With His Latest Detective Novel, Andrew Klavan Enters The Heart Of Darkness

In a passage from Ezekiel, the Old Testament prophet offers a message from God to His people, Israel—”I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” 

It’s a promise for their good, but it comes at a cost. Flesh feels pain; stone doesn’t. And the new heart will “remember its evil ways and wicked deeds, and [it] will loathe [itself] for its sins.” 

Cameron Winter, the poetry professor who moonlights as a detective in Andrew Klavan’s eponymous mystery series, is familiar with that kind of loathing. As an assassin for an intelligence agency known only as the Division, he was, by his own admission, “dead inside. Cold as ice.” Now, years removed from government service, Winter is only too aware of the ravages his past actions have wreaked on his soul. So he’s once again putting his training to use solving cases no one asked him to solve, all in a subconscious bid to become the thing that has always drawn him to the Western canon — a hero. Or, if not a hero, at least a good man. 

“This book, I think, is the crisis book,” Klavan tells me of A Woman Underground, the fourth entry in his Cameron Winter series. “Winter started out depressed, and then he started to go into therapy, and he started to feel better, as one does when one is in therapy. And now he’s kind of peeled off the layers so that he has now reached the center of himself. It’s a tumultuous, volcanic, painful place.”

But Winter’s soul isn’t the only thing undergoing a painful, volcanic eruption — so is the country he loves.

This outing finds the detective on the trail of a childhood love who’s caught up with a group of fascist radicals. Her lover, a murderer known as “The Phantom of the Zones,” has a penchant for luring antifa-style rioters into dark corners, where he unleashes beatings that leave his not-so-innocent victims wheelchair-bound. Winter’s search for the woman among anti-Semites masquerading as idealists and socialists masquerading as freedom fighters continuously brings his mind back to another journey into the heart of political darkness — an unfinished mission to track a Turkish sex trafficker that revealed the corruption within his own nation.  

“[Winter’s] life in the Division had stripped him of all respect for political ideology,” Klavan writes in the novel. “He had nothing but disdain for true believers of any stripe.” But that doesn’t stop various characters from trying to sell him on their politics, their faith, their fight.

Is anything still deserving of the patriotic devotion Winter once had for his country? One witness Winter encounters echoes his own disillusionment, observing cynically, “It’s not like there are any good guys anymore … There’s nothing left to fight for.” 

Klavan’s planned 10-book arc for Winter may yet prove otherwise. Because while politics aren’t the focus of his novels, they are an inextricable part of that question. 

“You can’t tell a story about America today without writing about politics,” Klavan tells me. “So I wanted to send Winter into this world that we saw of riots and city takeovers and extremist politics on both sides, as a guy who really doesn’t have a political stance anymore because he saw how the sausages were made. He still has ideals and ethics — he thinks people should be free, should not be oppressed — but he has no sympathies ideologically. So I thought it would be interesting to plunge him into an America like the America we know that is full of politics, without making the story about politics.”

Will Winter and his nation be able to overcome their violent impulses and self-deceptions to take hold of the true and the good again? Does anyone even know what’s true and what’s good anymore? (Winter, at least, has the motherly care of his therapist, Margaret, to help with that). While Klavan won’t say exactly what the future holds for either, he’s clear that he won’t be beholden to the postmodern, anti-hero worldview of the modern era and leave his protagonist in limbo. 

“I don’t want Winter to be a guy like in a television series who just has the same problem over and over again,” Klavan says, “He’s going to get somewhere. And this is the book where he confronts his own past, and also the changes in the country that he went to fight for.”

If he’s treading the path Ezekiel laid out, we know Winter is at least on the right track as he asks himself, “Who could free him from the weight of his past … How could anyone wash the blood off his hands?”

Whether the pain of confronting the man he was to become the man he wants to be is worth the pain may be the biggest mystery Cameron Winter will eventually solve. 

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