We’ve gone from Dirty Harry to Jason Bourne (or whatever his name ended up being; the camera was too shaky for me to ever tell what was going on). We’ve gone from Humphrey Bogart to George Clooney.  We’ve gone from John Wayne fighting Indians to Na’vi fighting Americans.

But, don’t fret. For there is an answer to our problems, fellow film buffs. I know you’re six feet from that ledge, but let me give you hope…they are called books. They are these contraptions with bindings and pages with words on the inside. Together this all creates a story one hundred times more fulfilling than today’s dim-witted liberal flavor-of-the-month films.

Hollywood has always been a liberal town. They give us anti-Iraq war movie after anti-Iraq war movie despite the fact that they all flop at the box office. But what of the literary world?  They must surely share Hollywood’s contempt for conservatives and enriching stories, right? Wrong. The publishing world seems to get it, for the most part. They like to publish what sells and what seems to sell today are right-leaning stories.

Stephen Hunter, Vince Flynn, Brad Thor, Tom Clancy, Frank Miller, James Ellroy, and Andrew Klavan. These are just a handful of names of today’s top fiction writers. All of them have something in common: they have, admittedly, right leaning politics and philosophies. This does not mean that their books are some kind of weird right-wing propaganda. What it means is that their stories usually make the bad guys who the bad guys really are and their heroes don’t shy away from masculinity or righteous indignation. These writers also have something else in common: they are all New York Times bestselling authors. Try out Stephen Hunter’s new novel Soft Target. It’s a hundred times better and more visually striking than any new action film to hit theaters in the last year. Or try Andrew Klavan’s last adult thriller, The Identity Man. It’s more thought-provoking and more well thought out than any half-baked political thriller cooked up by George Clooney. These writers lead the fiction front in literature today. They put out bestsellers that frequently win acclaim from critics.

As for non fiction…now we are really getting to the heart of the beast. Look at the New York Times bestseller list for non-fiction and you are bound to see a plethora of conservative thought. While Bill O’Reilly and Laura Ingraham are regularly blasted in the mainstream media, they regularly put out bestsellers. Others do too. In fact, most non-fiction political books that hit shelves are written by conservatives. Why this phenomenon and why now? Is it that conservatives have been turned away by Hollywood so they have retreated to the inner workings of books? Or is it because right-leaning artists and right-leaning thinkers need more than a 90-minute film to bring across a message and/or story?

Perhaps films are more representative of a liberal approach to storytelling, while writing is a more conservative approach. Films are a collected effort. They takes hundreds, if not, thousands of people to create, and usually have a vision that is compromised by too many cooks in the kitchen. Books, on the other hand, are a celebration of individualism. It takes one person to sit and put his vision down. Maybe this is the explanation, but maybe not.

But whatever it may be, this much is true: if you hit up your local bookstore or head over to Amazon, you’ll find a world of old school storytelling and right-leaning stories. John Wayne and his films ain’t dead, they just grew up. They exist in an entirely new world: the world of books.

Check out footage from the latest Tea Party rally and you’ll see people holding signs referencing classics like 1984 by George Orwell and Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Check out footage of the latest Occupy Wall Street rally and you’ll see people wearing “V for Vendetta” masks. That says it all.

An upcoming video game takes that branch of the OWS movement to its most radical conclusions.

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A snippet of the upcoming game “Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: The Patriots,” which won’t hit stores until 2013, was played over the weekend during the Spike TV Video Game Awards. The game casts the players as anti-terrorism agents squaring off against a group which believes the government and corporations are corrupt and must be taken down.

And if that means hurling an evil banker out the window, so be it.

Here’s a quick rundown on the video game’s plot:

Terrorism has evolved and America is under attack. Capitalizing on the sense of frustration in a nation seemingly corrupted by greedy politicians and corporate special interests, a group of US citizens-turned-radicals, the “True Patriots,” will stop at nothing to overthrow the government and financial institutions. As a leader of the elite Rainbow counter-terrorism unit, players will be the last line of defense tasked with saving the nation no matter the cost.

