Andrew Klavan is the author of such internationally bestselling crime novels as True Crime,
filmed by Clint Eastwood, and Don't Say a Word, filmed starring Michael Douglas. He wrote the screenplay for 1990’s “Shock to the System,” starring Michael Caine, and the 2008 horror film “One Missed Call.” He is a contributing editor of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal and his essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times and elsewhere. He has been nominated for the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award five times and won twice. His latest novel is Empire of Lies.
Andrew Klavan
BOOK EXCERPT: Andrew Klavan’s ‘The Long Way Home’ (The Homelanders) — Part 2
by Andrew KlavanCharlie West went to bed one night an ordinary high school student. He woke up a hunted man. Terrorists are trying to kill him. The police want to arrest him for the stabbing death of his best friend. He doesn’t know whose side he’s one or who he can trust. With his pursuers closing in on every side, Charlie makes his way back to his hometown to find some answers. There, holed up in an abandoned mansion, he’s joined by his friends in a desperate attempt to discover the truth about a murder he can’t remember-and the love he can never forget.
Chapter One
The Killer In The Mirror – Part 2
You have to understand: a trained man with a knife is as deadly as anything, even more dangerous in some ways than a man with a gun. You might grab a gun. You might wrestle it away. But you can’t get hold of a knife without getting cut. And if the knife-man knows what he’s doing, he can carve you up with a blade just as fast as a bullet.
And this guy knew what he was doing all right. All the karate training in the world wasn’t going to save me if I didn’t act fast and act smart. If I fell and he came down on top of me, I’d be dead in seconds.
I knew it even as I was falling. The panic raced through my belly. The thoughts raced through my head: I have to do something. (more…)
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BOOK EXCERPT: Andrew Klavan’s ‘The Long Way Home’ (The Homelanders) — Part 1
by Andrew KlavanCharlie West went to bed one night an ordinary high school student. He woke up a hunted man. Terrorists are trying to kill him. The police want to arrest him for the stabbing death of his best friend. He doesn’t know whose side he’s one or who he can trust. With his pursuers closing in on every side, Charlie makes his way back to his hometown to find some answers. There, holed up in an abandoned mansion, he’s joined by his friends in a desperate attempt to discover the truth about a murder he can’t remember-and the love he can never forget.
Chapter One
The Killer In The Mirror – Part 1
The man with the knife was a stranger. I never saw him before he tried to kill me.
I was in the Whitney Library when it happened, about seven miles from my hometown of Spring Hill. I’d been there for about forty-five minutes. I had come with a plan—a plan to clear my name, to get free, to get home to my family and out of danger. Now I had to leave. It wasn’t safe for me to stay in any one place for very long.
I was in the main research room on the library’s second floor. I went down the hall and pushed into the men’s room. I took off my black fleece and hung it on the door of one of the stalls. Then, wearing just my jeans and black t-shirt, I stood at the sink and splashed cold water on my face. (more…)
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by Andrew Klavan
I’m going to New York soon where I’ll attend a debate between Bill Maher and Ann Coulter. I’m taking a small garbage bag so I can bring back what’s left of Maher.
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by Andrew Klavan
Death – always a good career move.
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by Andrew Klavan
Daniel Craig looks like he’s thinking: “If I hurry up, I can get over to Nolte’s house before Hondo’s over…”
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Frost/Nixon: The Liberal Film As Conservative
by Andrew KlavanI finally got around to watching Frost/Nixon, and I was struck by how often the conservative view of the world—that is to say, reality—snuck in past the filmmakers’ strenuous attempts to bar the door against it. We see, for instance, that Nixon was right: the media was out to get him. The bitter hate-filled James Reston Jr. (Sam Rockwell) is shown as obsessed with destroying the already-disgraced former President. In the end, Reston’s childish triumph is that television was able to reduce Nixon to a single image of guilt, thus eradicating all the complexities of his legacy. Then there’s ABC’s Bob Zelnick (Oliver Platt). Zelnick ridicules Nixon’s complaints that a lovestruck media Obamanized John F. Kennedy. But in that ridicule the facts come out: the mob-linked, priapic Kennedy started the Vietnam war and made enough tactical Cold War errors to drive the world to the very brink of extinction. No, the bias of the mainstream media—and its smallness, meanness and dishonesty—are well on display for those with eyes to see and ears to hear.
