Upcoming Work: Shotgun Alley

First off, Dynamite Road. Tell us a little about it, in Andrew Klavan's words.

Dynamite Road starts with a private eye, Jim Bishop, being sent out to investigate corruption at a small northern California airport. But after a while, Bishop's boss, Scott Weiss, begins to link Bishop's investigation to this master assassin he's been hunting for years. So on Bishop's side, the story is a sort of big action yarn with airplanes and shoot outs and explosions, but on Weiss's side, it's more of a mental chess game with this killer he desperately wants to bring down.

But there's another element to the story, and to its sequel Shotgun Alley, that really interests me. I wanted to return to the place I started, the detective novel, and see what I'd learned about it in the intervening years. So the books are not just stories about the detectives, they're also stories about a young man, the narrator, a wannabe writer, working at the agency and using his experiences to fashion himself into a crime novelist. Not that the young man is me, he's really not, but he's a way for me to explore the effect crime fiction had on my youth and my imagination. It's a way of going back to the source, as it were, and rediscovering where I came from with it all and what I have to say about it. Because for me, genre fiction, especially crime fiction, is at the center of American literature, the way jazz is at the center of American music. I've tried my best to expand the genre and do original things with it, and I guess I wanted to write a sort of summary of that, and maybe a bit of a valedictory as well.

We hear from the website that Jim Bishop, one of the lead characters in Dynamite Road, is a "hard man, as cold as the wind off the water and tough to the point of brutality" Ok, so he's a hard man. What makes Bishop interesting? Why did you like him enough to craft him?

When was the last time you saw a movie with a conservative president as hero? Or a movie in which abortion was considered a bad thing? Why the hell not?

The man can fly planes, ride motorcycles, screw any woman he wants and rip a bad guy's esophagus out with his bare hands, what's not to like? Plus he's a way for me to address something that really bothers me in modern American fiction. I hesitate to call it political correctness, because the phrase is so overused and doesn't quite express the pernicious, destructive element that has shrouded the arts in this country. It's the whole smothering, censorious conglomeration of leftism, feminism, multi-culturalism and so on which seems to have replaced the medieval Catholic church as the muzzle and oppressor of the intellectual mind.

It's starting to crack now with the rise of the new right, but in the arts it still dictates. When was the last time you saw a movie with a conservative president as hero? Or a movie in which abortion was considered a bad thing? Why the hell not? I mean, artists are always declaring that art should shock, but they never mean it should shock them! They mean it should shock some make-believe fundamentalist preacher somewhere who in no way endangers their chances of getting a good review in the New York Times. Well, Bishop is an answer to that: he treats women like shit and women love him; he uses bad guys for target practice and he gets the job done. He's a hard-on with legs basically, and though the narrator, this young writer, is appalled by his coldness, he also admires what he calls his "lethal virility." And so do I. It's something that's been missing from the girly American art scene for too long.

In October of this year, we're getting Shotgun Alley from you. Scott Weiss and Jim Bishop are back. Will we get to see more sides of Weiss and Bishop? Something deeper? Something more of them you'd like to bring out?

Oh, absolutely. I think Shotgun Alley is one of the richest and most interesting novels I've ever written, which is usually a death sentence for a book in the market place, by the way, but there you go. It's the closest I've come to achieving a long-time goal of mine, the goal of writing a novel of pure, bullet-fast action and sex that's also an exploration of itself and its genre. It's a crime story, I think one of the best I ever did, but it's also an exploration of the crime story and the American imagination which produces it. It takes Weiss into the depths of an obsession, and Bishop into a very hot romance with a woman as predatory as himself. And it also gives Bishop a worthy adversary, a real top-notch villain to deal with. And all the while, without ever seeming to, without ever interrupting the flow of its action, it sort of explores the whole point and purpose of telling stories like this. I sound like I'm bragging, which is awful, I know, but I'm very proud of it.

Ok, on to new ground. We were particularly drawn to two of your books, The Uncanny and The Animal Hour. The reasons we liked them are nearly diametrically opposed: The Uncanny had its action and suspense, but it was the wonderful atmosphere, very reminiscent of what some might call "classic" horror & ghost tales, that really kept us interested. The Animal Hour, on the other hand, was almost an all-out assault on the senses, with plot twists and turns a-plenty, and a very likable and enigmatic poet named Oliver Perkins.

We know you're as well particularly fond of both. Tell us why.