“Soft Target,” in bookstores Dec 6th, manages to be more than just not bad; it’s a modern Western on amphetamines; it’s Tom Clancy if Clancy were a better weaver of the old fashioned good vs. evil yarn; it’s… well, it’s Stephen Hunter all the way. Semper fi and all that.

Those who are familiar with the author will understand, and those who are not–well, what are you doing reading a book review by me when there is writing out there carved by a master?

“Soft Target” is the new Hunter thriller that takes place in a thriller writer’s fantasy land: America, the Mall. Appropriately, it combines the two things America loves the most: shopping and violence. Those two ingredients are enough to carry the novel through a harsh and very quick 254 pages. You will not want to put this one down.

Ray Cruz is Hunter’s new John Wayne. He’s retired USMC and just wants to leave the Mall of America with his beautiful fiancée, Molly Chan. Only problem is some jihadists have a very different idea and decide to take the mall and the thousands of innocent shoppers hostage on the busiest shopping day of the year: Black Friday.

Cruz, noble and honorable and flawed as he is, decides to take the mall back when there is little action being taken outside by Colonel Douglas Obobo. Hunter sets up the contrast between the two perfectly. Cruz is the conservative man of action, while Obobo is the liberal believer in mankind, the man who believes in words above all else. Other characters flourish as well in the novel, which, despite being short, fleshes out the action from every perspective imaginable. We follow Cruz, we follow the Imam leading the ordeal, we follow Colonel Obobo, newscaster Nikkie Swagger, FBI sniper McElroy, and many others. The novel fleshes out so many characters and tells the story in such a thorough way that Tarantino would be jealous.

As always, Hunter’s greatest gift is his style, his prose. He’s been called the “populist Faulkner” and for good reason. He’s no Vince Flynn and he’s no Tom Clancy. His characters inhabit a harsh world that is unforgiving and follows no set code of good wins over evil. His characters inhabit a place called reality where Hunter’s simple yet delicate and violent prose comes alive. His heroes are not perfect and his villains are never black and white.

In fact, Hunter is famous for going where no other writer will go. He enters the grey. He tells the densely complicated stories other thriller writers shy away from. He throws his noble yet heroic characters into the world of grey and forces them to deem what is black and white, good and evil, and we sit back and enjoy.

Hunter’s novels also appeal because of their visual style, and this one is no different. He manages to keep the pace fast and the narrative swift without sacrificing clarity, because he knows exactly what we want. He feeds us the exact images and verbs our inner beasts need to gobble up in order to be completely consumed by the story. Hunter has perfected the craft of the thriller by keeping his prose simple a la Hemingway and giving us the details other writers shy away from, all while providing these in the context of a visually striking world only a man who reviewed films for decades could give us.

“Soft Target” will pull you in fast and hard and will not let go until the very last utterance has been spoken. Ray Cruz is our new hero, our new John Wayne, and watching him navigate through a world of liberal spinners, evil jihadists, political guinea pigs and bureaucracy at its finest is more than entertaining. It’s thrilling, and that’s due to the epic prose of Hunter. There’s no other thriller writer like him today. Hell, there’s no other writer like him today. He passes the Clancys, the Flynns, the Thors like they were all standing still. And considering how far ahead his novels seems to be in all most every capacity, they must be.

In addition to wearing the above listed hats, Derbyshire has also written a strange and wonderful little novel called Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream, a book described in the New York Times as, “a bouncy, Capraesque tale of midlife crisis, romantic confusion and spiritual regeneration.”  (The Times review was so favorable that it puts the conceit that conservative authors can’t get a fair shake from the liberal media in a good bit of jeopardy).

I asked Derbyshire about Coolidge, the writing of which he recounts with both fondness and exasperation, with decided emphasis on the former.  He claims that writing fiction puts one in a state of “aesthetic bliss” (to paraphrase Nabachov), the prime virtue of which is an expansion of perspective that “…separates you from the everyday world.”  He tells me that writing a good novel gives one a pleasure many times that of reading a good novel, which, if true, must be a high state of bliss indeed.

