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  #11  
Old 05-19-2006, 05:55 PM
Dominic Dominic is offline
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Default Re: Andrew Vachs\' Burke novels

Batman and Andrew Vachs do NOT go together. It'd be like having William S. Burroughs write a Benji story.
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  #12  
Old 05-19-2006, 06:03 PM
diebitter diebitter is offline
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Default Re: Andrew Vachs\' Burke novels

[ QUOTE ]
It'd be like having William S. Burroughs write a Benji story.

[/ QUOTE ]

I'd love that.
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  #13  
Old 05-21-2006, 04:42 PM
britspin britspin is offline
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Default Re: Andrew Vachs\' Burke novels

Dom,

Just to let you know that on the basis of this, I went to my local Crime bookshop and picked up a copy of Vachss's (yeah, apparently it's a two s name) blossom.

Apparently he's out of print in the UK, so I got a second hand copy for 2 quid. A review will follow in a while. Thanks for the tip.
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  #14  
Old 05-22-2006, 04:41 AM
Dominic Dominic is offline
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Default Re: Andrew Vachs\' Burke novels

[ QUOTE ]
Dom,

Just to let you know that on the basis of this, I went to my local Crime bookshop and picked up a copy of Vachss's (yeah, apparently it's a two s name) blossom.

Apparently he's out of print in the UK, so I got a second hand copy for 2 quid. A review will follow in a while. Thanks for the tip.

[/ QUOTE ]

hope you like it...Blossom's like the 5th in the series, but he catches you up fairly well with what has happened before so it shouldn't be a problem.
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  #15  
Old 08-13-2007, 01:29 AM
Dominic Dominic is offline
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Default Re: Andrew Vachs\' Burke novels

[ QUOTE ]
Dom,

Just to let you know that on the basis of this, I went to my local Crime bookshop and picked up a copy of Vachss's (yeah, apparently it's a two s name) blossom.

Apparently he's out of print in the UK, so I got a second hand copy for 2 quid. A review will follow in a while. Thanks for the tip.

[/ QUOTE ]

did you ever read the book, Brit? Just wondering....
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  #16  
Old 08-23-2007, 12:05 AM
maltaille maltaille is offline
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Default Re: Andrew Vachs\' Burke novels

Seeing this bump brought me over here for the first time, and Dominic was nice enough to invite me in, I guess I'll throw my opinion in too.

I used to be a big fan of Vachss' stuff, but unfortunately while when he's good he's very, very good, when he's bad he justifies all the contempt out there for genre fiction. I think he lost it several years ago. Burke especially is a caricature of his former self, and most of his other stuff takes itself so seriously that it makes me cringe, despite some really slick writing in places.

Vachss has always said that he doesn't consider himself a writer, it's just something he does because it furthers his cause, which is improving the conditions for abused children. Writing books gave him an opportunity to take a shot at the conditions that he believes cause the problem, rather than just helping each individual child as he can (which is why he wrote a Batman novel. It reached an audience his other stuff never would. It's not so weird, Batman is just as close a descendant of Philip Marlowe as Arkady Renko or Harry Bosch are).

I can appreciate this as a worthy cause, but about the same time he started producing comic books (thats not a metaphor, he does actually write comics as well) he went over the edge, and his prose started turning people away from his message. If you can't recommend his stuff, you can't spread his word.

Which is a pity, because I think his first half-dozen or so novels were some of the best noir stuff written in the late eighties. He's not so much in the Spenser vein (though Spenser has the same problem these days, he and Hawk are supermen) as Richard Stark's Parker (remember Payback, with Mel Gibson? This was an adaptation of the first Parker novel) or Garry Disher's Wyatt. Really spare writing, criminal protagonists who are so professional they've left some of their humanity behind, and worlds where there are no good guys. There's nothing refined about Burke. He's a pit bull who would rather hit first and get home alive than see whether there's a need to fight in the first place.

