A Conversation With Andrew Klavan on Incorporating Philosophical Ideas Into Storytelling (Killer Writers)

Andrew Klavan is a master storyteller I’ve followed for years, known for his gripping crime thrillers and psychological suspense novels, blending hard-boiled noir with profound moral and philosophical themes. With a sharp, cinematic writing style, I’m amazed at how Klavan crafts fast-paced narratives filled with high-stakes action and razor-sharp dialogue. His works, often infused with themes of faith, redemption, and the nature of good and evil (all favorite themes of mine), have earned him multiple Edgar Award nominations and a devoted readership. 

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“Andrew, you do it so well, I want to talk about how writers can incorporate their philosophical ideas into their works without slowing down the pace and not making them pedantic. Everything I’ve read of yours explores moral dilemmas. How do you balance the entertainment value of a thriller with that deeper philosophical mind of yours?”

“I started out very confused about that, and a great breakthrough for me when I was in my thirties was reading The Woman in White, a very classic Victorian thriller, where I saw the way that he seamlessly interwove a vision of the world—not necessarily philosophy, but just a vision of the world—with an incredibly exciting and mysterious story, and that woke me up to the fact that it could be done in a modern American thriller. It’s much tougher because you’re moving at the speed of light. These thrillers must move like clockwork. I always put the thrills first. I always hate it when I hear a reviewer say, ‘Oh, it’s more than a thriller,’ and I think, ‘Okay, but is it a thriller first?’ because that’s what people are coming to get, and they should get it. I think the important thing is that the story and the characters’ interaction with events should express a vision of life. It’s not just what one character thinks or one character says. It is really the interplay of people with events—like in your life or my life—that expresses the meaning of things. If you keep to your story and you make sure your story is tight and fast and exciting and thrilling, and then you make sure your characters are real, themes are going to bubble to the surface almost without you doing the work, and that’s what I try very hard to do.”

“Your protagonists are complex. They must make tough ethical decisions. How do you approach writing these flawed characters but have them resonate with readers, even if we feel uncomfortable with them?”

“I’ve never met anybody who wasn’t flawed so that makes it easy. I try to write the character honestly. That’s all there is to it. One of the things you find in stories, but also in life, is that good people are not flawless. They’re people who do or strive to do the right thing. I’ve written characters who are bad guys who, in that story, did the right thing. Winter, in my new series, is unique in the characters I’ve created in that he’s done some things he’s not sure he should have done. He’s trying to find his way back to the best man he can be, which is inherently appealing because the best of us are all trying to do that. It would be completely unappealing to meet a character with no mountains to climb.”

“Justice and redemption are recurring themes in your work. Do you see crime fiction as the ideal genre for exploring those themes?”

“Many people say that crime fiction is a place people go to for comfort because things are out of order. There’s a murder, and then the detective comes, and he sets it right. That’s a very common idea about crime fiction. And that’s not the way I see it at all. I see murder as the ultimate expression of evil. It’s the erasure of another person, which is the opposite of loving your neighbor. It is the complete just x-ing out of somebody. The ways people interact with that wickedness and the evil in the world are expressive of their situation and our situation. What I try to get at is the fact that it’s a gray world.”

“Your books often deal with the characters’ faith and belief amid all the violence, chaos, and ambiguity that’s going on around them. How do you weave those spiritual themes into a hardboiled crime narrative without making it feel forced, without going over the top?”

