Andrew Clavin (8:02)

Oh, thank you for having me. It's great to be here.

Faith Moore (8:04)

Yeah, it's a pleasure. So we're taking a slight detour in this episode because this summer, as you know, we are discussing fairy tales on Storytime for Grown Ups. Today, we are not talking about fairy tales. We're going to go back to talking about the Woman in White. But I haven't lost my mind, because we are talking about fairy tales as building blocks for story in general, one of the major building blocks of the stories that come out of the Western canon. And we're going to talk today about the Woman in White as story, as sort of the craft of a story. I want to talk about it as almost like a sort of guidebook for writers, which is something I talked a lot about when we were reading the book on the show. But I always kind of said, okay, this is not a podcast about writing. It's a podcast about reading. But I thought it would be fun to have you on and have this conversation. But before we get into that sort of nitty gritty, the nitty gritty of it all. So people who listen to both of us have noticed that you talk about the Woman in White a great deal, and so do I. And so then they often write to me and say, oh, you know, your father must have introduced this book to you. And in fact, that's not true. I discovered the Woman in White via the truly terrible Andrew Lloyd Webber musical of the Woman in White. And listeners know that whole story, so I won't get into it again, but I was wondering if you could then tell us how you discovered this book, the Woman in White, and what that experience was like for you.

Andrew Clavin (9:37)

Yeah, it's actually a very dramatic story. It's one of a handful of books that changed my life and set it on a different path than it was on. And it was probably the most dramatic encounter because. Especially because of what it says about writing, of what the book teaches you about writing and demonstrates about writing. But it was probably at the lowest point in my life. I was a young man, and I was not getting anywhere in. In life, anywhere I wanted to get. I had already kind of cracked up and I was in a very. Even though I. I was sort of getting help, I was in a very, very dark place and to the point of. Of, you know, I had this little daughter who you may have met, who. And I couldn't. Couldn't make any. The money that I needed to make, and I wasn't. My life wasn't becoming what I wanted to be. And at the core of this was the fact that I knew myself to be without being a braggart, but also without being falsely modest. I knew myself to be a tremendously talented writer. And I wasn't getting anywhere with my writing. And everything I did collapsed, and I couldn't even get published after a while. And I was kind of Persona non grata in the publishing industry. And at the core of that. At the core of that was an actual dilemma, you know, an actual, you know, conundrum, let's call it, which was. Which was this, that I. I had, and I have a fairly complex and rich vision of what life is and what it's about. And even though at that age I was just working it through, I was just sort of getting to the place where it was. It was more interesting than. Than being a child, but still, it was. I could tell it was not just a kind of shallow good guy, bad guy, whatever version of life. I had a quite intricate and deep vision of life, but my skill centered on writing suspense stories and especially on writing action scenes, which I was, I think, as good as anybody around at doing. And so that was really what I had grown up loving. I had been. My mind had been trained by Alfred Hitchcock and. And by reading the great detective stories, American detective stories. And that was really what I knew how to do really well. And so the Question was, how do you make those stories into something rich without losing the fact that they're thrillers and they're supposed to excite and entertain and be, you know, quick and hard driving and all that stuff. And I had no idea how that could be done. And I was working just as a side element to this, but an important one. I was already publishing what at the time were called paperback originals, which were cheap kind of throwaway books that people might pick up in a drugstore and read on the beach. And the books were winning awards and all this stuff. So that I knew I was. I was doing them pretty well, but they were, you know, each one of them, just as a joke, I sort of had. Each one had a 50 page action sequence in it. And the books were only like 250 pages. So I mean, they were really very, very basic books. And I was stymied. I mean, the books that I was writing that I thought were serious books were just awful, unreadable even to me. They were, you know, sometimes being published in very small presses. But they were embarrassing. Like, even I knew they were bad. And the mysteries I was writing were not up to the kind of level that I thought they should be up to. And really at the nadir of this point, I really did have. I mean, if I won't tell you the story here, but if you read my memoir, you will hear the story of this kind of lowest moment in my life when I. I decided, well, maybe I ought to live, you know, maybe I shouldn't like, you know, jump off the roof or anything like this. But I was still quite depressed and. And one day, just very shortly after that, I started to read the Woman in White. And I remember I was lying in bed and I must have gotten maybe 25 pages into it when I sat up and I thought, oh, that's how you do it. That is how it's done. And I immediately went to work writing a book that would become the Scarred man, which was my first real intelligent thriller, which I then put in a. In a drawer and didn't publish until I had built a bit of a name for myself and it could do something for me. And that, that book, writing that book, which I wrote directly after reading the Woman in White, that book changed all of our lives because I made a lot of money off it. And it was a really, a really different. It made it sort of name for me. So the book really changed my life in a very practical way. And just to prepare for this, I reread it for the first time in what must be over 30 years. It must be close to 40 years, I'm embarrassed to say.

Faith Moore (14:19)

Now you're aging me.

Andrew Clavin (14:21)

What's that? Yes, that's right. But, but I read it and I, and I immediately thought, oh, that's why it's so brilliant. It's such a brilliant book. And it is one of the, I mean the Victorian British novelists are the greatest of novelists, along with the Russians of that time and some of the French. And it's one of those books that, that is in that pantheon.

Faith Moore (14:44)

Yeah. So that's fascinating. Do you remember what it was in those 25 pages that made you go like, oh, okay, I can do this now. Do you remember what it was that Wilkie Collins was doing that caused you to have that revelation?

Andrew Clavin (15:00)

Yes, it was two things. It was one, the kind of expert timing, which was something I had an expertise in. But because timing restricts what you can do, just like writing a sonnet restricts what you can do. Right. You can't write a sonnet and expect it to be a five act tragedy. You have to work within a sonic. When you have good timing in a thriller, things have to happen at certain times and excitement has to come in at certain times and you can't just go off and to this discourse of thing. And so Wilkie Collins in this book is just. Has got his timing exactly on point. So even you start out the book and you know, he tells you he has a friend. Is this Italian friend, his name Pesca or something like that?