Sure, for the most part, the liberal mythos has its way with the truth throughout the picture. This is still a Hollywood film, after all. Nixon gets no credit for helping to expose Communist infiltration in American government, or for stopping the spread of Communism in Asia through his hard line war policies. The left takes no responsibility for the millions of murders brought about by the coming of “peace.” And, of course, we hear that the slaughter-happy Khmer Rouge was a creation of American policy: that comforting old leftist nursery story that no evil exists except when we make it—so if we’re very, very good, the bad men won’t hurt us. (more…)
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Curses!
by Andrew KlavanI write crime novels for a living. They are full of men—and other disreputable types—who talk like men talk and think in the words men think in. As a result of this, I frequently get letters from my fellow conservatives and fellow Christians that begin, “You call yourself a conservative,” or “You call yourself a Christian,” and then ask: “How can you write such filth?”
Now, not long ago, I was playing tennis—badly, as I sometimes do to counteract the rumors that I’m perfect in every way—and also because I suck—and with each new unforced error I would send up a furious shout of “Doggone it!” or “Rats!” My partner finally interrupted his serve and came to the net. “What is this?” he said, disgruntled. “I’ve read your novels. There’s no ‘Doggone it,’ in your novels. There’s no ‘Rats.’”
Sheepishly, I was forced to explain to him that I rarely use foul language in real life, and almost never in front of ladies, such as the ladies playing on the next court over. He seemed very disappointed.
This little incident came to mind the other day after the oddly lovable Andrew Breitbart posted here what he jokingly called Big Hollywood’s theme song, being Christian Bale’s despicable, bullying and obscenity-laced tirade against a Director of Photography—set brilliantly to a techno beat by some genius who calls himself RevoLucian. (more…)
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What The Nominations Tell Us
by Andrew KlavanBenjamin Button??? You gotta be kidding me. I spent three days watching Benjamin Button one evening and if that’s not the emptiest, most meaningless piece of high gloss semi-entertainment produced last year than I don’t know my American Idol. I mean, Brad Pitt’s a great actor who’s had sex with Angelina Jolie, I concede that. But what was the movie about? People don’t actually get younger, right? So it had to be a metaphor for something. But what? As near as I can make out, it was Hollywood’s take on what marriage is like: You hook up when you’re both hot then she loses her looks and he starts acting like a child.
Slumdog Millionaire? Yeah, I enjoyed it—then promptly forgot it: it’s a little, you know, light. And though I sympathize with Muslims getting persecuted in the world’s largest democracy, I can’t help noticing that Hollywood almost completely ignores all the Christians getting persecuted by genuine tyrants like the Myanmar junta and the ACLU. (more…)
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Why We Fight
by Andrew KlavanThis is by way of a friendly response to the estimable Jay Nordlinger, Senior Editor at the likewise estimable National Review. Jay wrote a strong column yesterday openly saying what I’ve been hearing many conservatives express tacitly ever since the election. Reflecting on the media’s disgraceful distortion of the characters of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin, he wrote:
“It seems to me that the Left has won: utterly and decisively. What I mean is, the Saturday Night Live, Jon Stewart, Bill Maher mentality has prevailed. They decide what a person’s image is, and those images stick. They are the ones who say that Cheney’s a monster, W.’s stupid, and Palin’s a bimbo. And the country, apparently, follows.”