Concerning modern poetry, Derbyshire tells me that “most of it is rubbish,” and leftist rubbish at that.  Concerning the New Formalists, he seems somewhat ambivalent.  The New Formalists, he says, are “not that formal,” and, in any case, “…art has to change, and some changes are dead ends.”

In prose, Derbyshire sees the prospects for conservative authors as not altogether bleak.  Like Michael Blowhard, he points out that while mainstream fiction tends to be tied to the Academy, and therefore liberal, in genre fiction the story is something else entirely.

Bill Buckley, he notes, wrote tons of excellent spy novels, starting in 1976 with Saving the Queen, the beginning of the long running and popular Blackford Oakes series.  Tom Clancy, best-selling author of political thrillers like The Hunt for Red October, is a decidedly center-right author who has reportedly given large sums to the Republican Party.  Science-fiction superstar Robert Heinlein was a Goldwater libertarian – in fact, Reason magazine said of Heinlein in 2007, “As a literary influence on the emerging libertarian movement, Heinlein was second only to [Ayn] Rand.”

Derbyshire could have added Dean Koontz to his list, the best-selling author of science fiction, horror, and suspense novels who as a young man worked for the Goldwater campaign, and who in 2008 was the subject of a favorable write up in National Review in which he was referred to as a “compassionate conservative.”  Or Michael Crichton, the science fiction writer (Jurassic Park) who in recent years outraged the liberal establishment with his frank and devastating critique of global warming orthodoxy in his novel State of Fear and in his address to the National Press Club in 2005 titled “The Case for Skepticism on Global Warming,” the text of which is to be highly recommended and may be found in full at Crichton’s official site.  (Mr. Crichton has sadly left us, succumbing to throat cancer in November 2008.)

So genre fiction can be welcoming waters for conservatives.  In poetry and drama, however, Derbyshire concedes that conservative authors may have a tougher time, especially in the theater, where “it will always be easier to put on a left wing play.”  Nonetheless, he says, “…conservatives can be poets and dramatists…the reign of the Bohemians is over.”

Ultimately, however, Derbyshire is of the opinion that political correctness rules in the big publishing houses, and that editors “enforce it ruthlessly.”  The silver lining is that “publishers want to make money,” and fortunately there is no shortage of openly conservative authors, O’Reilly, Coulter, et al, who have shown that there exists in North America a vast purchasing audience for “right wing” ideas and opinions.

Andrew (last name withheld), a New York based literary agent, agrees.  He has been in publishing for 16 years, four of them on the editorial side, the balance spent representing authors across the ideological spectrum.  Though conceding that “no question biases are there” in publishing, nonetheless Andrew insists that there are plenty of liberal editors who can and do rise above their prejudices and work with conservative authors.

Andrew insists that the success of conservative non-fiction authors proves that the situation of conservatives in publishing is “healthy,” though he concedes that “most novelists lean left.”  Why that would be so is a topic that we didn’t have time to get in to, but Andrew, who describes himself as a left-leaning centrist, hopes that “more conservatives gravitate towards” the arts and literature, because there is a need for “thoughtful books from both sides” of the aisle.

During my discussion with Andrew, the subject turns to the fear of many conservative authors that they will be ostracized or blacklisted for their views.  As an example, I ask him about the harsh reaction to David Mamet’s recent political conversion.  “Oh, yes, that was unfortunate,” he says, though Andrew correctly points out that ostracism is a phenomena that knows no ideology per se.

Tomorrow we will examine Mamet’s fascinating political coming out, and ask what it means for conservatism in the literary world.

[Ed. note: You can read a new chapter of this eight-part series every Saturday and Sunday morning. Previous chapters --Part one, two, three, and four.]

Matt Patterson is a columnist and commentator whose work has appeared in The Washington Examiner, The Baltimore Sun, and Pajamas Media.  He is the author of “Union of Hearts: The Abraham Lincoln & Ann Rutledge Story.”  His email is mpatterson.column@gmail.com.