“In a way, it’s simple. I don’t want to say it’s easy but simple. I believe there’s a God, and I’m not kidding around. For me, writing without a moral order and without a spiritual world would be writing books without gravity in them. That might be a good fantasy, but since I write fairly realistic fiction, to have my guys floating five feet above the ground or jumping off a building and wafting to the ground, falling and breaking their heads open, would be the same to me as writing in a world where there is no moral order, and there is no spiritual realm in which that moral order exists. The only people I’ve ever heard make sense of a world that had no spiritual level have promoted evil, like the Marquis de Sade, who said, ‘There’s no God, so we should just hurt other people because it’s pleasant to do that.’ And when I read that, I thought, ‘Yeah, that makes sense if there’s no God.’ I’m simply writing the world as I see it. That means if someone does evil without a conscience, there’s something wrong with him. It’s not that nobody does evil and doesn’t care. It’s that that guy is a bad guy. There’s something broken in him. Whereas good people do bad things, and they think, ‘Oh, now I feel bad. And now my world is warped in some way.’ I should point out I learned this trick from Shakespeare because it’s all through his plays. People who do evil without conscience are evil. You can see they are, and you can see that that has a cost, and it has a cost for other people and a cost even for themselves. I write that. I don’t have to write characters who believe in God, although I do write that because I think so many people do, and they get left out of fiction almost entirely. You can go to the movies forever and never see somebody say grace at a meal, whereas many, many people do say grace at a meal. I try to put those characters in, mostly as a demographic act, just because many people are like that. Some of my characters, for instance, Cameron Winter, are an agnostic. He’s not sure what he believes. He knows there’s something mysterious out there, but he’s not quite sure what he believes. That’s an experience, too. And I write his experience. I don’t try to convince him. I don’t try to have a brick drop on his head because he said something impious. I just let him live in that uncertainty, which has costs and value for him.”

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“Hardboiled fiction often embraces this kind of cynical view of the world, yet your stories have this underlying sense of these characters looking for moral clarity. How do you maintain that balance?”

“When I came to faith, one of my biggest worries was losing that hard edge. When I look at the world, I think it’s worse than people think. It’s a place of evil all around us, and we are part of that in the sense that we must live our lives. You want to live your life. I want to live my life. We want to have comforts. We want to have joy. We want to have all these things. And so, you don’t spend every day on the street protesting the wickedness in the world. We live within that context, and I believe we’re meant to live and have joy. I’m cynical in that sense. I have a tragic view of life in that sense. I would say I have a tragic view of life, period. I believe that there is more to life than life, so I think I fit very well into the hardboiled narrative, but I think I am bringing something fresh and different to it because I have faith.”

“You explore political and cultural commentary in your work. Do you consciously put those themes in from the beginning, or do they emerge as you type? And/or are they coming from you? How does that work?”

“I consider them part of plotting. I plot very carefully before I write. I write extensive outlines, and I consider that part of our world. If I were writing Miss Marple like Agatha Christie, if I were writing, you know, Hercule Poirot in a little British village, then maybe those factors wouldn’t come into play. But America is such a politicized society that to write without politics would be to write in some other country, would be to write in a fantasy world. I include them as part of the engine of the story. I’m very careful because, like most of us, I have strong political views. I’m very careful to let each person have his view unfettered by me. I think that’s the important thing. I don’t have to show that the guys I disagree with are wrong. I just let them live. I know many people I disagree with strongly who are lovely people, so I try to let people be full in their views. But to write in America without politics is not to write America.”

“Some argue that crime fiction is inherently political because it deals with law, justice, and power. How do you see your role as a writer in shaping and challenging these contemporary political narratives?”

“I’m not an issue writer, but I look around and see things that are sometimes being done with the best intentions that go awry. That’s always an interesting story to me. The fact that somebody might do something out of good intentions that paves the road to hell has always fascinated me. I see major issues in the country affecting everybody’s inner life. This is one of the things that I think news coverage never touches on, that you can’t do bad things to people without people showing up outside your door with torches and bricks and saying, ‘Hey, you know you mistreated me.’ People in the news business act like there shouldn’t be any repercussions for bad actions, but there are.”

“There’s always been pitchforks.”

“There’s always been pitchforks, and you know that thing where the king looks out the window and says, ‘Is this a rebellion? No, it’s a revolution.’ We’re always sort of on the brink of that in America. And so, even though I try not to be an issue writer, I never sit down and say I’m going to write a book about immigration, or I’m going to write about a book about this, I try to pick a location and think, ‘What are the problems that would be facing that society at that moment?’ That’s where politics come in, more than political figures, although I include them too.”

