Opening sentence: “Suddenly I woke up strapped to a chair.”

Strapped to that chair is Charlie West, a typically bright and motivated high school student who has no idea how he got there. The last thing he remembers is a good though unexceptional school day but nothing that connects to the where, how or why of his present and immediate circumstance. Not only has he been tortured, but voices in the hall have just decided to kill him … slowly.

From here Charlie will have to escape, out run and out-wit his deadly, resourceful captors and unravel what happened in-between scoring a first date with his dream girl and waking up in, well,  an Andrew Klavan page turner. The plot never stops moving or thickening and as the pieces come together, Charlie finds himself the only hope between … and that’s all you’re getting from me.

As fascinating as the story is, our protagonist Charlie West, a young man who rebels against lock-step conformity, questions authority and is unafraid to speak truth to power is just as fascinating because he really is all of those things.  Charlie’s a Christian who sees a satisfying future in serving his country and is unafraid to stand up to a politically correct history teacher even if it means a lower grade.

You could fill an ocean with books portraying left-wing teenagers as outsiders, but that’s about as dishonest as you can get. Assuming the anti-American, politically correct default position is The New Conformity – is creating a one-dimensional character – is about as radical as bringing aluminum cans to a recycling center.

Charlie West is not only a refreshing and original burst of fresh air, he’s an iconoclast and an alternative for parents who might like their kids to read about a hero who isn’t a one-dimensional walking leftist cliché, down on America, organized religion and all into Mother Earth.

I’m two decades older than the intended audience, not a fiction reader, nor a book reviewer, but reading something written by someone from our side who not only gets it but can do it so well is the real pleasure in all this. There are two things we conservatives concerned with the culture must do to further the cause. First, support the work created by artists sympathetic to our side. Second, support it only when it’s good.

With “The Last Thing I Remember” you’re doing both.

“The Last I Remember” is published Thomas Nelson and available tomorrow. 

Big Hollywood:  Where did the idea for “The Last Thing I Remember” come from? I know there’s an evolution to a good story, well told. How did this evolve from that first spark to final draft?

Andrew Klavan: Some of it in this case was a matter of putting my money where my mouth is.  For years, I’ve been complaining that there are no books with real boys in them, that when we want to write about manhood or patriotism or battling evil, we suddenly have to write about fantasy lands and dragons or Gotham City or whatever.  There’s real evil in the world, real people who do real evil, and they need to be fought and there’s no appeasing them.  So I started from that point of view.  Let me just speak plainly about what we’re fighting for, what kind of people do the fighting and what they believe that empowers them and why.  And I guess it started from that.

BH:  I know the secret to your success is having your wife read everything first. Are you like me? Do you get angry at her criticism, especially when she’s right?

AK: LOL.  I know your wife, you have the sweetest wife on earth and shame on you for getting mad at that good, good woman when she’s only trying to help.  But yeah, I do exactly the same thing.  You know how it is.  We pour our hearts and souls into these things and at the point when we show them to our wives, we’re still raw with it, the wound is still bleeding.  And she says, “This is the greatest novel I’ve ever read but on page 116, you misspelled whirligig,” and you’re, like, “How dare you, you harridan!  Don’t you realize I’m an ARTIST???  I meant to spell it that way!!!”  Luckily, my wife knows I worship the ground she walks on. 

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BH:  The writing “process” fascinates me. What’s yours? Do you set aside specific times each day, only write when you’re inspired? Long walks?

AK: I’m all discipline all the time.  I’m at my desk between 7:30 and 8:00 and work at least till noon, sometimes more.  Then I take a long lunch and get some exercise, tennis or karate or something, then I go back and do different types of writing chores, research and so on.  Then at night I do my reading, which is very important.  I think inspiration is misunderstood.  Inspiration is what you start with.  You wouldn’t be a writer if you didn’t have moments of inspiration, stories that appear out of the blue, fresh ways of seeing things, expressing things.  In the moment, the work is a matter of craft but the inspiration informs that.  It’s not like a light bulb goes on over your head and you have to rush to your keyboard.  Not usually anyway.

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BH:  Last year you wrote “Empire of Lies“, a brilliant novel that hit number one on the Amazon.com thriller list. You’ve been a best-selling, critically acclaimed author for a couple decades now. What was the reaction from the critics to “Empire,” as compared to your previous novels?