Faith Moore (15:44)

Yeah. And by the way, spoilers are fine. And those of you who are listening, we're going to do spoilers. So. Because I'm assuming that people have read the book with me. So we're gonna. So spoilers are fine. So yes, he has his friend Pesca.

Andrew Clavin (15:56)

Pesca. But he doesn't just have a friend. He. He meets him by saving his life. So you have an action sequence, like the first page, you know, it's like he's drowning. He drops to the bottom. He's like, you know, curled up in like a fetal position and goes in and gets himself. It's, you know, an old saying in the movie business that your hero has to either kick a dog or pat a dog in the first three minutes. And then, you know, whether he's a good guy or a bad guy. And so that's what he does. And he kind of, you know, gives you this action sequence. But then what got me right away was the fact that character is drama. And this is like one of the things that I think inexperienced and a lot of male writers, I think, don't instantaneously get, they want to pack in the action. Guys like action. And so they don't really bother with character and they don't bother with who people are. But I started to take my action sequences, which were cool already, cool, and key them in to character. And I started to have patience about when they could appear because I realized that the. That interchanges between interesting characters are themselves dramatic, intense, and can be suspenseful. So I started to build suspense into conversations. And I started to build characters who just in the. In meeting each other would cause some kind of tension and suspense, which allowed me to get deeper into what I was saying about humanity and what I was saying about the world. And while having a guy fall off a building. I mean, by the way, I should mention that the greatest expert of this is William Shakespeare, who has people saying the most profound things in the world while in a sword fight or climbing up a balcony to get the girl or whatever. So that's. That's kind of what you're going for or what I was going for.

Faith Moore (17:42)

Yeah. As you're talking, I'm thinking of two things from the book. One is that sequence where the lawyer. It's like 10 pages about Laura's financial information. And it should be so boring. It's like this, you know, estate is entailed to this person and that person. But it's riveting because you care so deeply about Laura and you're discovering that perhaps Sir Percival is in it for the money and perhaps he's going to kill her. And, you know, all this stuff. And. And that scene is so suspenseful, even though it's just a lawyer telling you what money this girl is going to get on her or somebody else is going to get on her death. Right, right.

Andrew Clavin (18:21)

But as with every character, the lawyer is also like a very, very sympathetic character. And in the midst of our heroine in terrible danger and obviously being abused, we see, oh, here's a friend. And so here's a guy figuring this out for us. And we're really happy. You know, we're just happy to be with him, you know, and it's the power of character that works throughout the book to make the story roll and to just, you know, make it. You know, you could do all those same scenes that are in the book and they could be dead as a fish. You know, they could be like. They could lie there like a lox, but they. But they don't, because the characters are so not just so alive and three dimensional, but also their approach to the story defines the atmosphere of what's going on.

Faith Moore (19:11)

Yeah. The other one I'm thinking about is the scene quite at the beginning where Marian is reading her mother's letters to Walter and Laura is walking back and forth on the veranda. And what he's about to realize is that Laura looks just like Anne Catherick, the Woman in White. And it's such a suspenseful scene, but the only thing that we're discovering is that these two people look alike. And who cares? I mean, we care eventually, but there's such drama in it because we care about these three people. And this is so mysterious and, you know, we don't know. And it's such a spooky, suspenseful scene. She's walking in the moonlight and all of this stuff. But it, in fact, nothing really is going on. You know, there's only this one tiny piece of information. So I'm agreeing with you that. That the characters are key and these characters are brilliant and. And so that's where I want to go now. And just as I say, I want to kind of really delve into this book kind of technically. And if you're an aspiring writer and you're listening, this is great for you. But also, just generally, as we've been talking about this summer, this is how stories are built. And I think that this book in particular is such a great way into that. Because in some ways, the. I think I've said this before on the show, but the machinery of this book is kind of laid bare in a lot of ways. There are places where I think that Collins kind of slips up a little bit. There are a couple of plot holes. There are things that don't quite. And. But I think that's kind of what makes it so amazing in some ways, is that you can see all the moving parts of this really complicated book ends up being such a very complicated plot that goes down. Right. So let's start with Walter Hartright as our hero. You know, why. Why is Walter our hero in this story? Why do we need someone like Walter to be the hero in a story like this?

Andrew Clavin (21:00)

Well, first of all, because he has his heart. Right. I mean, I think the most important thing about Walter Hartright. Well, I think we have the story is a gothic story, which was very popular for form, but it is. It revolutionizes the form by setting it in an English country home instead of in a crumbling Italian castle. I mean, that was kind of the typical thing, is a, you know, the virgin captured in this cap in this castle. And she has no way out. And there's ghosts. And these stories usually clunk like crazy. Like they're just filled with. They're so often dependent on one word that someone could say to another that would explain everything and then the story would be over. But. But this is a story. But there are always stories of isolation. And that's what this story is. It's a story of isolation and. And custom that traps usually a young woman in a. In a system of danger. And by bringing Hartright on the scene right away, we have this kind of sexual and romantic, both tension that we suddenly. We know that here's a guy that we trust right away. We trust him. We know he saved his best friend. We know he loves his mother. You know, I mean, you can't. You can't get your heart any more right than heart, right. You know, I mean, he is just. Just right on there and. And he has a. But he also has. Which is really brilliant. He also has a kind of callowness and gentleness that we're afraid of because we're afraid he doesn't have what it takes to make this stuff right. So he's like. He's absolutely, you know, he's, you know, he's not like, you know, you would think like, oh, if he were like a soldier or if he were a guy returning from the wars or if he had what they call in Hollywood skills. S, K, I, L, Z. You know, where. Yes, he's a painter, but he really knows how to take a man apart with his teeth, you know, or whatever. Like, nothing. None of that. He's just a guy who draws pictures. And so he's kind of like, you know, I won't call him a feminine. He's not. He's just one of those nice, lovely artistic fellows who really is not. We love him because we know he's the good guy and he's very clearly the good guy. And he's very clearly suited to this woman who is the heroine. But he hasn't yet got what it takes to become the hero we need him to be. And so that's the tension right there.

