I spent the early ‘90s with Andrew Vachss. We lasted seven books until the divorce. We began to grow apart. The novels lost what I liked about them. Increasingly clinical themes sucked the life out of them, like he was overcompensating for the pleasures of his earlier novels. The elements became repetitive. The sentimentality running through them became stickier. Today...we just want different things.

I got custody of Blue Belle and Hard Candy, Vachss’ third and fourth novels. I came across both in a public library in the mystery section, purely looking for someone new to read, had never heard of Andrew Vachss. These two books got me hooked. There is nothing like getting hooked. It happens maybe once a decade, if I’m lucky.

Vachss is hardboiled. Really hardboiled. In his first novel Flood, a woman removes her tattoo using gasoline and a match.

Vachss writes a series private eye named Burke. Burke is not subtle. Book cover blurb: "Burke would eat Spade and Marlowe for breakfast, not even spitting out the bones." Not an exaggeration. If Taxi Driver was about a P.I. it would be Burke. Burke is also humorless and has the least fun of fictional P.I.s.

Burke is "an outlaw who makes his living preying on the most vicious of New York City’s bottom-feeders, those who thrive on the suffering of children." Burke is an urban survivalist who keeps himself so underground much of a Burke novel consists of the intricacies of keeping himself untraceable. Burke knows his way around and knows people who make people disappear.

What hooked me: Burke is a compelling and overqualified tour guide into the Hell that exists underneath the fiction, where reality begins. Documentary realism coexisting with Sin City outrageousness. If there is a Burke formula, it peaks in these two books.

Blue Belle is essentially a love story between Burke and a stripper named Belle. Like most Vachss characters, Belle had a hellish childhood. Both are damaged. Burke heals her, she heals Burke.

Meanwhile Burke takes out the best-demonized bad guys in crime fiction. One of them exits with a grenade shoved through his teeth.

It ends with Belle hot-rodding a getaway Camaro into a hail of police bullets. The dialogue gets old-school: "My race is run, honey. I’m gone."

Hard Candy is essentially a hate story between Burke and his childhood sweetheart from Hell. But it opens with Burke finding Belle’s father. Burke is no Dr. Phil. The body is never found.

Copyright© 2006 Raymond Embrack

RAYMOND EMBRACK is a writer of underground pulp and crime trash, author of five books.

Read an extract from Raymond's novel, Day Of The Dudes