Clavin’s new novel After That, The Dark—the fifth in the Cameron Winter series—finally resolves a decades-old plot after Otto Penzler’s push, blending thriller, mystery, and romance as Winter falls for Gwendolyn Lord while solving a conspiracy. Praised by Publishers Weekly as "brilliant," it challenges modern storytelling by portraying a morally grounded yet flawed protagonist amid cultural skepticism of "good guys." With reader-driven success (like The Truth and Beauty’s USA Today bestseller run) and Penzler’s industry clout, hitting the New York Times list would be a rare victory—proving creative works can still outmaneuver media bias. Buy at dailywire.com/Clavin for signed copies. [Automatically generated summary]
I will be signing approximately 72,000 copies of my new novel, After That The Dark, which will be available to you at the Daily Wire shop.
And you can get to the Daily Wire shop by going to dailywire.com slash Clavin.
And that, you may not know how to spell Clavins, K-L-A-V-A-N.
And that will take you to all the venues where you can buy After That the Dark, including Amazon, Barnes ⁇ Noble, all the others, or the Daily Wire shop where you can get these copies that I'm going to sign while you watch, just to show you.
It's like a high wire act.
I'm not just going to do it behind the scenes and you won't believe it was really me.
I will be actually sitting here signing these books.
I could even turn this down and you could see me signing, but that wouldn't be as interesting as, you know, and I'm glad now that I did that without thinking, I'm glad I'm wearing pants.
But I also, you know, I want to talk a little bit about the book and what the book is about and what the character is about.
And I will take questions as well.
And they put on some questions.
Some of the staff of the Daily Wire put on some questions about the book itself.
But, you know, I'm having like a, how can I put this, a little bit of frustration with our side in that I feel that we have won such a tremendous victory against left-wing media, but we haven't begun to really intelligently build the arts and the journalism that we need.
We're starting to do some of that, but we haven't really done enough.
And the arts, I just think, are, you know, obviously, this is the reason I started talking out loud and putting myself in front of a camera, because I just believe the arts, novels, movies, you know, TV, anything, you know, anything by which we communicate our souls to one another, you know, people with talent communicate sort of the human spirit in time through these works.
And I just think anything we do just shapes, it not only reflects the culture, it not only reflects what's going on in the spirit of human beings at that particular time and that particular arc in our relationship with God and our relationship with reality, but it also has an effect on it because once you can see where you are, you start to move in different ways.
So, you know, I started this series.
I was writing this book, The Truth and Beauty.
The pandemic had started.
We were all locked down.
And I had wanted to write this book, The Truth and Beauty, which I didn't think anybody would publish.
I thought it was too offbeat.
It was such a weird idea, reading poets to kind of understand the Gospels a little bit better.
Bowl and Branches Make It Easy00:02:27
But, you know, I thought that was important because they were very informative to me.
And so when the world shut down because of the pandemic, I thought, you know what, I'm going to write this book and I'll just publish it myself and maybe two or three people will read it.
And afterwards, I had sent it to one editor who I thought was probably one of the smartest editors I've ever worked with.
And he bought it.
And to my absolute shock and delight, then he explained to me that the book probably wasn't going to sell very well, but he believed in me.
And so he was willing to give me a couple of bucks to put the book out there.
It was really, I'm not joking.
He actually did so in his own kind of elegant and elusive way.
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On the Times List00:12:15
And then the book came out, and it was a USA Today bestseller, which was both a shock and a complete joy to me.
And while this was happening, I got a call from my friend Otto Penzler.
And Otto Pensler runs the Mysterious Press.
He is probably the most important figure in mystery publishing for the last, he's now about, he's older than me, so he's now about 150 years old.
And for about a hundred of those years, he has been the most important figure in mystery and every in the mystery publishing business and everybody who publishes mysteries know him and I consider him one of my closest friends because he's just a horrible, horrible human being.
So we get along really well.
And he called me up and he said, I'm stuck here in my house and you know I was just.
I've had a lot of time to think and I was wondering if you would write a Christmas story.
And I had had this Christmas story in my head literally for decades, maybe 30 years, that I'd never been able to solve.
