it's, I was just paging through it because I got the hardcover only a couple of days ago.

They finally sent me a copy, and I was paging through it. And he's a very hard character, Cameron Winter.

He's done a lot of hard things and he's completely unsentimental, but he falls head over heels for this very convicted evangelical Christian.

She is just a real believer and he doesn't believe in anything. You know, he doesn't not believe, but he just doesn't address those problems.
So to him, she's like the loopiest dame he's ever met.

He just thinks she's kind of crazy, but he cannot help himself. It's as if he had walked in to a love story that was already going on before he got there.
And as the story starts, she tells him,

just trying to entertain him on a date, she knows he solves mysteries, so she tells him a true locked room mystery, which is a sub-genre of the mystery story.

How did a guy get killed in a room that no one was in?

All the doors were locked, all the windows were closed, how did he get killed?

And he gets so fascinated by this, mostly just trying to impress her, that he finds himself carried into a very, very dark story that goes very, very deep into government and into science and into this weird company that he follows.

And I think it's, I'm really happy with it. I think it's just a really exciting story.
And I think that the love story is

particularly charming. As I say, as I was paging through it, I thought, this is really charming.

I really like this. I had forgotten that I had written it.

I was wondering if Christianity was going to make an appearance in your mystery series. And if so, how significant is that theme throughout the Cameron Winter series?

Well, it's interesting because I wanted him to be a non-believer, but not an atheist. I mean, at this point, being an atheist is so dumb, I didn't think I could invent a smart guy to be an atheist.

So I made him just a person who knows there's some kind of mystery to life, but he doesn't believe in anything.

But he's taken in, his mentor is a guy who goes by the name of the recruiter, and he's the guy who brought him into the government, turned him into an assassin. And he is just a...

flamingly crazed evangelical fundamentalist.

But Winter can never tell whether the guy is joking or not. I mean the things he says are so outrageous.

And so he's constantly hammering at Winter about his unbelief and what an idiot it makes him to be an unbeliever. But at the same time the things he says are kind of over the top.

So it's really always, it's always a presence. And I always wanted it, I wanted Christianity to be a presence because I feel it's been written out of our lives.
Like stories don't deal with it.

People in movies don't say grace before dinner. You know, nobody prays on screen or anything like that.

So I wanted it to be a real force, but I didn't want it to be about, you know, you must believe in order to read these books. I just wanted it to be one of the forces in his life.

Now, you also have tried your hand at some nonfiction. I understand earlier this year you released Kingdom of Cain.

Can you tell us a little bit about that, and then I have some other questions for you that kind of relate. Okay, well, Kingdom of Cain is a book about three murders.

It's a book about three real murders and how they kept coming up again and again in movies and books and why, what it was that artists saw in these murders that connected them to the human spirit in its time, like what they said about

our fall from belief, what they said about

where we are as modern people. So

just as an example, one of them is Ed Gein,

who was a crazy man out in the Midwest who

killed women and dressed in their bodies.

And that, of course, inspired first the novel Psycho, which became the film Psycho, which inspired Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which was also based on the Ed Gein killings, and so was Silence of the Lambs.

And the entire really slasher movie genre grows out of Ed Gein's killings. I mean, he was just this kind of weird, obscure guy, but it became a big thing.

And it addressed the questions of transgenderism, of the... what the female body means as we lose our faith and how people have a hard time dealing with it.

And so I just took all those art, those works works of art that grow out of the Edgen killing and take a look at them.

And I look at that and another murder that inspired Dostoevsky writing Crime and Punishment.

And of course the first murder, which is Cain and Abel, and I look at the way they just replay themselves throughout literature and film and art and what that has to say about

this moment of the human spirit.

I mean, that's pretty dark subject matter. A lot of, I mean, a lot of times in Christian art, they don't want to look so closely at human darkness.
Would you say,

you know, some mystery novels will have pretty gruesome crimes. Are yours of that type or no?

You know, they're not. I don't concentrate on the gore of the crime.
I concentrate on the grief of the crime.

I mean, I don't want there just to be a body in the, you know, as they say, a body in the library, like an Agatha Christie, where it's just a puzzle.

To me, when you kill somebody, you not only cut off a work of God's creation, you separate that work from all the people who love them. And so that's the kind of thing I try to get at.

I try to get at the tragedy of murder and why it's such a, you know, basically the basic evil act. And so I'm not a big bloodshed guy.

I like action and I like suspense and I like fear and all the things that go into that. But the gore, you know, is of limited interest to me.
I will write it if I have to.

Now, kind of marrying all those interests, would you ever consider doing a true crime novel like In Cold Blood or something like that?

I would do a true crime novel like In Cold Blood, where it's actually a non-fiction novel.

You know, I would not just do the kind of reportage that some true crime writers do, and it's really entertaining, and I've read some of it, and some of it's good, but it's not my thing.

I want to get at the meaning of things, and I think that fiction is actually a better way of doing that.

And nobody did it better than Truman Capodian In Cold Blood and Norman Mailer in The executioner song and that that's the kind of thing I have thought of from time to time.

So I was going to see what yeah I was interested to know if you like true crime because I love true crime and sometimes people treat it like it's kind of lowbrow.

No, it depends. I always think that's the true crime is great.

I always worry when somebody comes on and says we found this guy was in prison and he's innocent because it's almost like 99% sure that he's not innocent.

And then I just think, oh, now he's going to get off.

But true crime is fascinating. Yeah.
Well, the greatest true crime podcast, and I'll stand stand by this, is Serial Season One. I don't know if you listen to it.