AK: Well, thank you for that.  The reaction was pretty dramatic.  I’ve been writing novels for years and have won, if I may say so, multiple awards and have gotten generally terrific reviews in hundreds of venues.  Suddenly Empire of Lies comes out and the hero is a political conservative who finds Christ and you could’ve heard a pin drop.  I think I got one mainstream review.  Called me “a right wing crackpot.”  That was it.  The rest was pretty much silence.  Luckily, though, a lot of good people stepped up and helped me publicize the book:  Glenn Beck, Mike Gallagher, the people at NRO and, oh yeah, some guy named Nolte.  I wonder whatever happened to him.  I heard he ripped off some public funds and went to Venezuela to work with Hugo Chavez.  Oh no, wait, that was Obama.  I always get those two confused.

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BH:  It’s amazing how this works. A writer like Stephen King can overstuff his novels, especially some of his later stuff, with left-wing talking points, speak out on politics regularly through his Entertainment Weekly column, and elsewhere – but he remains “Novelist and Storyteller Stephen King.”  And there are many other examples. But you do the same thing on the conservative side and the AP writes you off as a “crackpot.”

AK: You know what?  It is amazing.  And you know what else?  We have to stop being amazed.  We have to just take it as given that the mainstream venues are against us, the awards won’t go to us, the reviewers will attack us-sometimes without even admitting why.  We have to speak up for ourselves, we have to review each other, honestly and fairly, we have to buy the books that stand up for what’s right-assuming they’re good, assuming they do what they’re supposed to do, entertain, tell good stories.  We have to understand that the media is our enemy-the enemy of the American idea, our founders’ ideas-and we have to make our own arts, and celebrate our arts and reward our arts-and then we’ll see who wins in the marketplace.

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BH: You have stepped up your profile as a kind of “Culture Warrior” through your editorials in the major newspapers and your work at Pajamas Media, but I think it’s harder for our side to do this, as opposed to a George Clooney or Gore Vidal, who are allowed to compartmentalize their activism and creative work.

AK: Yes, it is easier for them that way.  But it’s harder for them too because they’re talking absolute nonsense and we’re telling the simple truth:  that liberty is a great good and worth defending, that right is right and wrong is wrong and moral relativity is merely a form of cowardice, that the individual is more important than the state, that our rights come from our Creator.   See, they can attack us, try to silence us, maybe crush us-but they can’t beat us because we’re right and they’re wrong.  The truth is not so coincidentally a lot like Jesus, dude.  You mock it, you torture it, you kill it-and yet there it stands.   I try not to worry about what they “allow,” or what they say is permissable.  I try to hitch my wagon to the truth and hold on.

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BH:  As one of the first out there calling on conservatives to get seriously engaged in the culture, how are we doing compared to a few years ago?

AK: Good.  Better.  But not good enough.  We got guys like you and Andrew Breitbart and you are both, I flatter you not, mighty warriors, cutting a way through the evil minions.  Every time I come on your site and see IowaHawk and Steven Crowder or go over to PJTV and see my colleague Alfonzo Rachel there doing his thing, my heart leaps up.   This is new, fresh stuff and it’s paving a way.  On the negative side, I’m still  seeing too much complaining and not enough creating.   Not enough novels reviewed in conservative venues, no awards for novels and movies from conservatives, no new cultural infra-structure to oppose the left, no money to make films that defend individualism and American values.  The left-and by the left I mean all the so-called mainstream venues-the left is not going to help us, they’re not going to reform, they have to be opposed and outdone.  We have to turn our backs on them-stop trying to win their Oscars and Emmys and Pulitzers-and begin to make a new American culture.

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BH:  For lack of a better term, since “coming out” what’s the best thing that’s come of it, or happened?

Oh, that’s easy.  I wrote a piece for City Journal called the Big White Lie, about what a relief it was to stop paying lip service to liberal lies.  To stop pretending that men and women are the same, for instance, or that all cultures are morally equivalent and so on.  For an artist to be chained to a system of dishonesty is, in some ways, more destructive than being put in prison.   At least in prison, you know you have to resist the power.  PC hogwash gets into your head, infects your thinking.  Once I freed myself from it, once I broke out of the Matrix, I think I started writing the best stuff I’ve ever written, thinking with greater clarity, seeing life more precisely as it is.  I’ll put what I’m doing next to anything anyone’s doing in the field.  And that’s pure joy.

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BH:  What’s the worst?

AK: Money.  It’s a lot harder for me to make money.  I can’t just pick up screenplay work in Hollywood like I could before-I can’t work in Hollywood at all.  I’m doing the best work of my life and, because the reviewers ignore or attack me, I have to work twice as hard to publicize it and get the word out.   But I haven’t lost a moment’s sleep over it.  I know I’m doing the right thing.

