Sat 14 Sep 2019
A PI Mystery Review by Barry Gardner: ANDREW VACHSS – Down in the Zero.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[6] Comments
ANDREW VACHSS – Down in the Zero. Burke #7. Knopf, hardcover, 1994. Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, paperback, 1995.
Vachss’s tales of the alienated and disconnected Burke and his group of misfit and off-center allies are very much a specialized taste, I think. I’ve liked them anywhere from somewhat to considerably over the course of the series.
Burke is locked into a spiral of depression that threatens to take him down into the “Zero. or oblivion. He killed a child, and it may destroy him. Then a young man appears who is afraid that a mounting number of suicides among his rich acquaintances may hide a common dark secret, and asks Burke to help him.
Burke wouldn’t, but the young man plays a trump — his mother told him to seek out Burke if he ever felt threatened, and to remind him of a favor he owed her. It’s an invoice a long time in the presenting, but Burke feels he must honor it.
Vachss’s fiction has always struck me as a curious mixture of the romantic and the perverse. Sexual deviance, child abuse, and bloody violence exist side by side with relationships among the characters that are oddly idealized and romanticized. There’s little real about the stories, either, which are very grim fairy tales.
In this one there are strong echoes of Robert Parker’s Early Autumn, on that Burke transforms a fearful wimp of a young man into a macho budding race-driver in an astonishingly period of time. The plot is half-assed and half-hearted, and this is another case, I’m afraid, of an author just going through the motions with a successful series. There’s not a great deal here even for confirmed Vachss-ites, and even less for anyone else.
September 14th, 2019 at 10:27 pm
I thought I was a die-hard Vachss fan. This the one when I lost interest. And I think it was the one when Vachss lost interest too.
September 14th, 2019 at 10:37 pm
I’ve tried but I’ve never finished a Vachss book. Just a little too dark for me. Well, maybe a lot too dark. I think Barry nailed this one very well.
September 15th, 2019 at 7:40 pm
Vachss can write very well when he wants to, but you can’t carry a series on nothing but white hot fury at injustice, even when the subject is as important as child abuse. He’s too uneven for me as a fiction writer, but his crusade is still important.
The brutal even exploitative violence doesn’t really balance with the strangely otherworldly nature of many of the people inhabiting his world.
No one since Spillane has written at quite the white hot level Vachss achieves, but Spillane knew how to spin a plot and create a genuine mystery. That said, Vachss has written some books I admire. And no one can deny the import of his chief subject.
It should be pointed out people in the genre who made these very points about Vachss were accused of being child molesters by his more rabid fans in the past, which frankly turned me off his work even more.
September 17th, 2019 at 7:52 am
Firm fan of Vachss, here. Speaking from purely my own perspective as a reader, I feel he is one of the few (maybe the only) credible modern heirs to Hammett. There’s even a little bit of Tennessee Williams in there too. I’m glad to learn he’s still writing; he seemed to ebb a bit after his first 3-5 titles. Drifted off into novellas and shorts. But Vacchss offers a distinctive, valuable, and bleak view of New York which I’ve never seen the beat of. His vision is still true in some neighborhoods and (who knows?) might be true again someday. But in the meantime, I figure him to be a little ‘beaten down’ by the anemic, politically-correct phase we’re in now. Friend of mine met him in person once, said he was polite but completely unapologetic about the nastiness he penned. Eh, I reckon audiences just can’t handle him anymore and maybe he senses that and has retreated. Anyway, ‘Blue Belle’ (Burke #3) I rank as his best work and one of the finest examples of its kind. Of the others, ‘Strega’ is also a fave. I know some of the neighborhoods in that novel.
September 20th, 2019 at 8:47 pm
Vachss holds a unique place in my reading. I consider TWO TRAINS RUNNING (2005) one of the best hard boiled novels of the last thirty years, and HAIKU (2009) one of the worst books I ever read.
September 22nd, 2019 at 8:48 pm
Like David, I’ve found Vachss’ work to be very uneven. Yes, TWO TRAINS RUNNING is an underrated novel. I admit I gave up on NAIKU after 50 pages.