Customer Reviews

Two Trains Running

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Andrew Vachss has always been an important novelist, and with TWO TRAINS RUNNING he becomes a major one. His subject is nothing less than how America came to be what it is today as a result of what happened in the pivotal year of 1959, when his story takes place. As rival gangland factions gather and clash over the future of Locke City, so do other larger, more entrenched and no less corrupt forces clash over the future of the country itself. In the center stands the protagonist, Walker Dett. Dett functions as a passenger on both "trains," the express running on the Locke City plotline, and the slower but more powerful engine bearing the country itself to a future formed as we watch. While Vachss's portrait is of far more than the city in which the tale is set, so too is his subject far more than crime. He delves deeply into the still unresolved problem of race relations, revealing the roots of black anger and burgeoning black pride. He examines the genesis of gang violence and the motivations that draw the young and rootless into that particular hell. And he takes a hard look at government intrusion into all aspects of society, and how the investigation of corruption can lead to the corruption of the investigator. What makes Vachss's story even more journalistic is its style. The book is constructed of a series of scenes presented chronologically with the date and time at the start of each. Never does he reveal the thoughts of any character, even his protagonist. He "merely" reports. With such a seemingly cold and clinical way of relating events, it's surprising how much warmth and compassion come through in the human story. The book is filled with well-drawn characters rich in moral ambiguity. Vachss weaves all their stories together seamlessly, and even engages in some fascinating speculation in the process. TWO TRAINS RUNNING works brilliantly on all of its many levels, and is one of those books that repays rereading. It's a new American classic - an intriguing story well-told, and a deeper rumination on how we got to where we are today

In 1959 Locke City is completely owned by Royal Beaumont, wheelchair-bound since childhood. Royal, living up to his first name, uses excess force to rule over his vice-laden kingdom that has made the town a Mecca for tourists looking for illegal prostitution, gambling, and a few more violent activities for the right price. No one dare say no or criticize this dictator although a local militant black movement is growing.

In the fall, two rival New York mobs discover Locke City; each demands a piece of the action threatening Beaumont. First the Italian mafia tries to push Beaumont around; soon afterward an Irish mob offers Beaumont a deal in which they receive a cut in exchange for tossing out the Italians and crushing the blacks. Beaumont has his own plan taking advantage of the ethnic hatred and distrust by bringing in his own killing machine Walker Dett. However, in the midst of compiling one hit after another by outflanking the Italians, the Irish and the blacks, Walker falls in love. Will a woman soften this hit machine?

Though Burke-less, TWO TRAINS RUNNING is a fabulous testosterone filled historical thriller that grips the audience once the mobs arrive at Locke City, but especially takes off when Walker starts his destruction. Royal will remind the audience of Broderick Crawford in All the King's Men while Dett steals the show as a perfect killer until the intriguing twist of when he meets Tussy; that actually slows down the flow of blood (what can one expect with sex, naps, and showers) yet humanizes him. Andrew Vachss is at his action packed best with this convergence of dark forces in a small town in 1959.

Harriet Klausner

You aren't ready for this. No, really. No one is ready for the amazing turn Andrew Vachss has taken his writing life. And that, of course, is the best part. Two Trains Running is a book that astonishes the reader on many levels.

Known, of course, for the durable Burke series, Vachss here takes his loyal readers down a completely different track. For those just getting on board, the welcome is there for the reading, as this is a totally new creation from Vachss. A historical noir--told in a voice steeped in the knowledge of years, and hardened by them.

Two Trains Running is two weeks in the life of Locke City, somewhere in the non-coastal American Heartland, fall of 1959. A once-prosperous place, brought low by depression, revived in well-protected vice. That vice is ruled by Royal Beaumont, native crime boss. With Italians and Irish trying to muscle their way in to his world, he brings in the enigmatic Walker Dett to sharpen his edge. Mix in various law enforcement agencies with various motives, and a brewing race war. As struggles over, variously, ways of life, love, salvation, and the future of the country erupt, Vachss blends and boils the threads of his story without sentiment, and with clear intent. The result is a work both breath-taking in its action and startling in its heart and soul. The stories you are told, in many cases, are the ones you had no idea you were reading until they were over. There are a couple of those here, too.