The first one, Flood, is a little shaky - I don't think he'd quite figured out who Burke is yet - but the second, Strega, and probably up to Sacrifice are fantastic. Then Max starts turning into the deadliest man alive, Burke starts getting laid more than James Bond (and the sex starts getting a little misogynistic), and I start wondering whether some intern is actually knocking these out while Vachss works the talk show circuit. You're getting the soup Mama serves to customers, not the stuff she keeps for family.

A few of the non-Burke ones are worthwhile though. Shella has already been mentioned, Getaway Man is ok, and a lot of the short stories in Born Bad and Everybody Pays work. But once you've been through those switch to Richard Stark, or James Ellroy, or Lawrence Block, or F Paul Wilson, or early Elmore Leonard.
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  #17  
Old 08-23-2007, 01:03 AM
Dominic Dominic is offline
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Default Re: Andrew Vachs\' Burke novels

[ QUOTE ]
Seeing this bump brought me over here for the first time, and Dominic was nice enough to invite me in, I guess I'll throw my opinion in too.

I used to be a big fan of Vachss' stuff, but unfortunately while when he's good he's very, very good, when he's bad he justifies all the contempt out there for genre fiction. I think he lost it several years ago. Burke especially is a caricature of his former self, and most of his other stuff takes itself so seriously that it makes me cringe, despite some really slick writing in places.

Vachss has always said that he doesn't consider himself a writer, it's just something he does because it furthers his cause, which is improving the conditions for abused children. Writing books gave him an opportunity to take a shot at the conditions that he believes cause the problem, rather than just helping each individual child as he can (which is why he wrote a Batman novel. It reached an audience his other stuff never would. It's not so weird, Batman is just as close a descendant of Philip Marlowe as Arkady Renko or Harry Bosch are).

I can appreciate this as a worthy cause, but about the same time he started producing comic books (thats not a metaphor, he does actually write comics as well) he went over the edge, and his prose started turning people away from his message. If you can't recommend his stuff, you can't spread his word.

Which is a pity, because I think his first half-dozen or so novels were some of the best noir stuff written in the late eighties. He's not so much in the Spenser vein (though Spenser has the same problem these days, he and Hawk are supermen) as Richard Stark's Parker (remember Payback, with Mel Gibson? This was an adaptation of the first Parker novel) or Garry Disher's Wyatt. Really spare writing, criminal protagonists who are so professional they've left some of their humanity behind, and worlds where there are no good guys. There's nothing refined about Burke. He's a pit bull who would rather hit first and get home alive than see whether there's a need to fight in the first place.

The first one, Flood, is a little shaky - I don't think he'd quite figured out who Burke is yet - but the second, Strega, and probably up to Sacrifice are fantastic. Then Max starts turning into the deadliest man alive, Burke starts getting laid more than James Bond (and the sex starts getting a little misogynistic), and I start wondering whether some intern is actually knocking these out while Vachss works the talk show circuit. You're getting the soup Mama serves to customers, not the stuff she keeps for family.

A few of the non-Burke ones are worthwhile though. Shella has already been mentioned, Getaway Man is ok, and a lot of the short stories in Born Bad and Everybody Pays work. But once you've been through those switch to Richard Stark, or James Ellroy, or Lawrence Block, or F Paul Wilson, or early Elmore Leonard.

[/ QUOTE ]

wow, thanks for the in depth words...even if I don't agree with you! I do feel his earlier Burke novels are leaner, more jarring and blistering...but I still love the later novels and how Burke has had to evolve...along with his family.

I've never read any Parker...but I love Ellroy and Leonard...

what did you think of Two Trains Running?
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  #18  
Old 08-23-2007, 03:17 AM
maltaille maltaille is offline
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Default Re: Andrew Vachs\' Burke novels

If there was no disagreement it would be a pretty boring forum, no? Still, I was pretty harsh. Of the later books, I definitely appreciate the ones where Burke has had to evolve more - I'm thinking of the big upset in his life and the subsequent stint in Portland - but it's mainly the way his family is treated that ruins them for me. They stop being real people and turn into plot devices. We need some advice, let's go talk to the Prof; we need a heavy, let's go get Max.