Faith Moore (23:22)

Yeah. And, you know, we. We ended up joking when we were reading this, you know, in the show that he. He goes away and gets the skills, right? He goes to Central America and we. I was calling him Walter 2.0, right? He comes in back and he is suddenly the guy that we need, right? And he, you know, he knows how to use a cudgel and He's. He's here to solve the problem. He's Walter 2.0. He's Laura's Avenging angel. That's what we kept saying on the show because, yeah, he starts off as this guy that you kind of think like, well, that's nice. You know, they love each other, but how is he going to get her out of this horrible situation? And I think that's part of the isolation that you were talking about. I mean, I feel like that first half of the book is all about every single person that could save her just going away, either being either being completely unable to save her, like her stupid uncle, or having to leave like Walter, or having their hands tied like the lawyer, Mr. Gilmore. Right. Everybody that could help her, every man that could come in and save her is sort of stripped away one by one. And then in the second half, we get Walter 2.0 coming back. And then, you know, he's the guy that we need. But it's interesting. You're saying it's sort of like the fact that he's not quite ready to do that adds to the tension in the beginning.

Andrew Clavin (24:38)

Yes. And to the heartbreak. I mean, there's no more heartbreaking scene in literature than when he has to go away and leave this woman he loves to somebody we know is sinister. But Marian, who is really the co. Heroine of the book, says to him, you have got to go. This is the right thing to do. So he goes and does the right thing. And later she has this wonderful dream, because, like you, he could have written a whole third of, you know, as long as the book is like 600 pages or something, he could have written another 200 pages about Walter's adventure, and we would have gone with him. I mean, I'm almost sorry he didn't. But instead, what he has is this scene with Marian, has a dream and sees him spiritually and kind of miraculously in surviving these horrible things. And he said. He says to her, you know, I alone have survived this thing because I am coming back. And it's very, very moving and dramatic, and we're like, yay. You know, this is. You know, it's like what it would have been a telegram in another time or a phone call or whatever.

Faith Moore (25:40)

Yeah, right. Exactly. I mean, that's the avenging angel, right? That's the moment where we learn, like, it's not just that he's gonna come back with his cudgel or whatever, but that somehow he's been kind of earmarked to be the one that solves this problem that stands up for Laura. And. Yeah, and there is that kind of actually supernatural experience that happens where she, she has this kind of prophetic dream, she dreams what really does happen to Walter and she, she hears him and they have this sort of telepathic connection which I guess brings me to the next question, which is about Laura and Marian. So, yes, there is this beautiful romantic relationship between Walter and Laura. But as we were reading the book, a lot of listeners were writing in to say Laura is kind of disappointing. She seems sort of like a drip. She's always kind of fainting on her fainting couch. And Marian is this amazing character. We love Marian here on Storytime for Grown Ups. And the relationship between Walter and Marian feels, I think, to us as modern readers, like a modern romantic relationship because there is an intellectual connection as well as, you know, not what there, there isn't a romantic connection, but if there were, then that would feel like a sort of modern romance is this sexual romantic connection. And the intellectual component. And the intellectual component seems to be missing from the Walter Laura pairing. So can you talk to us about the two heroines of this book, Laura and Marian, and kind of what, what the deal is with them? And, and do you agree with the listeners? Is Laura the wrong one for him? I mean, I will say for plot purposes, obviously Laura has to be the one because Marian wouldn't find herself in this situation and Laura would. So for the plot we need, and for the plot, she needs to be the love interest of Walter because otherwise why would Walter come back and do all of this if she wasn't his love interest? But is there something beyond that that maybe we're missing? And is Laura actually the right person for him? And what's going on with Marian?

Andrew Clavin (27:48)

Yeah, no, this is very, it's very important theme in, in a lot of Victorian literature. And it's, it's a problem that is, that is with us to this very day. I write about this in my book the Truth and Beauty. There's a chapter about Frankenstein as a novel in which a man creates life without a woman. And, and why. What is the problem with, with women as this time happens? What happens is if you look at the Bible and you look at the famous Proverbs section that begins, you know, what, what is the. Who is like a righteous woman? Her price is way beyond rubies. And it describes what a righteous woman is. And it's nuts what she is. I mean, she's like, she's the mom and she's the wife and she is a businesswoman and she's planting orchards and she's making clothes. Clothes and all this stuff. And that was actually the life of a woman, you know, that women. The idea of a woman sitting around eating bon bons, if she was a homemaker, like, didn't exist because they made clothes. Women were called the distaff because that was the little implement you used to make wool into yarn. And, you know, they had to be able to use a. A. What are they called? Where you loom? Yeah. And, you know, they made the food and they grew the food, this stuff. So suddenly the Industrial Revolution comes along and all of those cottage industries vanish, and they all disappear. And so now you have women at a certain class. Once they reach a certain class, there's not really as much for them to do. Their moms and their homemakers, and they still run the place, and they still have a huge. A huge social function in making sure that people get married and making sure that women, you know, girls get taken care of and all this stuff, but they're nowhere near the woman whose price is above rubies. So now you get, especially as you get into the Victorian age, you get this kind of angelification of women. You know, the. The angel in the House was a very popular poem and a very popular picture that people hung in on their walls. The angel in the house. And the thing about women is love them as dearly as I do. They're not angels, they're people. And they want, like all people to have a role, not just in their homes, but in society and to be a part of things. And a lot of that was taken away from them. So you had this kind of. This kind of character of the woman who is just. Her job is just being a girl. A woman, you know, sweet, tender, loving, nurturing, all of the things that we love about women. But she had no role. And so what you get is you get these characters, like in Vanity Fair is, I think, think the most important one by William Thackeray. You know, it has a villain named Becky Sharp, one of the great villains in fiction, who is smart and cunning and diabolical, but you kind of admire her because she's like one of those villains, you know? And then it's got this woman. What is her name? Amelia. Amelia is the other woman, and she is sweet and loving and all this, but she's kind of poisonous because she sucks men in, and then she's got nothing to give them. And there's a famous scene in Vanity Fair where the hero turns to Amelia, who's the Classic Victorian heroine, and says, you don't deserve me. You're not good enough for me, you know. And so that's this. What a lot of people are feeling about Walter and Laura. You have the Minna in Dracula who. Van Helsing keeps saying she has the heart of a woman but the mind of a man, which isn't true. She actually has the mind of a woman. She organizes things. She takes down everybody's notes. She puts everything together. She wrangles the men. You know, she. She does things that women actually do, but that is now seems like manly to. To the Victorians because that role for women has disappeared. And so Laura is, you know, everything men look for in women. The tenderness, the sweetness and. And by the way, that role of playing music, which she does remember, there's no radios. There's nothing like that. So that the role of women to beautify and create music and all that is still important, but it's still not the economic function that they had before and the kind of thinking function that we think of in a woman. So. So really, Marion and Laura should be one person. But instead he has made Marian very masculine. And she's ugly, which is important, you know, like, she's not somebody you want him to go off with because you want him to get the beautiful girls, you know, and that's. And those are all the problems. But that element of femininity, which is a real element, like I said, it's in the Bible, so it's a real thing. You know, that element has been stripped away from women by industrialization. And so it's a genuine problem and remains a problem today, although getting less so because computers have brought back the possibility of home industries. And so you have women who take care of homes and they raise children and they're nurturing to their husbands and, you know, feed their husbands and all that stuff, but they can also sit in a computer and build an industry from their house. And so that's. That. That's bringing us back to pre industrialization through technology. And that's, you know, kind of a remarkable thing that's happening now. But it wasn't happening then.