You know, I'd never been able.
I knew what the ending was, I knew what the beginning was and I'd never been able to solve it.
And I said, you know what I'll?
I'll take a couple of walks, since I'm locked up here, and I'll try and think it through.
And and I did, I went out for a couple walks and I thought about whether I had an end or a middle.
Really is what I was looking for for.
This, this story, and always with me, the most important thing about any story is who's the character in the story, who is the story happening to?
Because that's what a story is about.
It's about people, it's about the human soul, it's about the human soul in a, in a situation and at a time.
And you know, maybe this time, something like this time, so that you can see some of the effects the world is having on all of us.
And I invented the character Cameron Winter for this particular book, the the Christmas book it was called When Christmas Comes, and the minute I invented this character, I have never written a series.
I've written trilogies.
I wrote a short, like four-book series when I was starting out as you know, writing under a pseudonym.
But I'd never really thought I had a character that I wanted to see come back again and again.
And what struck me about Cameron Winter is that he's a character of our time in that he's a man who has done manly things, but has no way of reconciling those manly things with the culture that he's in.
So that basically he doesn't know whether he's a good man or a bad one.
You know, he has no idea how to judge himself.
And so he's basically gone into a depression.
He's gone into a tailspin.
And the thing that he does to sort of cheer himself up and keep himself awake and alert is that he, certain cases call to him, certain murders call to him, and he goes out and he tries to investigate them and look into them.
So he's a typical kind of amateur detective that is a whole subgenre of the genre.
But he's also somebody who has been a government agent and he is a very hard man who has done a lot of hard things.
So he works as a college professor, but he's also a very hard guy.
And the reason this guy captivated me was because I had noticed, and if you listen to the show, you've heard me talk about this, that in the last upsurge of culture, which was of our culture, which was the golden age of television that came about right at the turn of the century, right in the early 2000s.
And a lot of those characters, I couldn't help but notice, had been characters of a kind that I had written before.
Hard people, not necessarily good people, but people who were fit for the job they had to do.
And I noticed that so many of the great shows, so you had the Sopranos, you had The Wire, you had Breaking Bad, you had Justified.
You know, I'm sure you can think of some others, Better Call Saul, were all about bad guys.
They were about guys who were admirable in some ways, like Tony Soprano, you kind of admire his toughness and the fact that he is a winner and the fact that he defeats his enemies all the time.
But they were evil people too.
And I started to realize, of course, that this is one of the problems in our society is we don't know how to write about women because we're not allowed.
Everybody but me is not allowed to write about women because you're supposed to be a feminist and I'm not a feminist and I don't see women the way feminism sees women.
I see women very differently.
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How do you spell that?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
No ease in Clavin.
I just make it look this easy.
And I've been writing them that way for all my life, and I'll continue to write them as long as women actually are that way, and I'm trying to tell the truth.
But it means that there's no role for men.
You know, if men aren't supposed to support, help, defend women, then what are we really doing here?
What are we doing that makes us ourselves?
And so I thought, well, okay, now we've seen these things, and I have been writing guys like this since the 90s.
If you look at true crime, I mean, true crime is not that different than, you know, The Wire, not that different than characters that you get in The Shield, one of my favorite cop TV shows, kind of corrupt in certain ways, but also good at what he does, and also the one guy who can see through society's lies.
And I realized that Cameron Winter was that guy trying to become something better and trying to answer the question of like, well, how do you write a good guy?
What does a good guy look like in the modern world?
And so that's the question that kind of haunts these books and his passage or his attempt to pass from one kind of man to another is what the stories are about.
In the fourth book, which was called A Woman Underground, he deals with a lot of his backstory, a lot of his past.
And so I felt really free in this book, After That the Dark, to almost start the series again, to start the series in a new way where he was a different character than he had been from the beginning.
And to me, this book, you know, I know obviously I'm trying to sell books because it's really important that the books sell so I can keep the series going because if they don't, I can't.
But also I feel that this is a good place to start.
When you read this book, you sort of see him and then you can go back to the beginning of the series and see where he came from and it really works.
I also think, and I shouldn't say it, but I do.