I haven't actually read Two Trains Running. I don't think I've read more than a few of his last seven or eight, and I'm not American so race relations in the corrupt South doesn't have a lot of resonance for me. Good, bad, middling?

In checking which one Two Trains Running was though I noticed that Vachss has a new Burke novel coming out next month, Terminal. I'll probably pick it up after this discussion.

You're in for a treat if you haven't read any Parker before. He's the original professional. The first books are from the sixties and seventies - though they often don't have the dated prose that a lot of stuff from that period has, thanks to the subsequent popularization of their style twenty years later - and then there's a twenty year gap to the next bunch. Richard Stark is the pen name under which Donald E Westlake (yup, the same Westlake who wrote the script for The Grifters) writes his more noirish stuff.

To diverge for a moment, did you manage to finish Ellroy's The Cold Six Thousand? I have a theory that he was trying to emulate James Joyce's Ulysses with it, and produce something that could be both a masterpiece and virtually unreadable at the same time.

It might be more appropriate in another thread, but given the names I've thrown up, is there anyone I might not have read that you would recommend?
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  #19  
Old 08-23-2007, 05:34 PM
Dominic Dominic is offline
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Default Re: Andrew Vachs\' Burke novels

[ QUOTE ]
If there was no disagreement it would be a pretty boring forum, no? Still, I was pretty harsh. Of the later books, I definitely appreciate the ones where Burke has had to evolve more - I'm thinking of the big upset in his life and the subsequent stint in Portland - but it's mainly the way his family is treated that ruins them for me. They stop being real people and turn into plot devices. We need some advice, let's go talk to the Prof; we need a heavy, let's go get Max.

I haven't actually read Two Trains Running. I don't think I've read more than a few of his last seven or eight, and I'm not American so race relations in the corrupt South doesn't have a lot of resonance for me. Good, bad, middling?

In checking which one Two Trains Running was though I noticed that Vachss has a new Burke novel coming out next month, Terminal. I'll probably pick it up after this discussion.

You're in for a treat if you haven't read any Parker before. He's the original professional. The first books are from the sixties and seventies - though they often don't have the dated prose that a lot of stuff from that period has, thanks to the subsequent popularization of their style twenty years later - and then there's a twenty year gap to the next bunch. Richard Stark is the pen name under which Donald E Westlake (yup, the same Westlake who wrote the script for The Grifters) writes his more noirish stuff.

To diverge for a moment, did you manage to finish Ellroy's The Cold Six Thousand? I have a theory that he was trying to emulate James Joyce's Ulysses with it, and produce something that could be both a masterpiece and virtually unreadable at the same time.

It might be more appropriate in another thread, but given the names I've thrown up, is there anyone I might not have read that you would recommend?

[/ QUOTE ]

Two Trains Running was very good...not quite great, though.

I have not read that Ellroy novel...and since we're talking this genre and you mentioned The Grifters, IMO, no one has come close to touching Jim Thompson.
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  #20  
Old 08-23-2007, 11:39 PM
EYEWHITES EYEWHITES is offline
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Default Re: Andrew Vachs\' Burke novels

i think i have read the last four he put out. The trains one was pretty good, i agree its not great, but i found it inresting enough to finish and ive to my dad.

he put out a book of short stories which i thought was really good although im not a big fan of short stories at all.

i read the last 2 burke novels, which i thought were great, i felt like i was cheating on my diet, i hoestly couldnt put them down and finished both in less than a day.

i plan on going back to the begining and starting with flood im glad to hear that its good.

i think i read somewhere he was kinda the influence for a chacter in law and order svu, but i dont know if that was true. The author not burke.. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]
although burke would be cooler
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