Faith Moore (32:49)

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because Marian is obviously not a villain like Becky Sharp from Vanity Fair. And in fact, she's incredibly likable and incredibly heroic in the story. And, you know, this sort of spy scene where she's putting on her, like, spy gear and climbing over the.

Andrew Clavin (33:07)

Oh, one of the best scenes in the book.

Faith Moore (33:10)

It's the best. I mean, that's the best scene. And then at the end of it, when, like, Fosco's writing in her diary, it's like, please. But unbelievable. Yeah, but so, I mean, it is kind of interesting because what you're saying, and I think this is right, is that, you know, it's almost like Collins has sort of pulled out the acceptable Victorian qualities of a woman. And this is kind of what we talked a lot about on the show as well, is that Laura is the kind of perfect Victorian woman and pulled that out, but he had a lot of woman left over or something. You know, this is kind of what I'm getting from what you're saying is like, he had. He had a lot of woman left over, and he put it in Marian. But Marian can't possibly be. I mean, also for plot purposes, Marian can't possibly be a love interest of Walter. I mean, that would be horrible if there was a love triangle or something. Walter has to be Laura's person, you know, her avenging angel. But it is interesting that he was able to create a likable and sympathetic character who embodies what he saw and what the society of the day saw as a more masculine version of femininity.

Andrew Clavin (34:19)

Right. Because if you go, you only have to go back, it's about a generation and a half to Jane Austen's heroines, who are much sharper, much more incisive and insightful and still have the kind of role. I mean, their. Their role as. As decorators and music makers and, you know, beautifiers is still very much alive, and the marriage system is still so. How can I put it? It's so programmatic that they're still in charge of this world in which you have to marry your daughters off, you have to find somebody for your sons and all this stuff. And so they still have a role to play. But it's beginning to be. Get into that period. But you can see it developing there back in the, you know, early 1800s and the 18th century. Late 18th century. But before that, you know, your. Your wife was running an industry in her house, and. And that was part of what was lost to industrialization.

Faith Moore (35:18)

Yeah, that's totally true. And it's interesting to look at Austin's heroines as being more intellectually savvy than some of these Victorian heroines, even though we look at that marriage situation and think, oh, my gosh, there's. They're sort of stuck in a lot of ways, and they don't have a lot of agency, but really their intellectual selves as characters in books is much more developed, it seems to me, based on what you're saying. So let's now switch gears and talk about villains. So this book has two villains, which I think is interesting. It's got Bosco, who I think is one of the greatest villains to ever walk the pages of any book, ever. I love him. He's my favorite character in the book. And he's a bad guy, so that says something. But then we've also got Sir Percival, who kind of is like. I kept saying, like, Sir Percival is like the thug and Fosco is like the mob boss. You know, Percival is kind of like. He doesn't really know what he's doing a lot of the time, but he's not a good guy. And then there's Fosco, who's the sort of criminal mastermind of it all. So I want to talk for both about what it means to the story that there are these two villains. Villains and what it does to a story to have two villains in it. And I want to talk about what makes Fosco such a great villain. So I guess maybe let's start with what does it mean to a story to have two villains in it?

Andrew Clavin (36:41)

Well, it's an interesting thing to do. It doesn't often work as well as it works here. But here he gives them each such an important role and such a role that he couldn't blend together. He really couldn't make Bosco the irritable, abusive, you know, passionate and mistaken husband that he is. Fosco would almost have become a kind of Hannibal Lecter, an indestructible villain. And I don't think that's what he wanted at all. I think he wanted Fosco to be incredibly human and sort of the generator of the materialist, you know, worldview that is kind of the source of the evil, you know, the love of money and the. The dismissal of people and all this stuff. So I think he was doing the same thing with the villain that he was doing with the women. He was dividing the character into two. I mean, he could have done it another way, but I just don't think it would have had as much fun that I think that he gives brilliantly. He gives us a villain that Walter can plausibly take on, you know, physically take on. And what a great scene that fire scene is, where he gets caught. And it's just incredibly exciting. The British, you know, the British for a long time were not very good at action scenes, and they still don't have the American flair for it. But that one is a great scene. That is a terrific scene. And then Fosco is just on another level altogether. I mean, I think what Fosco is, is he. He's bigger. He's almost. I think the reason he needed two villains is because Fos was almost too big for the story. You know, he is. He's got a whole political life that is going on behind the scenes that we don't have to understand, but we get it. He is part of the wider world and he is kind of the. It's. It's as if. It's as if you were telling a story about a home, a sweet home in the country, and suddenly war started. And you thought, oh, wow, the big world is breaking in on this home. And that's what's essentially happening here. That. That. This. This foreign influence. I love the whole thing about the English as this island, who think, you know, foreigners. You know, foreigners don't. They mean well, but they just don't have the privilege of being an Englishman. It's just hilarious. But it's very real, you know, it's very real. The English were cut off from the continent from a long time during the Napoleonic wars, and they just developed this kind of insular. And of course, just with the ocean around them, they developed this insular attitude. And so what. What Fosco is, is the big world kind of coming in on these sweet little people. And his connection to Italy is a connection to the Gothic. And that's what. What Collins is doing. He's bringing a story normally set in Italy or Germany, the Gothic story, and he's bringing it to England. And so Fosco kind of represents that force from. From outside.