I'm always very moved when people pick out those two novels because, with Shotgun Alley now, I think they're my most original books. I especially love The Uncanny for the richness of its themes and the imitations of different types of ghost stories, ranging from medieval ballads, through Victorian short stories to Hammer horror films. Both novels are about storytelling and identity, about the place of the imagination in defining the individual.

I'm always very moved when people pick out those two novels [The Animal Hour & The Uncanny] ...

The Animal Hour is about a woman who suddenly finds out she's not who she thinks she is and it basically takes her through the process of rebuilding her identity. It all takes place in a single day and, as you say, it's very fast and furious. And The Uncanny is about an assimilated American Jew, a film producer, who goes to England to search for the truth about the English ghost stories that have defined his inner life. Both stories, The Animal Hour implicitly and The Uncanny explicitly, explore the question: is identity just a story we tell ourselves or is there someone there, a soul?

Now these books haven't done as well as some of your others. Any thoughts on that?

Yeah, (laughs), a lot of thoughts. When I look back on my career, on the intentions of my career, I understand that a certain amount of commercial failure was written into the program. I wanted to take genre fiction and use it to explore very rich, very deep themes, but not in that horrible literary way that the critics love, you know those books where they say, "It's so much more than a thriller," and really it's so much less because it's not thrilling at all, there's not one thrilling moment in it. I wanted my stories to work as thrillers first, to be full of nerve-shattering suspense, to move like the dumbest bestseller ever written, but to genuinely delve into questions that obsessed me, of meaning and imagination, identity and narrative and faith.

Sometimes that was possible, and the action moved like lightning, hiding the intentions beneath. That's when the cash registers rang and the movie producers showed up and so on. But sometimes the themes dictated a stranger journey, darker, more complex. And then, alas, the crops died and darkness covered the land. The guy who read True Crime on an airplane and said, "Hey, that was really zippy, what else have you got?" and then went out and bought The Uncanny, he felt terribly betrayed, I suspect. But from my point of view, they were all of a piece, all part of the master plan.

At the end of the day, how big of an effect does something like that have on your work? Obviously, you want your work to sell and the praise of both fans and peers is something any of us enjoys. But do you find it can influence you to take the following work in a different direction?

Well, that's a good question, and I'm not sure I know the answer. I have tried to stay rock solid true to my intentions. When True Crime came out and made a splash and sold to the movies and so on, I could've followed it up with True Crime Two or whatever. But I wrote The Uncanny instead, knowing full well I was shooting myself in the commercial foot, but also knowing that this was the dictate of my muse, my song. But everything that happens becomes part of you, and who can say the commercial failure or success of one work doesn't somehow feed into the inspiration for the next?

All in all, I've been extremely fortunate. I've done exactly what I wanted and I've made a decent living. Plus I have a really hot wife. I'm a pretty jolly guy.

Now, you've had several of your works make it to the big screen, you've even written specifically for the big screen with A Shock To The System (1990), starring Michael Caine. Your most widely known would probably be True Crime (with Clint Eastwood) and Don't Say a Word (with Michael Douglas and Brittany Murphy). There are a lot of folks who go see movies and might not have ever heard of the books these films are based on. For the benefit of those not in the know, what's the process when a book is taken and crafted into a film? Just exactly how "based on" do you generally find these films based on books to be?

You know how mathematicians say: it's extremely unlikely a given coincidence will happen, but it's extremely likely that some coincidence will happen. Well, movies are like that. It's extremely unlikely any given movie will get made, the process is so difficult and expensive and fraught, but I guess it must be likely that some movie will get made because they keep coming out with them. So I'm glad they've adapted my books because the odds are against it, and it's very helpful in terms of money and career. But they're very different art forms and you can't get too wrapped up in the similarities and differences.

As for the process, usually it begins with a studio buying or optioning the book, then hiring someone to write a screenplay. When the screenplay has either been perfected, in the best case, or utterly ruined, in the worst case, it's then sent out to actors and directors and so on. The idea then is to get the elements, Tom Hanks to star and Gore Verbinski to direct or whatever, so that the studio is lulled into a false sense of security, making it possible to pry the fifty million dollars from them you need to start filming. How it ever actually gets done, I can't imagine.

Do you ever find these film projects frustrating as a writer seeing your work added to or taken from?

Nah. I know from experience, the difference between writing a novel and writing a screenplay is the difference between being an architect and being a carpenter.

