A Woman Underground Is A Great Book
A Woman Underground
By Andrew Klavan
(Mysterious Press, 288 pages, $27)
Sometimes it takes several entries in a fiction series to strike gold. There were three terrific James Bond movies before the ultimate, Thunderball (Sorry, Goldfinger aficionados). And Hercule Poirot made a clever sleuth for two books only to stun readers in the rule-breaking third by Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. For ex-government assassin, unofficial detective, college poetry professor, and reluctant moralist Cameron Winter, everything comes together in Andrew Klavan’s thrilling mystery, A Woman Underground.
Every character is distinctive and memorable, you could say modern-day Dickensian.
Of course, the real mystery is how Klavan could offer such rich Winter novels just a year apart then outdo himself in the latest. It’s as if he’d started a subtle puzzle in the first book, kept assembling it through the next two, then added the satisfying last piece to the new one. Such multiyear narrative control requires a remarkable writer, and Klavan is one of the best. I already knew he could do this from my introduction to his work, a riveting trilogy featuring two other detectives, Jim Bishop and Scott Weiss. That Klavan specializes in tough guy crime fiction puts him in the pantheon with Hammett, Chandler, Spillane, and Fleming.
A Woman Underground retains the clever framework of three alternate stories established by the previous three Cameron Winter books: When Christmas Comes, A Strange Habit of Mind, The House of Love and Death. This consists of the fresh main mystery; a flashback to Winter’s youth then assassin spy past as told to his lovestruck yet sharp old psychiatrist, Margaret; and an intrigue on the university campus where Winter teaches Romantic Poetry, not coincidentally a passion of the author’s (see my review of his The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England’s Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus.
There are two major variations on the formula in A Woman Underground, and a great minor one. The memory Winter narrated to Margaret in the first book about his childhood love for a beautiful older girl, Charlotte, who still haunts him, becomes the main mystery in this one. In a brilliant demonstration of literary legerdemain, Klavan creates a fourth storyline — a novel within the novel featuring a renamed Charlotte as the protagonist, who’s in present-day danger. Winter has to mine the book for clues and locate the pseudonymous old female author to find Charlotte before a very real murderer does. Both devices are unique, engrossing innovations, at least to my experience in the mystery thriller genre.
According to Winter’s fictional guidebook, Charlotte was involved with several men in a fascist group planning to counter the forces of antifa during the early decade riots. One of the men, the handsome brutish “Moran,” Winter academically pegs as the elusive author’s John Galt, but whom he, Winter, recognizes as a formidable homicidal psychopath — his own Red Grant (From Russia with Love reference).
Moran is also obsessed with “Miranda” — Charlotte, only far more menacingly. Winter must beat Moran to her but is diminished by his own emotional depression that she helped initiate. The masterful combination of psychological insight, urgent literary detection, and ticking-clock cat-and-mouse suspense makes A Woman Underground an engrossing read.
The difference in the college storyline proves just as satisfying. All three previous installments featured Winter’s more attractive yet equally amusing Gladys Kravitz (old Bewitched reference) Lori Lesser, the dean of student relations who simultaneously wants to oust Winter for his sexual indiscretions and seduce him. Their maneuvers provide welcome humor in some serious drama. Lori is absent this installment, in which a professor colleague admits to Winter his intention to leave his wife and son for a nubile coed.
Though this thread is secondary to the main plot, it ultimately becomes just as exciting and heroic, while offering some of the finest writing in recent fiction. When Winter happens to observe the oblivious femme fatale on campus, seldom have the contrasting perspectives in a typical affair been more incisively described.
“He thought of the hulking forty-year-old Roger Sexton singing the aria of his middle-age opera. Oh, Barbara — she makes me feel so alive. And here was Barbara herself, and she hadn’t a clue that she was part of the show. Or if she did know, she didn’t give a damn.”
And even without Lori Lesser, Klavan finds the human comedy in Winter’s annoyance at Roger Sexton: “So often he struggled with the fact that he had killed people. But just now he was wondering if maybe he hadn’t killed enough of them.”
Every character is distinctive and memorable, you could say modern-day Dickensian. They include recurring ones like Margaret, undercover federal agent Stan Stankowski, who’s less a master of disguise than an inhabitor of each, and the enigmatic Recruiter, Winter’s former spy chief, who appears only in flashback this time unlike in a previous book.
And the new people really shine, in one special case, the present version of Charlotte, who we knew through Winter as a little girl then a teenager then a young woman. Indeed, it’s hard to measure which inspires more suspense — Winter’s predator-prey confrontation with Morgan or his looming encounter with Charlotte. Both greatly reward the reader, as does this book.
With the closing of a life-affecting chapter in his life, it will be interesting to meet Cameron Winter again next year. Knowing Andrew Klavan, he’ll be turning up right on time.
READ MORE from Lou Aguilar:
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