Faith Moore (39:38)

Yeah. And I think what you said also a couple minutes ago about Fosco being human is so important because I think, you know, he is kind of larger than life, as you're saying. He's so big and he's sort of ridiculous, you know, with his birds and his waistcoats and his pastry and all of this stuff. And there's something very effeminate about him on the one hand. And then on the other hand, he's sort of got this iron will and he rules his wife and all of this stuff. And he's very captivating to the women and all of this. And he's got this sort of weird male, female thing going on as well. And. And I guess. But he. His love and appreciation for Marian is real. And it's the thing that brings him down. It's his.

Andrew Clavin (40:24)

It's a weakness yes, it's. It's his only weakness. And it's. And it's kind of. It's kind of beautiful because he. One of the important things about him is he is kind of sexless. You know, he's so fat, he's playing with the birds. And, you know, like, it just. It's just kind of. He's kind of icky, you know, at that. At that level. So his. His love for her is touching something that is a weakness in him and. As opposed to a strength where. In heart. Right. It makes a man out of him and him. It brings him down. And so it's like a really. It's really interesting. And it's interesting too, that his. You know, he's after less money than Sir Percival glide. So he's like, almost. He's almost in it for the fun of it, you know, he's almost in it for just the. The sadist. Sadistic, you know, mastery of other people, which is also brilliant. And, you know, there are two huge coincidences in the book, both of which could have been easily gotten rid of. I mean, just easily. You know, there's no reason for them to be there. And I think in the American movie, they take one of them out. The fact that the woman in white stops Walter near London, but he's going to the very place where her mystery is centered. It's absurd. So I think in the. I think in the movie, I may be getting this right. I'm talking from memory. I haven't seen the film in a long, long time, which is not very good, the. The old American movie. But I think they put that scene in the woods outside of the house outside of Limerich. And so that makes a lot more sense.

Faith Moore (41:50)

That makes sense. Yeah.

Andrew Clavin (41:51)

Yeah, that makes a lot more sense. And the other is that Pesca happens to be the one guy in the.

Faith Moore (41:56)

World that's hilarious and so funny.

Andrew Clavin (41:58)

Yeah. I mean, it would have. It would have been a little. It would have been a little less ridiculous if, you know, he had brought somebody along or something like this. But. But the. Somebody once said that romance is the genre that turns coincidence into providence. And so there is throughout the book this sort of sense that these things are meant to be. Just like in the dream sequence, in Marian's dream sequence, you know, he sort of says, I have been saved. Not just I'm communicating with you from far away, so that's a spiritual act right there. But also I've been saved for this purpose to come home to you and rescue you, you know, and like That's. So there is that element. You kind of just accept the coincidences as part of that.

Faith Moore (42:40)

Yeah, and it's quite gothic as well. I mean, I think in Jane Eyre there is also one supernatural experience that forwards the plot. And, you know, and I think, you know, we talked a lot about this. This kind of novel is called a sensation novel, where you bring the gothic into the home space. Right. And. And Wilkie Collins was doing it first, but. Or close to first. And. But it has all these Gothic elements to it as well. And so now I want. As we kind of start to wrap this up, I want to now just kind of throw at you a couple really specific techniques that I feel like Collins is using and then sort of get your take on them as a novelist. Like, these are things that we talked about as we were reading the book during the season. And I just want to know what your thoughts are as someone who. Who writes novels like this. The first is the concept of telling us up front that something bad is going to happen. So the book begins, right, with the prologue or the preface, whatever it's called, in your particular copy, it's different in different copies that basically says, I'm going to tell you the story of this horrible thing that happened to me and the people that I love and that wouldn't be allowed to be heard in a court of law. So it's terrible, and nobody's going to help us, and it's awful, and we're on our own. What does that do to us as readers to give us that right up front?

Andrew Clavin (44:03)

Well, I think in suspense, it's good. It's usually called foreshadowing. And it's like. I think in suspense, it's just an absolutely important thing because you want it. It creates this kind of looming dread that hangs over the story. And, you know, and Collins does it. He takes it right up to the point of unfairness, but doesn't cross the line. He does it. I mean, as with everything in this novel, he does it almost perfectly. Perfectly where he'll say, you know, the greatest disaster. What is the line in Phantom of the Opera?

Faith Moore (44:34)

Disaster beyond our wildest imagination.

Andrew Clavin (44:37)

You go, okay, you know, that's. You know, and in Phantom, it doesn't pay off, but in this book, it really does pay off. And he never quite says, and everybody's gonna die? And then says, well, no, I was only kidding. He doesn't do that. He takes you right up to the point where you think, like, well, gee, maybe everybody's gonna die. And in fact, you. You he could have gotten away with killing some of our favorite characters, but he doesn't. And that's, you know, that's terrific. But. But still, he could have done it. So you don't really know how bad it's going to get. And I just think that's really thrilling, you know?