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BH:  Who should read “The Last Thing I Remember”? Who should we be buying this book for?

AK: Well, I’ve shown it to both boys and girls as young as ten and as old as 25 and have yet to get anything but an ecstatic reaction.  A friend of mine over at NRO told me he found his two sons, 12 and 14, fighting over it because both were so wrapped up in it.  I had to explain to him the whole buy-another-copy concept.   Also, Charlie has ambitions to be in the military, so if you have friends overseas, they might like it, they might see themselves in it.  And hey, you told me you really liked it and you look like you’re pushing 90, at least, so maybe it can skew older too, I don’t know.  But between 10 and 25, so far I’m batting a thousand.

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“The Last Thing I Remember” is published by Thomas Nelson and scheduled for release April 28th. You can pre-order it today at Amazon.com.

Andrew Klavan: Well, to begin with, you know how much I love video games…  I wanted to write a story such that, if a kid had my book in one hand and a video game in the other, he’d choose the book-it’d be that exciting.  And Thomas Nelson publishers and I are offering a guarantee that if you start this story and aren’t completely swept away, John Nolte will personally come to your house and sing the entire screenplay of Hondo to the tune of “Fella with an Umbrella.”  So you can’t lose.  But of course, if you want to tell a story that cool, you can’t preach and you can’t hammer people with your point of view, so I decided, okay, I just want to change the rules of the game, that’s all.  Instead of the usual alienated teen, or the wimpy guy who finds a magical sword, I’m gonna make my hero the kind of hero I like to read about:  a manly guy who loves America, believes in God and is ready to fight for liberty if he has to.  I thought, in the current climate, that alone would be revolutionary.

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BH:  For the record, people should know that either the Thomas Nelson Guarantee can bring me to your home to sing the “Hondo” screenplay to the tune of “Fella with an Umbrella,” or $10.

Anyone who reads fiction is used to protagonists with leftist viewpoints, especially from teenage characters. This has become the default position and accepted norm, but I hadn’t really realized how common this was until I met your protagonist Charlie West. It shouldn’t be a shock to meet a fictional high school kid who loves his country and believes in God, but such is modern-day pop culture.

AK: Exactly-and what people don’t realize is that an enormous system is in place to make sure such heroes are not the norm.  It’s not a conspiracy, it’s a created climate of opinion, a sort of critical consensus of what is and is not acceptable to say, what’s cool, what’s realistic, what’s entertaining.  Cross that line and-no matter how entertaining you are, how thoughtful you are, how much fun your book or movie is-you’ll be slammed, denounced, ridiculed and generally not allowed to sit at the cool kids’ table.  Luckily, I don’t have to worry about that, because WHEREVER I sit is the cool kids’ table.  Mostly because I sit next to you, but still…

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BH:  Who was your model for Charlie? Not to declare you un-hip, but modern, teenage culture; how they communicate and all the gadgets available to them felt very real.

AK: Yeah, well, I know I don’t look like it, but I actually do pay attention.  I have a teen-aged kid and I’m involved in his life and know his friends, plus it’s very easy to do research because real life kids are all on line telling everything to everybody.  But mostly, it’s this strange thing that happens to me when I write:  suddenly I know things I never really realized I know.  My wife always teases me that I can’t find a fork in our kitchen, but I sit down to write someone cooking a souffle and I get it just right.  It’s kind of weird actually and raises an interesting question:  where DO we keep the forks?

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BH:  One of Charlie’s heroes and inspiration throughout is Winston Churchill. Was it the quote Charlie lives by that brought you to Churchill, or did Churchill bring you to the quote?

AK: Oh, definitely Churchill to the quote.  As you know, I lived in England seven years, and he became one of my culture heroes.  You know, it’s easy to look at these historical guys and forget that, when they took their stands, when they showed their courage, history wasn’t a done deal, they didn’t know how it was going to come out, that they were going to win through and be the hero.  There were a lot of people then, as there are now, who wanted to move softly, softly.  Don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans.  Don’t insult Hitler and he’ll go away. Churchill was in political exile for years but he didn’t compromise.  He stood his ground.   And that’s the kind of integrity, the kind of courage in the face of self-doubt, that my hero, Charlie West, is searching for. 

Andrew Klavan

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BH: Obviously the book’s emphasis and primary goal is to tell an exciting story. The first page hooked me immediately and the pages didn’t stop turning from there.  So how would you describe the book? Not just the story, but what you want people to get out of it.