I will.
I also think it is just as good a book as I have ever written.
I've written a couple of books that I'm really, really proud of, and this is one of them.
And I'll tell you the story, a little bit of the story.
In this book, Cameron Winter falls in love.
He falls in love with a woman named Gwendolyn Lord, and he takes her out on his first date.
He's very nervous about it because his whole problem has been that he doesn't feel that he's worthy to be loved.
And that's part of his whole psychological problem.
And he takes her out on a date, and she, trying to entertain him, trying to keep him amused, as you do with the date, girls do it and boys do it.
And she tells him a murder mystery.
She knows he's interested in murders, and she tells him about an impossible murder that happened in a locker room.
And to impress her, he goes out to try and solve it and finds that he has opened up an incredibly huge conspiracy of some kind that is going to endanger his life and maybe the lives of everybody around him.
And I think it's an exciting, obviously, I think it's a thriller, but it's also a mystery, but it's also a love story.
And I think it really works.
So I hope you go on dailywire.com slash Claven and order a copy.
If you haven't got one already, you can get one signed from the Daily Wire shop, or you can just get one from Amazon, get it anywhere you want.
And I'll tell you another bit of this.
This is the second book I brought out this year, and I feel like I've been testing your patience by pitching my books to you.
But at the same time, I feel that they're important books.
I think that they're books that matter, and I think that they're worth supporting.
And the first book you guys supported so much, it got on the New York Times bestseller list, which is amazing.
I mean, True Crime got on the bottom of the list, but this one got on the actual list.
And that was shocking.
And I thought, well, maybe we can do this again.
Maybe we can get it on.
It doesn't look, it's going to be really hard to get this on the New York Times list.
And the reason is, first of all, the New York Times picks the books that it wants on the list, which puts me at a disadvantage.
But also, there's this new fad, especially among women who make up the bulk of readers, called Romanticy.
And it's kind of a romance novel, but with wings, you know, with fairies and woodland creatures and all the things that come with fantasy.
And that book, that genre is the one thing that is selling at a really, really high rate.
And so all the books on the New York Times bestseller list, a lot of them are these books, and they're selling a lot.
So to get on the list, you have to beat the other guys out there.
And so it's more like at this time last year, the books that I had to beat were selling about half as many copies.
So it's a tough one.
It's a long climb.
And what I'd ask you to do is buy the book.
And first of all, I wouldn't sell it to you if I didn't think you'd like it.
I think you're going to love it.
Buy the book.
Tell your friends to buy the book.
Buy some books for your friends.
And let's see what we can do.
I mean, I think it would be an amazing thing.
And I was telling you about my friend Otto Penzler.
He is, as I say, just a towering figure in the world of mystery publishing.
If you come to my signing in New York, which I think is November 11th, you can meet him.
He's a curmudgeonly, horrible human being who will just scream at you to hurry it up because he wants to go out to dinner.
But I love him like a brother.
And I don't think for all the things he has done, and he has done just about everything in mystery publishing that there is to do, I don't think he's ever put a book on the New York Times list.
And so it would be a great gift to him.
As I say, he's older than me, so he's probably not going to last even to the end of the show.
So it would be a great gift to him and to me if this book made it onto the Times list and gave that gift to him because he supported me when I was exiled.
He supported me when I was canceled.
He supported me when nobody was buying my books.
And now these books have been selling really well.
The Cameron Winter books have been selling well because of you guys.
And it's been a great thrill to be able to let him cash in on his faith in me.
It's been a terrific.
And that would be the ultimate would be to put this book on the times list.
Tough job.
It's a tough job.
My all-new book, After That the Dark, is out now.
It's the fifth Cameron Winter mystery and may be my best yet.
Winter's past and present collide in the most dangerous way possible, and he will do anything to protect the woman he loves.
It's already received praise, including a starred review in Publishers Weekly who called it brilliant.
And now I need your help to send it to the New York Times and USA Today bestseller lists.
You can secure your copy of After That the Dark now at dailywire.com slash Clavin.
Go to dailywire.com slash Clavin to order After That the Dark today.
For more Clavin-y magnificence, like and subscribe.