I’ve been hearing and reading prominent conservatives and Republicans say nearly as much on television, in print and in private conversation ever since the election. They say Sarah Palin can never make a comeback. They say the fight for small government has been lost. They say we can’t have immigration reform that protects our borders. They say we have to distance ourselves from “embarrassing” commentators like Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter.
No, no, no, no. What the right is experiencing at the moment is a phenomenon called “cultural para-stimuli.” You can read all about it in Tom Wolfe’s wonderful novel I Am Charlotte Simmons. It’s sort of like peer pressure on steroids. It was discovered by Nobel Laureate Victor Ransome Starling, who found that when he surrounded normal cats with cats whose behavior had been bizarrely altered by brain surgery, the normal cats began acting like the crazy cats all around them.
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Wanted: The Moral Universe
by Andrew Klavan*Spoilers to Wanted*
My DVD player broke over the holidays so I’ve fallen a little behind in my watching of mindless action drivel, but hurrah, the new machine is here so I did catch Wanted over the weekend. Film-wise, it’s more or less okay, the first half an entertaining Matrix ripoff, the second half a lot of so-so CGI bang-bang. But idea-wise, it’s pure fascism—although Angelina Jolie shows us her butt so maybe fascism’s not as bad as we thought.
James McAvoy plays Wesley Gibson who’s not man enough to stand up to his overbearing boss or stop his girlfriend cheating with his best friend or do just about anything. Then Jolie shows up and teaches him how to be a super-human assassin and kill people. Doesn’t matter which people—although we get the feeling they’re unsavory because one is a businessman and another rides in a limo and smokes a cigar—it’s the killing that makes him macho. Also, he decks his best friend who’s so awestruck by Wesley’s new testicular magnificence he gasps, “He’s the man.”
Since the nature of the dead don’t matter, we’re treated to action scenes in which hundreds of innocent people are destroyed, but we’re not supposed to care. Just pay attention to the Nietzschean Super-Men fighting center screen, children, they’re the only ones who matter. The film concludes with Wesley committing the quintessential fascist act—delivering a bullet to another man’s brain. Then he turns to the camera—to us—and says, “Well, what the f*** have you done lately?” Yeah, he’s the man, all right.
I mean, this is not the usual romance of the outlaw—Scarface or Sopranos or something like that. Romantic though they are, those stories take place in a real world where evil has both a physical and a spiritual toll. In the world of Wanted, the killing alone has significance, the good or evil of the killer and victim count for nothing.
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Hooray For Big Hollywood
by Andrew KlavanWhen it comes to deploring the leftist hegemony in Hollywood, I can deplore with the best of them. It stinks that America-bashing and God-bashing and military- and capitalism-bashing—the usual cowardly leftist conformism parading itself as courage—continue to alienate audiences and turn many films into predictable ideological yawnfests.
But because our dishonest media hypes this half-baked tripe while ignoring or attacking top-flight material that does not walk the lefty line, we may sometimes miss the good news slowly becoming apparent all around us: the conservative revolution is already underway; we’re winning and we’ll win.
Have a look at some of the great things that have happened recently at the multiplex. Spider-Man 3, a pro-American, pro-responsibility film with deeply Christian overtones topped the box office in 2007. 300, which said a lot that needed to be said about the war on terror, came in at number ten. Even more amazing, the Oscar winner for the year was No Country for Old Men, a decidedly conservative film that linked the evil of its nihilist serial killer to the decline of morals since the 1960’s. “Once you stop hearing sir or ma’am,” says the film’s lone moral voice, “the rest [of the evil] will follow.”
It was pretty much the same this year. Top of the box office so far: the blatantly pro-war on terror Dark Knight. The Christian Prince Caspian is at number eleven. The pro-abstinence Twilight is currently at sixteen and still hot. And perhaps most delightfully, and of course most ignored by the MSM: the Christian pro-marriage film Fireproof, despite suffering from its shoestring budget, still out-performed such favorites of our media elites as W, Religulous and Stop-Loss.
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