Faith Moore (45:06)

It is. Yeah. And I think it also makes you come up with all of these things that are actually worse. You know, I was getting a lot of letters like, percival's gonna kill her on their honeymoon. He's gonna stab her. You know, he's gonna. He's out to get her immediate. Immediately. And, in fact, he actually wasn't thinking about that at all. It was Fosco's idea to kill anybody and to switch them and all of this stuff. So, you know, he was just out for the money. But it makes you kind of think something even bigger and crazier is going to happen, and you're primed for that. I feel like by that, the way.

Andrew Clavin (45:40)

The story is written, it could happen, you know?

Faith Moore (45:42)

Exactly. Yeah.

Andrew Clavin (45:43)

It's. It's like when I first saw the movie Die Hard, I didn't know anything about it, and I thought, oh, this guy could get killed. This is really exciting, you know? And then later I thought, oh, no, they've got to make the, you know, 15 sequels. But. But, you know, when you first saw it, it was built so you could see how things could go really bad. And that's the way he builds this story, too.

Faith Moore (46:01)

Yeah, exactly. And. And I think it also means that when you hear that Laura is dead, even though she isn't, you believe it in a way that you might not if you didn't know what was gonna go on.

Andrew Clavin (46:15)

You know, this. This was the second time I read the story. And there were. There was a moment when I thought, does she die? No, no, wait a minute.

Faith Moore (46:24)

Yeah, yeah. No, exactly. I mean. And that. I mean, that is the pivotal moment. That moment where, you know, they come back to him in the graveyard and everything is the moment. The best moment, of course, as we said, is when Marin's climbing over the roof and everything. But that's the moment where you realize, okay, this is what. It's all this whole claustrophobic, awful thing of they're in the, you know, Blackwater park and it's rotten and everything's corrupt and decaying and everything. And this is the payoff is that, you know, it was this kind of switch. Okay? So that's one. Another is the fact of the multiple narrators and specifically the idea of A diary. So what does it do to a book to have somebody's diary as part of the narration and more broadly, to have more than one narrator?

Andrew Clavin (47:11)

Well, I have to say, I don't think Wilkie Collins was the first person to do this. There are a couple of narrators in Wuthering Heights, which I think is earlier, but it wasn't that common. And he does it so perfectly. You just are dazzled by it. But what it means. It means a couple of things. First, I mean, if you've got different narrators, especially in diaries of the. They're. They're not. They're not speaking when the whole story is over. They. They don't know what themselves, what's going to happen. So he's hiding things from them so he doesn't have to reveal them to you. But at the same time, he also does the opposite, which is he tells you things. The things, you know, like, Fosco is a bad guy, which drive you insane when somebody's saying, oh, that Fosco, he's so charming, you know, you're like, no, he's not. He's a terrible.

Faith Moore (47:55)

Exactly.

Andrew Clavin (47:56)

And so he's. This is what I. When we. At the very beginning, when I said to you, the character is drama, that's just creating character by drama. So, like, you'll have a. A maid who is actually a decent person and a fairly intelligent person and is just being fooled by Fosco. And you. You have sympathy for her, but you also want to strangle her, you know, and just say, no, you know, call the police or whatever. You know, it's like not dial 911.

Faith Moore (48:19)

Or whatever you were doing that time 999.

Andrew Clavin (48:24)

So. So, you know, it's just perfectly done. And it also has this way of. Of maintaining suspense, because even when one coil of suspense is undone, the narrator, as he's speaking, is creating another coil of suspense by not knowing what we already know and not knowing where this is going. And it's just. It's just brilliantly done. I. I mean, and it's. I. I don't think it's done as well again, until Dracula.

Faith Moore (48:51)

Yeah, that's another great one in the same vein. And I think also another thing that diaries do, I think, is that it means you don't know if that person lives or dies. And, you know, it's Marian's diary. And so I got a lot of people writing and saying, oh, is. Does that mean. Why doesn't he have her narrative? Narrative? You know, he. The whole concept is he's asked these people after the fact that, you know, please write up a narrative of what happened. But instead of Marian's narrative, we've got her diary. And so people were saying, does that mean that she's actually dead? Because why don't we have a narrative from her instead?

Andrew Clavin (49:27)

That scene where Fosco put some postscript on her diary.

Faith Moore (49:31)

Yeah.

Andrew Clavin (49:31)

I think that that may be one of the most sensational scenes in all of fiction. I mean, it can't. It can't miss. You know, you can't not. You can't resist it. It's. It's a. It's. I mean, the scene in Silence of the Lambs where she shows up at the wrong house is very close, but there's something about that that's so vile and so terrifying. And you love her so much and you should admire her so much for what she's doing that it's. It's really a masterstroke of fiction.

Faith Moore (50:00)

I mean, it totally is. I mean, it makes no sense, really. Why is he writing in the diary? You know? Doesn't mean.

Andrew Clavin (50:05)

But it makes sense. See, that's the way. Wonderful thing about Fosco, because if he were the perfect villain, if he were the perfect villain like Hannibal Lecter, then it wouldn't make any sense. But he's a narcissist and he does stuff like that just because he's Fosco. I am Fosco.

Faith Moore (50:20)

Exactly. Right. I kept saying that I'm Fosco. Yeah, right, exactly. And because he loves her and he wants her to see what is what, how he's Fosco. He wants her to see I am Fosco. Right. I'm so smart that I've outsmarted you. It's like, yes. But he thinks that she'll think that's wonderful and brilliant. Yeah. So I think the last one, and then I want to ask you if you have any others that you. That jumped out at you in the book is the way that so often after a big scene like the one with Marian on the roof or something else, we're taken away from the action, right? So after Marian on the roof and Fosco in the diary, we get stupid old Mr. Fairley, the uncle, right, Telling us, you know, oh, this stupid woman came to my house, you know, And. And so that happens a couple of times. Like, we're like, oh, my gosh, something horrible has happened and now we have to be over there. Or the whole sequence of Laura's supposed death takes place via these characters that really don't know her at all. Like the woman, the. The woman that washes the body, the woman that is the servant in Fosco's house. The narrative of the tombstone is how we know she's dead. And all of these things, instead of our beloved Walter or Marion telling us, you know, this is what happened. And it was so horrible and I was so sad or whatever it is. So what does that do?

