safe house | andrew vachss
Safe House is the 10th book in the Burke series by real life badass Andrew Vachss. Burke is an ex-con man for hire, New York style, with the usual assortment of hardboiled odd characters with unique talents who are indebted to him. There’s the Prof, and that guy you doesn't talk, and that other smart guy...I can’t say I remember all too well right now. Basically, Burke needs something, someone shows up like a saint or a pagan god and the plot belt keeps cranking along.
I read another book in this series about 20 years ago, Dead and Gone, and remember liking it quite a bit. Having parted ways with it as some point over the decades, I wanted to read it again, but found only Safe House at one of my city’s fine used bookstores. Unfortunately, this did not live up to the foggy memory of that previous read.
The skinny of it is, Herk (a big Scandi ex con named Hercules who gives off serious Lenny Of Mice Men vibes as all he does is go on about wanting to garden in the country) is hired to scare off a woman’s abuser and when the guy goes for his gun, Herk does what Herk does which is a lot of stabbing in a parking lot in NYC in the daytime. Fearful of going back to prison, Herk asks Burke for help since they knew each other in the hoosegow back in the day where they were incarcerated for never mentioned reasons and Burke sets him up in a Safe House till Burke can figure out if anyone saw Herk do the deed.
No one did and it should end there, but Vachss needs to drive this into the ground. I would like to go on about the plot, but it felt like I was reading the script of a slightly risque 80s police show that wasn’t Hill Street Blues and not really worth repeating in any detail. Burke meets a woman named Crystal Beth who originally hired Herk to do that deed and, get this, she runs an underground shelter for abused women in an old warehouse. Another safe house? Why wasn’t this called Safe Houses?
I would think that any book that climaxes with the main character blowing the brains out of an abusive, porn addicted neoNazi would be very well worth the reading, alas this is not that book. While the first third was fun and fast paced, the rest the book slowly came to a screeching halt as the whole nazi plot seemed to hinge on Burke’s married hookup being worried her husband would divorce her if he saw the incriminating lesbian action she was involved in. See, he’s fine with men and their slurp bones getting together with her but damn if he’ll be so understanding about her snacking on someone else’s honey nut Cheerios.
The first third of book is really good though as Burke tries to find out if Herk was setup, but it descends into conversation after conversation after conversation, generally about things that sound fairly interesting but we don’t see them.
We do get see a Nazi get blown away so that`s okay. So read the first third of this book and then skip to about five pages before the end. It won’t make sense, nothing in between made any sense either.
About the author
It's a rare thing where the author is more of a badass than their badass fictional avatar. He even had an eye patch! sayeth the wiki:
Before becoming a lawyer, Vachss held many front-line positions in child protection. He was a federal investigator in sexually transmitted diseases, and a New York City social-services caseworker. He worked in Biafra, entering the war zone just before the fall of the country. There he worked to find a land route to bring donated food and medical supplies across the border after the seaports were blocked and Red Cross airlifts banned by the Nigerian government; however, all attempts ultimately failed, resulting in rampant starvation.
After he returned and recovered from his injuries, including malaria and malnutrition, Vachss studied community organizing in 1970 under Saul Alinsky. He worked as a labor organizer and ran a self-help center for urban migrants in Chicago. He then managed a re-entry program for ex-convicts in Massachusetts, and finally directed a maximum-security prison for violent juvenile offenders.
As an attorney, Vachss represented only children and adolescents. In addition to his private practice, he served as a law guardian in New York state. In every child abuse or neglect case, state law requires the appointment of a law guardian, a lawyer who represents the child's interests during the legal proceedings.
If I see Dead and Gone at a used bookstore I might still pick up and see if it lives up to my memory of it. If so, I might just revisit Burke, and that one smart guy, and some other dudes and some of them aren't dudes. They seemed liked good people.