Author/Lawyer Andrew Vachss Attacks Serial Killers, Child Molesters, and Prostitutes
By Ann Pryor and Alexander Laurence
Andrew Vachss has achieved cult status. A devoted young follower in Hawaii has opened up a page on the Internet about him. A major publisher, Knopf, has just released his eleventh novel, Footsteps of the Hawk. New Line Cinema is making a movie of his novel, Flood. He’s readying a new book, False Allegations, for 1996. And Warner Books has just issued his hard-bound book, Batman: The Ultimate Evil, along with a comic adaptation by DC Comics. In it, Gotham’s avenger uncovers the heinous crimes against society: child abuse in all its forms.
The publishing ventures are an ancillary part of a career spent in law offices and courtrooms. Vachss is a serious, passionate defender of the young and helpless, and his writing is a redirection of the incredible energy and anger generated by his wish to see criminals behind bars.
This immense attention has launched Vachss into a particular limelight. There are those who would prefer Vachss cease and desist his activity: he’s received nasty letters and even death threats. He points out these threats are not against writing itself, but the content of his works and his legal practices. The two are intertwined. The law has a direct effect on his creative content. From the child prostitutes and sick killers to the porno freaks and baby organs on the black market, Vachss says his novels are mirror of what he’s actually seen. The goal is to get people roused—to get them to care.
Vachss (pronounced “Vax”) wasn’t always the valiant lawyer. After holding down a series of tedious jobs, he wanted a change of scenery and a new tack on life. This led to a job as an investigator of sexually transmitted diseases. The end of the line consistently pointed toward young children who had been raped and abused. Disgusted, Vachss vowed to crusade against the criminals who very often either go free or retain custody of their abused children.
Taut, tense, loaded with gritty scenarios, Vachss’ razor-sharp writing style recalls Raymond Chandler and other prominent crime novelists. Yet he ducks any queries of his personal influences. (He does, however, mention his most admired writers, including Martha Grimes, Alice Hoffman, and friend Nick Pileggi.) In Batman: The Ultimate Evil, the Caped Crusader directs his powers to fighting child abuse in Gotham, shifting from mere crime fighter to “warrior.” As an echo of Vachss’ own desires to prevent these crimes, Batman cracks a child peddling ring in Asia. Unearthing the true beginnings of his own past, Bruce Wayne learns of his mother’s struggles to end a sick pattern of child abuse—and that his parents were killed by the leaders of a pornography ring leading back to Udon Khai, Thailand. Batman is the saddened orphan with no happy boyhood memories: they’ve been taken away and wiped out. Like Burke, the New York City bounty hunter working against the grain of the law in Vachss’ novels, Batman stands out as a lone figure of justice and revenge. Here the parallels among Burke, Batman, and Vachss converge.
The book is a veritable call to arms. The epilogue is a truly disturbing essay by David Hechler, an assault on the kiddie porn industry in Thailand and how we can stop it. Addresses are provided for Human Rights Watch and Don’t! Buy!Thai!, an organization designed to promote a boycott of all legal exports from Thailand. [Note: The boycott ended 12/20/00. For the complete story, click here.] His comic book company, Dark Horse Comics, has joined in the boycott. During a recent online chat arranged through DC Comics, Vachss wrote that closing the child porn industry down is a fight to be done in a grassroots-style of operation. “If a label says ‘Made in Thailand,’ put it back on the shelf and tell the retailer why.”
Burke and Batman will always find ways to succeed. Their ability to thrive doesn’t stem from basic instinct, but from recognizing and acting on what they’ve learned. Not surprisingly, that sounds a lot like Vachss. “Their actions reflect an accumulation of trauma-driven knowledge,” Vachss explains. “You memorize that a lot more deeply than you would some bar exam.”