Andrew Clavin (51:44)

Well, I think this. This is what I talk about when I talk about timing. And timing, you know, means that certain thing, you know, if you go, you know, 75 pages in a thriller novel and nothing thrilling happens. It's not a thriller novel, right? So you've got. There are things. There are places where you just have to have a sense of where that beat is. Now, in. In Hollywood, they've worked it into a pseudoscience. So you can buy a book about screenwriting where it'll tell you on page 23, and it really will say this on page 23, this must happen. And the only thing that this does is makes movies so uncreative that I will be able to write them. They're like, super formal, yes, super formulaic. But a real writer, a guy who really knows what he's doing, just has a feel for what he can do. You know, Kenny, you know, here's a place where a fight goes, what if I took the fight out? You know, what if this is a place where there should be a turning point? What if there's not? What if you're expecting it, but there's nothing? You know, those are the kinds of things that real writers can do. But the fact that there have to be after, especially after moments of great tension, there have to be moments of release. There have to be moments where you go, like, ah, okay, now this is going to happen. That is an important point because it means that if you can fill those scenes up with. With matter, with character, with incident, with emotion, you will have used them to deepen the rest of the story. Because it's hard to get a lot of character into a scene where a woman is climbing outside a window on a ledge, listening in. You know, that's an action scene. But what you want to do is you want to fill those scenes, you want to fill the other scenes with so much action that by the time your character gets into an action scene, the action itself expresses character. So in the same way that character is drama, you find that action can be character. And that's, to me, really important as somebody who, you know, writes, I think, really good action scenes and Loves writing action scenes. I try never to put in an action scene that is somehow not expressive of who these people are. And once you do that, you're not just, look, any. Anybody can put a guy on a ledge, and the. The audience, even if he's a criminal, the audience will say, oh, you know, don't fall off the ledge. Don't fall off the ledge. So you can use that. Anybody can do that. But when you do something like that scene where she crawls out there, and you know that she's this Victorian lady and, you know, she's a little frustrated in. In her womanly role. That womanly role is constricting for. But at the same time, she is a woman. You know, that's one of the wonderful things about Marian is she has what is being called a masculine nature at that moment, but she is, you know, even she herself appreciates the womanly part of her. And so there she is out there with no defense. No, you know, it's not going to be like some stupid movie where she suddenly beats up a guy. We know that. There's not going to be those lies that we tell about women. Now. She is, in fact, helpless in that moment. So there's just the raw courage of it, the nobility of it, and the fact that she is actually struck down by nature is just. It's just remarkable. It's action. It's the purest of action scenes. It could be in today's movie, could be a chase scene, but it reveals character. And that's brilliant.

Faith Moore (54:50)

Yeah, I think it is brilliant. So are there others, do you think. Have we covered. Are there. Do you have favorite kind of techniques that Collins uses? And this is kind of the last thing that we're going to switch gears and talk about something else for the last couple of minutes, but is. Do you have favorite techniques that he uses, one novelist to another?

Andrew Clavin (55:11)

Oh, God, yeah. I mean, so many that I like. I mean, I love. I love the setups, the long setups, the fact that the two women look alike, and we're wondering what that is. And I love the fact that that is explained. There's an actual reason that they have, that it's not just, you know, a coincidence. I. It's. It's. You know, when your brother and mother were watching Lost, I think I've told you this story before, but they're watching Lost, and I sat with them for the first three or four episodes, I can't remember, and I turned to them and said, they can't solve this anymore. And the reason I knew that is because I knew that each effect comes with an explanation and each explanation becomes. Can become clunky machinery. And weirdly, I remembered this book as had been having very clunky last hundred pages where they explained everything happened. It doesn't. I mean, it really doesn't. The explanations are as interesting as some of the events in it. And that to me is. I mean, I hate to over praise the book and make people feel that it's, you know, flawless. And no book is flawless. But it is remarkable how he goes just to the place where he can explain it in an interesting way and not beyond. And in the same way that Lost went to the place where the only reasonable answer was they're having a dream or they were dead and this was, you know, limbo or whatever, you know, he never goes to that place. And even the places where, like I said, there's something's too coincidental or something is maybe a little flawed, he could have fixed it, you know, I mean, it was just weak and he could have fixed it. And it is that I love as well. And finally, he's one of the rare writers and of course Dickens was editing him. So this may have been helpful because Dickens is the classic writer in this. He's one of the rare writers who can write happiness. So the resolution is as moving and as uplifting and as cheer inducing as a movie. It's impossible to do it. And that last line in the book is just spectacular. I mean, everything about that, that thing is, you know, you want to end the thing. You know, you want to have the guy dangling off the cliff and then he's rescued and all this stuff. But you do want that denim where somebody, where they sell. We celebrate the fact that we've been through this with these characters and they made it and he does it so well and it's so touching. And the servants cheering as she comes in and fairly being told to get stuffed, basically. Like that whole thing is just terrific. Yeah.

Faith Moore (57:37)

Yes, exactly. Try. Try reading it on a podcast and not crying. Luckily it wasn't live. I had several takes. Yeah. But thank you. This is fantastic and I think will be very interesting and helpful for all of the people that listen to the book all of this time. I want to switch gears just a little bit for the last part, but it's not really switching gear gears. It's kind of coming back around to what we've been talking about this summer, which is fairy tales. And I want to talk about your book. So. Yeah, so one of the things that people have been writing in about a lot as we talk about fairy tales is the fact that they are dark and they are gruesome. And people say, I don't know that I want to read these. I don't know that I want to exist in this world where people are cutting off their body parts or, you know, throwing people into burning cauldrons to be eaten by toads or whatever it is that is happening in these stories, and they're not sure they want to show them to their kids and all of this stuff. And I think, you know, even a story like the Woman in White can fall into this category. A story where these horrible things are happening to good people. I mean, yes, it has a happy ending, but. But so do many fairy tales. These horrible things are happening. Do we want to exist in these dark worlds? And I think this ties really nicely into the topic of your new book, which is called Kingdom of Finding God in the Literature of Darkness. So can you talk to us about your book, what it is, what it's about, and speak specifically to this concept of should our. Should we ingest these stories, stories that held within them darkness?