And what's funny is they did try to prove that he was innocent and did the exact opposite.

All right. So

before I move on from talking about your book, how did you come up with the title?

After that, the dark, it's from a Tennyson poem about his death, which was printed at the end of every collection of Tennyson's poems, where he says he's sailing out to sea. And after that, the dark.

After that, the dark. He's moving into the dark.

And so it's a story about these impossible murders that take place in different parts of the country and are obviously unrelated and yet somehow have to be brought together.

And so it really deals with the grief of the people involved and the fact of death and what it does, what murder does.

Just approaching Halloween, do you have any favorite scary books or even just what do you, what is your most scary book you've ever read? Oh my gosh, I love scary books.

Although, again, I don't like gore. You know, I don't like horror.
I like ghost stories. I like that kind of, you see something out of the corner of your eye.

Two greatest, probably the greatest ghost story ever written is Henry James, The Turn of the Screw, which was made into a spectacular black and white film called The Innocence with Deborah Carr.

It was written in part by Truman Capote. It is, to me, the gold standard of ghost story, but it's very, very, very subtle.

And so people who are used to guys with big butcher knives jumping out at you would not be as interested in that. But I just love that ghost story.

Another one is The Haunting, which I think was made the same year, another black and white film that they remade. It's based on The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson.

And you have to not watch the remake, which is in color with Liam Neeson, but the old one is absolutely fantastic. And I love those subtle, I like subtle ghost stories.
Do you believe in ghosts?

You know, I don't not believe in ghosts, even though Ben Shapiro makes fun of me for that.

Every time I've got more than 10 people in a room,

At a dinner party of mine, I will ask them, has anyone ever seen a ghost? I have never gotten 10 10 people to say no. There's always someone who's seen them, sane people with very convincing stories.

I would have to, I'm such a skeptic that I would have to see a transparent guy in chains saying, you know, repent before I would actually believe.

But I can't stop feeling like just so many people have seen them. There must be something to it.
That's been my experience as well.

So if you were having a dinner party and you were going to invite three

writers from time past or time present, who would they be?

Well, first of all, Shakespeare, because, you know,

I do not understand how a human being could have done what he did. I mean, I've never seen,

there is no body of work that contains so much of the human spirit as William Shakespeare.

So I might just invite Shakespeare, and then I'm not sure I would invite anyone else who would interrupt him, but if I were, I would love to meet John Keats.

He has been like my companion through life, one of the greatest poets who ever lived. And maybe, you know,

there's nothing like Charles Dickens. The guy was just, you know, every time I want to dismiss him as being sentimental or liberal or anything like that, I go back and read him again.
What a writer.

What a great storyteller, great writer. So I'd love to have those three guys in a room and then just sit back and drink quietly while they talk to each other.

Well, and

this somewhat relates because you could, I suppose, ask them for some advice, but what's the best writing advice that you've ever gotten?

Oh, the best writing advice, I think, is, you know, Elmore Leonard, he didn't say this to me, but he used to say this to aspiring writers, who who would say, you know, I don't have time to write.

He would say, wake up an hour earlier. And I guess the best advice I ever got was from Raymond Chandler, a letter that he wrote saying, I always spend four hours a day doing nothing but writing.

I don't have to write, but I can't do anything else. And that was how I built my discipline.

As a boy, when I was 14, I just started spending four hours a day just sitting in front of what was then a typewriter and just not doing anything but writing.

And that has been the best thing in the world for me. The other thing I have to say to young writers, learn grammar.

Like learn, you know, get a book, a workbook, go through it, learn how to use an English,

English sentence. All right.
And last question. If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be? One book of mine or any book.

One, well, I mean, you could make a business decision there, but one book you can choose, however. I can choose any book I want.

What's the book I would have him read? Gee, that's such an interesting story. I wouldn't touch our president.

I think he's doing such a great job that I would be afraid of putting any idea in his mind that would change whatever he's doing because he seems to do it instinctively.

But I think that if I had to recommend one book to him, it would probably be Christmas Carol.

Because Christmas Carol is, somebody once called it the fifth gospel, and it is the gospel distilled into a story. And I don't think that

Trump, I think, has moved toward faith, which I think is a beautiful, beautiful thing. But I think it is the simplest way to explain the Christian faith to anybody is to read a Christmas carol.

It's a story about how the past, the present, and the future all come together, and we're all responsible to each of them.

It begins when the ghost of Jacob Marley shows up, and he starts questioning Ebenezer Scrooge, asking him, do you believe in me or not? Do you believe in the spirit or not?

Because everything else grows out of that. Everything else grows out of that question.
Do you really believe that there is such a thing as a human spirit?

And it just takes you through, it takes you through a man's life who has slowly given in to complete materialism.

He starts out as a young man with some kind of idealism and it slowly shrivels up in the presence of money and the presence of ambition and all of the things that drive us.

And I think that it's what's wonderful about it is that Dickens gives Scrooge really good arguments for being who he is.

And I think that when you talk to materialists, they do have good arguments for being what they are.

And it's only a realization that there is a soul and that that soul is eternal and that the things that you do affect that its passage into eternity that change the way we look at material things.

And that's a brilliant, brilliant way of explaining the gospel without explaining it. Yeah, I love that interpretation and I'm going to carry it with me next time I watch that.

Andrew, thank you so much for coming on. Oh, it's great to see you.
You guys do a great job.

That was Andrew Clavin and his new book, After That, The Dark, releases Tuesday, October 28th. Thanks for listening, and this has been a weekend edition of Morningwire.

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