ANDREW VACHSS
ANDREW VACHSS (featured on January 18, 2003)
Genre fiction is written for a lot of reasons. Money and fame are the usual, obvious motivations, though few scribes actually attain much of either. Some writers have compelling voices in their heads, or love the escapist aspect of their chosen fictive category.
Tonight I am honored to present an extremely successful producer of mystery-genre manuscripts written primarily because he has an important social agenda to further and finds fiction to be the best tool for that job.
His experiences and impressive accomplishments outside the field of genre-fiction writing are varied and many. He experienced the tragedy of the Biafran holocaust first-hand in the late Sixties. He has been an attorney since graduating magna cum laude from the New England School of Law in 1975. The list of private and governmental organizations and agencies he has been involved in over the last thirty years would take more time to mention than we have here tonight, but the bulk of them clearly indicate that his primary life's work and professional focus is fighting child abuse and the incarceration of the predators who commit child abuse. He has been the recipient of numerous scholarships, fellowships and literary awards, including the 2002 Raymond Chandler Award for his body of work, which includes nineteen novels and two books of short stories, as well as an audio book, collected essays, an extensive array of articles, and two textbooks on the causes and cures of juvenile delinquency. He is a contributing editor for Parade Magazine.
His machine-gunfire prose-style has been compared to that of Dashell Hammet, but the social-agenda objectives and concerns imbedded in his genre-mystery creations are unrivaled in a field usually dismissed as escapist-literature. He is deliberate in his choice of theme and topic in both fiction and nonfiction, and as one our most quotable contemporary writers has some simple, straightforward conclusions about the crime-ridden national situation in which we currently find ourselves:
"If we really want to fight crime we must start at its root— the abused or neglected child."
"What children are, more than anything else, is this: another chance for our flawed species to get it right."
"...the greatest threat to this country's long term existence is not communism and it's not cocaine. It is that no society can survive if we let too much of it prey on its own young. The quality of our lives... is somehow connected to sociopathy and sociopathy is nothing more than ambulatory human beings with no sense of empathy. They feel only about their own feelings. They care only about their own pain. And I'm not saying they're all serial killers. Some are selling used cars and some are on Capital Hill, but they're all pernicious to us because they're not of us, and the only way you get that is when the socialization process is skewed."
Please welcome Andrew Vachss...