Andrew Clavin (59:17)

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, first, just as a. An epigraph, I quote C.S. lewis, or paraphrase C.S. lewis, since I can never quote anything accurately. But he says. He says, you know, you don't have to be afraid of telling children there are dragons. They know there are dragons, but fairy tales teach them that they can be beaten. You know, and I think that that is an important point, but even. But beyond that, I think it goes beyond that, is that the book the Kingdom of Cain is about four murders, really, and how they continually reappear in fiction and in movies and even in poems and philosophy and paintings and things like that. And so, you know, one of them, for instance, is the Ed gein murders in 1950s Wisconsin, which, because of its sexual nature, became the book Psycho, which then became Alfred Hitchcock's movie Psycho, which then inspired an entire genre of slasher films, including Silence of the Lambs, which is also based on the Ed Gein murders, and so is the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and so are numerous others. And. And so certain acts of evil capture the imagination, I believe, because they capture something that's happening in the world, and they're cap. They capture something that's happening in the culture. And my argument and King, Kingdom of Cain is one of the things that captures the slow death of faith in the Western world. And what is unraveling. Things like gender is unraveling and the sense that there is a moral law to which even mighty men are responsible is unraveling. All these ideas are unraveling that we can rewrite reality to our specifications. And so studying these things is studying a true, true force of human life, which is evil. And you know, evil is really a. When I say it's a force, that's what I mean. I mean, it's not something that people are. I mean, you can meet the most evil person in the world and you might find something endearing or human or sad about him. Even, even Hitler was abused as a child. And you can say, oh, poor Hitler, you know, but like, no, you know, at some point the evil is so dominant that you, you know, you stop saying that. And so to not to think that you are. To think that you have a relationship with God but have no concept of evil is to have no relationship with God because it's have no relationship with reality. And this is one of, one of the reasons I wrote this book. There are two very strong reasons why I wrote this book, but one of them is I feel that Christians art, which used to be the great art. I mean, if you look at the Woman in White, it's a very Christian book. Even though Wilkie Collins himself was not. He's writing in a popular vein and that, that his audience is Christian. Christian art used to be. Christianity used to be the source of, of all great art in the West. The poem poet William Blake said, the Bible is the code of art. You know, it is what and forms all art. And I think that's true today. And yet when you watch Christian movies today, they're happy, they're, you know, gooey, they're sentimental. They basically tell you that God is going to make everything all right in your life. I even had, when I was, you know, plugging the book and going on shows, and I even had a couple of Christian people say, well, doesn't God work out everything for the good? And I would say, well, no, not in this one. You know, a murder victim never gets justice in this world. We trust that he or she will get justice, but we don't get it in this world. No, the world is very unfair and very full of evil. And if you don't know that, you don't know reality in the same way that people who don't know God don't know reality. People who don't understand evil or accept the presence of evil don't understand reality. And I think reality is important because that's where things are actually taking place. And so Kingdom of Cain is about the way that artists transform, transform evil into wisdom and in doing so transform darkness into light. And in doing so give us a lesson in how God may work with the world in a larger frame than this, our lives, you know. And so that's, that's kind of what I'm. I'm writing about. And the second reason I wrote it is because I write such dark thriller crime stories. And I'm constantly getting this letter. I think it may be the same guy writing me from different places, but it always begins. You call yourself a Christian, but you write about these dark things. And one person just to make it a perfect letter said, I don't need to read this. I can read the Bible. And I thought, have you ever read the Bible? I mean, there's incest and rape and, you know, castration, all kinds of horrible things in the Bible that people don't seem to. They seem to gloss over. As if God could tell his story without those things. And I don't think he can. And this is an explanation of why I don't think think he can and what our reactions to evil should be.

Faith Moore (64:05)

Yeah, and it's great and it's perfect. Ties perfectly into what we've been talking about this summer about why we should read these stories or any stories that have darkness in them. The book again is Kingdom of Finding God in the Literature of Darkness. And there's a link in the show notes of this episode for people who are listening now and want to just pick up a copy. It's so easy. You just scroll into the show notes, you click on the link, it's right there and you can get your copy. This has been fantastic. Thank you. I think people are going to really get a lot out of what you said and hopefully some. We have many aspiring writers in our listenership and hopefully they will take something away from that as well. So thank you so much for coming on the show and talking to us.

Andrew Clavin (64:42)

As you know, I will talk to you anytime.

Faith Moore (64:45)

Yes, but thank you.

Andrew Clavin (64:47)

I look for excuses to talk.

Faith Moore (64:49)

Yes. But thank you for talking to these other lovely people who are thrilled to.

Andrew Clavin (64:52)

Hear people as well.

Faith Moore (64:53)

Yeah, thanks. Thank you so much for listening. Storytime will return in September with a new book read aloud in twice weekly episodes with a few notes along the way, like an audiobook with built in notes. The new book will be revealed sometime in August. In the meantime, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this episode. Is there anything you'd like me to clarify? Did something particularly interest you? Please go to my website faithkmoore.com click on contact and send me your questions and thoughts. Or you can click on the link in the Show Notes to contact me. I'll feature some of your thoughts as we go along. Speaking of links, please check out the other links in the Show Notes. You can learn more about me, pick up Storytime merch or become become a member of our online community. Before I go, I'd like to ask a quick favor. This is an independent podcast. It's produced, recorded and marketed by me, so I need your help. Spread the word about the show by posting about it on social media or texting a link to your friends. Subscribe, tap those five stars and leave a positive review wherever you're listening. If you are able to support the show financially, there's a link in the Show Notes to make a donation. I would really really appreciate it. Alright everyone, class is dismissed. I'll see you next week.