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“Let’s go look at your protagonists, like Winter, who frequently grapple with things in their past and have personal dilemmas, and not all of them have psychologists to talk to. How do you craft these backstories that enhance the philosophical and political dimensions of your narratives?”

“I sit with my characters for a long time. I outline characters like I outline stories. There comes a point in every book where, if you’re fortunate, the characters come to life, and your outline goes out the window because then the character is telling you what he is, who he is, what he’ll do, and what he won’t do. I’ve lost entire outlines when the character would not do what I wanted him to do in any realistic way. Many good thriller writers are pure plot, but if a thriller is not about a real guy in an extraordinary situation, it doesn’t have any depth. I like exciting stories but want them to be exciting and have a sense of real life. You can’t do that without real characters.”

“Do you think modern crime fiction, to some degree, has lost its philosophical weight compared to classic noir writers like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Andrew Klavan?”

“I absolutely do. I think this kind of addiction to serial killers speaks to the fact that we can’t understand that evil doesn’t have to be some guy cutting people into little pieces and hanging them up on a hook. Evil can be a very quiet thing, and it can be something that, as Solzhenitsyn said, ‘the line between good and evil goes right through every human heart.’ I think that we have reached a point in our society where we’ve talked ourselves into the idea that tolerance is the only good, which is absurd. I mean, we know it’s absurd because ultimately, whenever somebody says to me, good and evil is relative, my urge is to punch them once in the face and say, ‘Is it still relative?’”

“And we know you were a fighter, so you can punch them.”

“In my youth, in my youth. But no, I think that the moral thing is really interesting to me. I love the arts, and I love stories, and I love paintings and all these things. I’ll listen to podcasts, and people will discuss a movie, but it will never occur to them to discuss whether the movie had a moral outlook or what the moral outlook of the story was. Sometimes, I see a movie that’s so beautifully made, and every actor who’s on screen is always so talented. We have so many talented filmmakers in the country. But I’ll be looking at it and think, ‘These guys don’t really know how life works and what matters in life, and they’re just kind of dodging the issues that really do matter.’ I think we have reached the point where people are afraid to say, ‘Oh, that is an obvious wrong, that shouldn’t be done, and that will blow back on you and hurt you.’”

“And writers are in that position?”

“You can say it with all love. I know many people are just living their lives in a way I can tell they’re going to become a cropper, but you should write it so that there is a reaction from the moral order to your actions.”

“If a new writer reading this column wanted to incorporate deeper philosophical or political themes into their thriller, what advice would you give them to ensure that their ideas feel like they’re coming out of them organically rather than some sort of didactic place?”

“I think it was a Zen master somewhere along the line—I cannot remember who it was—said, ‘Enlightenment is easy. All you have to do is give up all your opinions.’ I think that is one of the best things a writer can do. We’re talking about the moral order. We’re talking about these things, but if you set judgment aside and look at people, and what happens in response to their actions, how their actions affect them, how their actions affect the world, and just get it right, and just write it as it actually is, not as you want it to be, where all the good guys win, and all the bad guys lose, or not as you want it to be, where all the bad guys are miserable. My favorite example of this is at the end of Macbeth. Macbeth is a nihilist, you know. He believes life is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing, not because Shakespeare is a nihilist but because Macbeth has broken away from the moral order. Shakespeare shows what happens to that guy. That’s what I try to do. I think that’s one of the things that young writers should practice continually, along with grammar, is watching the world without opinions.”

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Andrew Klavan is the author of such internationally bestselling crime novels as True Crime, filmed by Clint Eastwood; Don’t Say A Word, filmed starring Michael Douglas; Empire of Lies; Werewolf Cop; and the Cameron Winter series. He also hosts a popular podcast The Andrew Klavan Show at the Daily Wire. https://www.andrewklavan.com/