Vachss tells the story with no chapters, per se, but in a percussive time-stamping style, that does a couple of things; helps give the various plot-lines a propulsion that is cinematic; It also re-enforces the observational nature of the narration. It's written as a sort of omniscient surveillance of events sans comment. That part is our job. Vachss wants us to look at these events filtered only by our own experience and knowledge, and to see how the pieces fit into the country we think we live in. And by doing so, decide their truth.

According to some early press, part of Vachss' intent was to create a tribute to investigative journalism as a last line in a democracy's defense (no currency there, eh?). He does that not so much in the way he presents Jimmy Procter, Locke City's hotshot reporter, but in the way he tells the story itself. It's a style refined in reportage, betraying no point of view. Just the facts. Third person, and then some.

Walker Dett is a ronin of his times, a soldier without an army, on a path that transcends anything in it. One of Two Trains Running's victories is how his journey provides moments of such extreme dark and light. For every demonstration of his violent gift, there is, upon his introduction to one Tussy Chambers, a stage of a soul opening, that provides the essential counter-balance to the entire story. There are numerous love stories amidst the darkness here, and they all serve to feed the passions at work.

So let's talk about Tussy for a minute, ok? Burke readers, let's just say she's right in there with Blue Belle and Ann O.Dyne as classic Vachss Gals. She is love, faith and temptation. She is irresistible. And of course, the force of her personality becomes a major part of the story Vachss is telling. While we're talking about the "fun stuff", let's mention that Vachss' love affair with the American Automobile is in full fettle here, and adds a precise authenticity to the action.

Vachss has fueled Two Trains Running with some first-rate characters; from the afore-mentioned Royal Beaumont Mountain Man Crime Boss (think Burl Ives in Nick Ray's swamp-noir, "Wind Across The Everglades), to Sherman Layne, the only honest cop in the entire story, who is in love with the town madam.

Vachss nods to other themes familiar in his canon....that families are made not born, forged by action and trust, not blood. That crime is often in the intent, not the deed. Part of the joy to regular readers of his work is seeing how those themes get worked in to his story. It's one of the things that make Andrew Vachss a singular writer in this genre. And it's just a small part of what makes Two Trains Running a singular reading experience.

I love the Burke series, but when Andrew Vachss decides to step out into new arenas, I am even more entranced.

Two Trains Running is set in 1959, when every social faction in America geared up to take control of the 1960 presidential election. Who will win, and what will each group draw the line at how far it will go to win? Vachss sets readers the task of putting together the evidence. This book reads better than any Sherlock Holmes (or CSI) plot, because Vachss gives readers all the information to come to their own conclusion.

The story is strongly drawn, and the sense of place is astonishingly three-dimensional. Locke City is a crossroads of low-down activity, disguised as a rundown industrial river town. The characters all have secrets, but we tease those out only by keeping our eyes and ears open, since the omnicient third-person narrative so common to mystery and suspense writing is laid aside here. It's the right choice, as knowing what the characters are thinking would be like adding training wheels to the book. What's important is what the characters say and do, and that information is reported in a series of vignettes that are time-coded like police surveillance.

I can't praise this book enough. the Burke novels made me a Vachss fan, but this book is even more special, like a fine brandy distilled from sumptuous wine.

Vachss has semlessly woven together FBI corruption, the Mafia, politics, small town corruption, redemtion, the JFK/Nixon election, drugs, gangs both black & white, porn, the Tuskeggee experiment, race relations, mysticism, love & hate, Emmitt Tell,the Irish political machine, human nature both good & bad into his densist novel ever. Set in the border town of Locke City in 1959, all the above issues, and more, twist & turn, simmer and finally boil over. The many plot threads become a little hard to follow, but are worth the effort. The main character, Walker Dett, is in some respects the scariest of Vachss creations, a remorseless killer on a mission of his own, but not of his own making. My only complaints are the absence of Jimmy Proctor for most of the novel, this character just dissapears for the middle 85% of the book; and I must agree with another reviewer, the interplay between the sexes seems strained, but then all of these characters are damaged so that is not surpising. We will be seeing Walker Dett again. Dallas, Tx. Nov. 1963.

OK, so maybe I've just crawled out from under a rock, but I'd never heard of Andrew Vachss. And then I started reading Ken Bruen's bare-knuckled crime fiction, and kept running across Bruen's frequent and reverent references to Vachss. I figured it was time to find out what was impressing the venerable Bruen so much.