AK: Well, Charlie is this fairly ordinary, straight arrow kid who goes to bed one night and wakes up strapped to a chair being tortured by terrorists.  He hasn’t lost his memory-he knows who he is-he just doesn’t know what happened between the time he turned out the light and now-and how he’s gonna get out of it before they kill him.  The themes develop sort of naturally out of that.  Charlie has been put in a position where a lot of the beliefs he was certain about when his life was comfortable have now been suddenly thrown open to question in a very immediate and terrifying way.  His faith, his loyalties, his liberty are all under assault, and he’s not only got to keep himself from getting killed, he’s got to rediscover the reasons for what he believes so he can defend those beliefs.  Now that’s something that I think a lot of young people know about because they often go into a period where they question everything they were taught.  And it’s something I know a lot about too because I had to completely reshape my belief system and identity somewhat late in life.  So basically I wanted to allow readers to experience that journey with Charlie in the most exciting way I could think of.

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BH:  After a time, I thought of Charlie as the anti-Jason Bourne (at least the film version of Bourne). Charlie is on the run trying to unravel his past, but unlike Matt Damon’s character, he is not a moody, rank narcissist hoping to get in touch with his feelings and sort out personal issues.  I guess this is the difference between the hero and anti-hero.

AK: The whole purpose of the anti-hero is to assert man’s individuality in the face of a conformist society.  But where’s the conformity now?  It’s political correctness, it’s easy ungrateful radicalism protected by the might of the US Marines, it’s artists pretending to speak truth to power when what they’re really doing is kowtowing to powerful left wing critics and producers.   Charlie stands for the truth as God gives him to understand it, whether that makes him popular or not, whether it endangers his life or not.  The ancients had a word for that:  they called it manhood, and Charlie’s got it.  The whole thing about Bourne is that he was created in the 1970’s and so was the antiquated worldview of today’s so-called radical artists.  In truth, they ought to be wearing big sideburns and bell bottoms.  They think they’re cutting edge, but they’re really just Saturday Night Fever.

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BH: There’s a Readers Guide at the end of “The Last Thing I Remember.”  Is the idea to get this in classrooms or in the hands of teenagers in some structured way?

AK: Well, that’s something publishers do because it helps teachers discuss the book with kids, helps kids learn to think about what they’re reading.   But I’m not involved in it except to give my approval.  My job is to write the story.  And to pose for the picture of the young man on the cover.  All right, I’m lying.

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BH:  There’s also a preview of the next chapter in the Charlie West series, due in February of 2010.

AK: Yes, and I’m glad to say the book is already done.  Charlie has to go home in the sequel to try and clear his name.  I found it a very moving story to write, because everything and everyone he loves is right nearby but he can’t reach out to them for fear of bringing them into danger with him.

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BH:  I loved “Don’t Say a Word,” which was adapted into a terrific feature film starring Michael Douglas. One of your “Last Thing I Remember” characters, Crazy Jane, seemed to be a nod to the “Don’t Say a Word” character played so well by Brittany Murphy.

AK: I’ve always been fascinated with madness, schizophrenia especially.  I suppose it raises serious questions about reality and identity that are important to storytelling, especially the stories I write in which the search for truth is so central.  There’s also something extraordinarily heart-wrenching about it because, I’ve worked with disturbed people, on hotlines and in shelters, and you get the powerful sense that the real person, the person God made them to be, is in there, but can’t break through the prison of their disease.  You just want to rip the disease open with your bare hands and set them free.

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BH:  When it comes to the creative process, how do you go about writing a story like this? It’s obviously structured meticulously and deliberately; is this something you outline beforehand or find as you go?

AK: Oh no, I’m a big outliner.  I’ve written outlines almost as long as books.  I’m obsessive about it.  Because the plot is the frame of the house and, for me, it’s got to be more or less in place so you can do the richer, deeper things that make it spring to life, the characters, the themes, the emotions.  What good is any of that, if the reader is thinking, wait a minute, that doesn’t make sense, that would never happen.  So the plot has to work before I get started because I don’t want to be troubled by it when I’m supposed to be delving into a character’s heart.  I don’t want to get to the moment of profound revelation and suddenly think, holy moley, Colonel Mustard’s supposed to be in the library with the lead pipe!

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In part two, which runs tomorrow, Andrew Klavan talks more about his writing and creative process, and what it’s like to be openly conservative in the world of publishing and Hollywood.