Writing a novel, it can take me all morning to describe a character walking from one side of a room to the other. Not just the character's thoughts, feelings, movements, but every stick of furniture in the room proceeds from me, my mind, my imagination. When you read that, you get everything I'm capable of giving you. Writing a screenplay, I tap in: "He walks across the room," and then it's up to Michael Douglas and the director and the scenery guys and so on to make the thing live. So if I sit there and watch the film and say, "That's not my baby anymore," it's ridiculous. Of course it's not. It's a group creation. Which is not to say a cluster fuck. But it's enormous fun, and I like the movies, so I just try to have a good time with it.

New ground again. What was it about The Woman in White that inspired you so? It obviously moved you a great deal if works like The Animal Hour came from said inspiration.

I know from experience, the difference between writing a novel and writing a screenplay is the difference between being an architect and being a carpenter.

Well, see, at that moment in my youth, I was torn, I was divided. I felt I had a deep and original vision of life, a vision that went against the current tide of ideas, and I thought the proper form for such a vision was the "literary" novel. But the modern literary novel struck me as the dullest, most pretentious thing in the world, whereas the crime novel was in living communication with actual readers, giving them actual thoughts and feelings and experiences like novels are supposed to do. Plus, it was my natural genre, the one I had a talent for.

You know, it was that thing about, "Am I selling out? Am I being true to my vision?" Then, when I read the Woman In White, I suddenly thought, "Wow, yeah, you can write a thriller that does everything a literary novel does." I mean, the Victorian British novel is pretty much the height of novel writing for my money, and The Woman In White, for maybe 700 of its 800 pages is as good as any of them. So with that inspiration, I set out to try and fashion an American version of that, faster, leaner, more idiomatic, but still rich with meaning and vision. Looking back, it was a pretty arrogant and audacious, possibly suicidal, thing to do. But that's what youth is for, I guess, and I'm still here.

Now, with Dynamite Road and Shotgun Alley, we see you taking a break from the thriller and heading back to the detective novel. Is it a big adjustment or do you find yourself more or less easing into it again?

No, no, it's all part of the plan. After I wrote Man And Wife, I felt I had completed a sort of cycle of thriller novels. As I say, I'd been using the thriller to explore certain themes that were interesting to me: the limits of rationalism, the power of imagination and storytelling, the nature of identity, the possibility of faith. I started with Don't Say A Word, in which a psychiatrist's analysis of a young woman's fantasies masks the fact that her fantasies aren't fantasies at all, his rationalist theory fails to take account of the mysterious facts, and that's what sets the plot into motion.

With Man And Wife, I returned to that idea in a deeper way, where a psychiatrist treats a religious mystic and expertly "analyzes" his visions while their imaginative truth, in turn, unmasks the shrink's life and takes it apart. I realized I'd completed a thought, as it were, and it was time to go back to the beginning, to the basics of the genre, and make a statement about it.

How difficult has it been for you to conceive characters that you know will be featured in a series versus the ones whose situations are resolved within the scope of one book?

After I wrote Man And Wife, I felt I had completed a sort of cycle of thriller novels.

The tough thing is, as they say, keeping it real. I mean, with all these stories, there's an element of unreality, or super-reality or whatever. My particular speciality has been bringing realistic human reactions and emotions to stories about kidnappings and death row and manhunts and so on. So the problem I faced with Dynamite Road and Shotgun Alley was how to put people through these earth-shattering events, and then bring them back and do it again. That's why I like the technique of the narrator so much, because it creates the possibility, in fact the likelihood, that the stories are being processed through his crime writer's imagination. There's a bit of a conjuror's trick to it, if you watch closely, because Weiss and Bishop are not just people he knew, they're people he's creating as, in fact, I'm creating him.

We asked you earlier why you liked Jim Bishop, and surely you must like him as much or more than the reader since you'll be in his head for some time. Do you find yourself connected more to him than a single book character like, say, Oliver Perkins from The Animal Hour?

Not really. You know, one of the reasons I've written so little non-fiction is that every time I make a definite statement about anything, I can also see another argument, the side from which it's all wrong. What I like about fiction is that you include that in the mix. Each character has a point of view, but each point of view is limited and incomplete and contradicts the points of views of others. I identify with all my characters, men and women both, but I see their flaws, their weakness and the things they can't see about themselves. None of them is me, and in the end, they're all me together, I guess.

Not just the heroes, I mean, but the spear-carriers and clowns and everyone. The villains too, you have to say that. The villains too. I mean, I'm a delightful fellow, really I am, but these things of darkness I acknowledge mine.