—Ann Pryor
ALEXANDER LAURENCE: In your books everyone is having a moral crisis. How do you think that we are going to remedy this in practical terms? ANDREW VACHSS: I’m not that sort of pontificator. Everyone of these problems has the same remedy, which there is an enemy and you fight it. A lot of the young people I speak to all over the world—I don’t care if it’s Oslo or Melbourne or Brooklyn, it’s the same thing—they actually want to be in a war. I don’t’ mean that they want to get guns and kill people. I mean that they want to fight for something. It’s really unclear to them what there is to fight about, so you get a certain amount of energy expended in nonsense. There are legitimate enemies. I think that it’s human nature to seek balance, safety, and peace, and to be willing to go to war to find it. What we have is the lack of balance, but we don’t have the war.
AL: You have dealt with many serial killers, child molesters, and criminals. What do you think of the idea that the prisons create career criminals?
AV: It’s simplistic to say that the prisons are responsible. The prisons still have to get their product from some place, and they do get it essentially from the maltreatment of children. There’s no bio-genetic code for a serial killer. If you bred Ted Bundy and Squeaky Fromme you wouldn’t get a mass murderer. You’d get whatever was raised. That’s what we seem to have forgotten completely. The maternal instinct that people used to talk about—we have almost devolved past. If you look at the most awesome animal of the jungle, the elephant, nothing can bother it. But a baby elephant without its mother is food. So animals have figured out a long time ago that if they don’t protect their own, they won’t survive as a species. Let me give you another example. Why did the dinosaurs vanish from the earth?
AL: There are many theories about that…
AV: Right. There’s only one truth though. That is because they are lizards and they don’t protect their young. And eventually we, people, evolved and we figured out that we can kill them in the egg. And we did it! We killed them and they didn’t adapt and survive. Sharks survived because we couldn’t get to them. We are not going to survive forever if we keep maltreating our children.
AL: Abuse has been there from the start?
AV: Since there has been children, which is forever. That’s the point. We are just looking at it now and saying, “Oh my God, look at all this child abuse that has just started….” There’s no evidence to support that view, and all the evidence supports the contrary, which is that children have been perceived as the property of their parents to do as they wish.
AL: How did you get involved representing children in sexual abuse cases?
AV: I was an investigator for the federal government in sexually transmitted diseases. My job was what you’re doing now except I’d ask different questions. My questions to you would be: “Well, you got syphilis, pal, and I need to know all the people that you have been with sexually within the hot zone.” And then find those people and ask them the same questions. Right? To try to break the chain at some point. At the time, I thought that I was a pretty tough kid. I was happy working in whorehouses, juke joints, and gambling dens, and having myself a fine old time. I never realized that people had sex with babies. And when I realized that, and I realized that by—I was going to say a “man,” but not a man—a male sitting as close to me as you are now, sort of giggling about how he ripped out his child’s rectum to have fun, I thought that I saw the devil. But it wasn’t the devil at all. As a matter of fact, it was a typical attitude although the method was extreme. Since then, that is what I have done whether it was the war in Biafra or running a maximum security prison. When I went to law school, it was exclusively to represent children and that’s what I’ve done ever since.
AL: Do you consider yourself a participant in what you write?
AV: This isn’t Raymond Chandler. This is what I do. The books are an organic extension of what I do, and I wish only that the books were fiction.
AL: What is your interest in prostitutes?
AV: Where do you get a prostitute from? Do you think that it’s a career choice? If you go out on a stroll tonight and talk to some working girls, how many do you think will have not come from abusive childhoods? Do you think that they were reading counseling catalogues?
AL: Maybe 20 percent.
AV: I doubt that. You might if you go way up the ladder. If you go up to Heidi Fliess type of stuff you may find women who, for their own reasons, made that as their career choice, but if you find these little girls who are walking around the corner, giving their money to a pimp, if you think that was a career choice, you must be crazy. They’re simply continuing a cycle and playing out a script that was written for them when they were children. And that’s my interest as you put it, I’m sure. The self-concept of such people is profoundly damaged by their prior lives, and they’re exploited at every step in their lives, and it’s not anything resembling a glamorous profession.
AL: No. Some of them delude themselves into thinking so.
AV: Of course. And some kids who are having sex with their fathers delude themselves into thinking it’s an affair, too. The capacity to self-delude is part of the capacity to survive.
AL: What sort of influence do you want to have on your readers?
AV: I want them to be angry. If they are not angry then the book has failed. It’s not more complicated than that.