I find myself agreeing with Bruen's superlatives. "Two Trains Running" is a remarkable novel that can be enjoyed on several different levels. On the surface, it is a kick-butt pulp crime fiction, a hardboiled and tight-lipped gem reminiscent of Jim Thompson or Raymond Chandler. A level deeper, you've got an authentic slice of late-Eisenhower America that includes the racial tension, gangs, drugs, and corruption not often depicted in the old "Happy Days" nostalgia typically associated with this era that was setting up the mayhem for the turbulent 60s. And then, running through it all is a near supernatural undercurrent that can only be described as weirdness - a surreal tone that reminds one of the brutal and bizarre "Sin City", Frank Miller's comic book nightmare brought to garish life on the big screen.

The story unfolds in Locke City, and decaying mid-America mill town run by wheelchair-bound boss Royal Beaumont and his unmarried sister Cynthia. Unlike most pulp fiction which it mimics - or perhaps parodies - Vachss' "Two Trains" is epic in scope - long and convoluted, with multiple subplots and even more messages to sort through and ponder. Beaumont brings to town Walker Dett, an enigmatic hit man hired to thwart encroachment by an emerging Mafioso. It is soon clear that Dett is not what he seems, but what he is is an entirely different matter. And if you're like me, he will having you guessing right up to the last bloody page.

A couple of words of caution: this is a long and complex novel that should not be read casually or sporatically. Vachss paints this masterpiece with lots of parallel stories and a rich set of characters, told in a staccato shorthand that may have you scratching your head and thumbing back through pages to pick up the thread. It is beautifully blunt and as far from politically correct as you can get, so the more sensitive readers may be offended by frequent use of racial slurs blatant bigotry. But in the end this is a brilliant example of crime fiction smashed together with cutting social commentary, a vivid and intelligent story that will not easily be forgotten. Bravo, Mr. Vachss.

Vachss' latest is a departure from his usual style. In everything I've read by him, he tends to write about "ground zero," about things the media has under-reported. Here, he instead has plummed history for things the history books have neglected, and tied them together to explain how America changed in 1959. A really interesting theory, and a really interesting book. Make no mistake, it's not the fast read that his Burke novels are; but well worth the effort. If you're looking for an easier way to digest it all, try the audiobook. David Joe Wirth uses emphasis and inflection to make it all more understandable, the way a great Shakespearian actor is able to make King Lear instantly understandable.

The time is 1959 and the setting is the dirty underbelly of a town, Locke City. It's not a big place, but it has grown in leaps and bounds to be one of the vice capitals of the country. Royal Beaumont is the wheelchair bound head of the crime "family" made up of men he trusts and grew up with. But the times are changing and the Italian syndicate and other criminal groups are trying to edge in and take over. So Beaumont calls in an outside killer, in the person of Walker Dett, a cold blooded, intelligent professional to take care of some business for him.

But what Beaumont doesn't know is that changes are brewing and boiling up all over: the civil rights movement is taking off and becoming radical in the poorer black section of town, a group of Irish Catholic men are planning that the country must soon have a new kind of president, a man "like them," there is an Aryan white power group making hidden and undercover plans of their own, and a few members of the FBI who have the idea that it's time for independent thinking, are selling weapons to the more violent gangs in order to make a case against them. Into this pressure cooker is thrown a cop and a newspaperman. The result is violent in the extreme.

TWO TRAINS RUNNING almost takes place in real time, with chapters dated and time stamped to show that we are getting a glimpse of action that's taking place at the same moment all over town. There's no one lead protagonist, but more of a large cast of characters. The novel is closer to a fast cut movie than a book, with dialogue taking up a large percentage of the pages. The author, Andrew Vachss, takes a lot of time detailing each and every character's description, from the color and type of boot on their feet to the two buttons opened at a neckline. The minutia of details makes TWO TRAINS RUNNING very visual, again underlining the idea that this is more like a movie than a written story.

