Talk Back

[Old Man Scrimshaw]

It took me four months, three renewals and about ten bucks in over due library fees but I finished reading an actual, honest-to-God book. You know, the rectangular thing with the cover and the pages and the spine and the binding. It’s the first non-audio book I’ve finished in over a year and a half. The truly sad part is it was only a tad over two hundred pages…

The book was The Getaway Man by Andrew Vachss, a novelists and attorney, known not only for his preeminence in the crime genre but also for his work as an advocate for children’s protection. According to his bio, “For ten years, Vachss’ law practice combined criminal defense with child protection, until, with the success of his novels, it segued exclusively into the latter, which is his passion. Vachss calls the child protective movement ‘a war,’ and considers his writing as powerful a weapon as his litigation.” From his photo, you believe it when he says war. He appears to be standing on a rooftop, wearing a dark suit, a swathe of five o’clock shadow, mussed hair and a villainous looking black eye patch. One of the rare instances where the back cover sells the book, not the front.

Although I’ve read and greatly relished other books and stories by Vachss, The Getaway Man is special. If his other novels are war, this one’s shore leave. It was written and published as a “paperback original” in the unswerving pulp style of the old Gold Medal crime novels of the fifties. I am a great fan of this genre. Back in the early to mid nineties there was a crime novel renaissance. Much of it can be attributed to Barry Gifford, a contemporary crime-ish writer probably best known for his Sailor and Lula novels that were the basis for David Lynch’s Wild at Heart. In the late eighties Gifford founded Black Lizard Press and reprinted three classic crime novels by Jim Thompson— The Getaway, Hell of A Woman and Pop. 1280 (read them!). Gifford sold Black Lizard to Random House in the early nineties and it became the Vintage Crime/Black Lizard imprint. Thanks to these reprints and a series of successful film adaptations, most notably The Grifters, these long forgotten men of pulp enjoyed a new and sadly posthumous acclaim (something Jim Thompson, for one, predicted, “Just you wait, I'll become famous after I'm dead about ten years."). Although Vintage Crime/Black Lizard still exhumes the occasional crime writer of old, the trend has mostly passed. Once again it’s harder and harder to find people who recognize names like Jim Thompson, Charles Willeford, David Goodis, and Chester Himes. In some ways, it only seems appropriate. These were men who lived from one brutal, nihilistic novel to the next, literally cranking out pages to put food on the table. Many of them had brushes with success during their lifetime (mainly with film adaptations of their work) but inevitably the gold ring slipped from their grasp and like the doomed protagonist of their books, they fell, vanishing into pulp oblivion.

What’s truly astounding about The Getaway Man is Vachss’ ability to pay complete homage to the genre and it’s authors without ever slipping into pastiche. Narrated in the first person by a young getaway driver named Eddie, the book follows his life of crimes and incarceration, leading up to the final “retirement heist”. The early portions of the book, not surprisingly given Vachss background, chronicle Eddie’s early run-ins with the law and time spent in juvenile prison. Like many of the great crime writers, Vachss uses the first person narration to ingratiate his protagonist. Eddie is clearly not a rocket scientist but he’s not dumb either. He is the classic crime novel everyman, an innocent compelled to commit crimes in search of self-knowledge. Along the way, he is of course ensnared by femme fatales and fellow criminals and slowly but surely driven toward a final, decisive act with consequences that only seem inevitable in retrospect. In this way, The Getaway Man is a crime novel by the numbers. But despite the classic structure, Vachhs gives the book a subtle modernity that makes it distinctly of its time and ultimately gives it relevance that goes beyond mere tribute.

Um… I guess I recommend it.