In his extremely popular "Burke" series, his nonfiction work, and even his foray into graphic novels Mr. Vachss has focused his considerable talents largely on where we as a society are now and where we might be going. The social issues examined in those works generally radiate outward from our collective ability to protect our children or our ineffectiveness in doing so. In TWO TRAINS RUNNING Mr. Vachss takes us back in time to the America of 1959 and shows us how a confluence of social pressures, cultural realignments, and political movements, both open and clandestine, have given us the America of the 21st century.

TWO TRAINS RUNNING takes place in Locke City, a small American "border" city. After losing its industry shortly after WWII, Locke City became the vice-capital of the area, controlled by a local crime "family." That "family," headed by Royal Beaumont, finds itself under siege from a variety of angles. Royal Beaumont contracts the services of Walker Dett, a master of violence and destruction, more mercenary than hit man, to tip the scales in what promises to be a violent struggle for the prize of Locke City.

I have seen TWO TRAINS RUNNING compared in other reviews to Dashiell Hammett's RED HARVEST. To me, the sociopolitical scope and importance of this 450 page novel are more reminiscent of the work of Theodore Drieser, John Dos Passos, or even Upton Sinclair. TWO TRAINS RUNNING addresses, head-on, issues of economic and political disenfranchisement, racial injustice, governmental misuse of power, as well as the absolute need for unfettered, courageous journalism and hints, quite emphatically, at how the ensuing half-century of conflict and controversy around those issues has indelibly shaped the country we live in ... a remarkable achievement, as thought provoking and on-target as Howard Zinn's A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES.

Mr. Vachss' "ground zero" knowledge of criminal behavior has given his previous books an almost prescient quality. Many activities and events, both criminal and non-criminal, appear to have been predicted by the books of the "Burke" series. In TWO TRAINS RUNNING Mr. Vachss focuses that same depth of knowledge and perception on America's past ... the results are astonishing. TWO TRAINS RUNNING is a multilayered, dense story, much, much different in style from the books of Mr. Vachss' "Burke" series, but no less important or entertaining for readers willing to make the investment of reading this brilliant novel carefully and perhaps even giving it a second read.

You aren't ready for this. No, really. No one is ready for the amazing turn Andrew Vachss has taken his writing life. And that, of course, is the best part. Two Trains Running is a book that astonishes the reader on many levels.

Known, of course, for the durable Burke series, Vachss here takes his loyal readers down a completely different track. For those just getting on board, the welcome is there for the reading, as this is a totally new creation from Vachss. A historical noir--told in a voice steeped in the knowledge of years, and hardened by them.

Two Trains Running is two weeks in the life of Locke City, somewhere in the non-coastal American Heartland, fall of 1959. A once-prosperous place, brought low by depression, revived in well-protected vice. That vice is ruled by Royal Beaumont, native crime boss. With Italians and Irish trying to muscle their way in to his world, he brings in the enigmatic Walker Dett to sharpen his edge. Mix in various law enforcement agencies with various motives, and a brewing race war. As struggles over, variously, ways of life, love, salvation, and the future of the country erupt, Vachss blends and boils the threads of his story without sentiment, and with clear intent. The result is a work both breath-taking in its action and startling in its heart and soul. The stories you are told, in many cases, are the ones you had no idea you were reading until they were over. There are a couple of those here, too.

Vachss tells the story with no chapters, per se, but in a percussive time-stamping style, that does a couple of things; helps give the various plot-lines a propulsion that is cinematic; It also re-enforces the observational nature of the narration. It's written as a sort of omniscient surveillance of events sans comment. That part is our job. Vachss wants us to look at these events filtered only by our own experience and knowledge, and to see how the pieces fit into the country we think we live in. And by doing so, decide their truth.

According to some early press, part of Vachss' intent was to create a tribute to investigative journalism as a last line in a democracy's defense (no currency there, eh?). He does that not so much in the way he presents Jimmy Procter, Locke City's hotshot reporter, but in the way he tells the story itself. It's a style refined in reportage, betraying no point of view. Just the facts. Third person, and then some.

Walker Dett is a ronin of his times, a soldier without an army, on a path that transcends anything in it. One of Two Trains Running's victories is how his journey provides moments of such extreme dark and light. For every demonstration of his violent gift, there is, upon his introduction to one Tussy Chambers, a stage of a soul opening, that provides the essential counter-balance to the entire story. There are numerous love stories amidst the darkness here, and they all serve to feed the passions at work.

So let's talk about Tussy for a minute, ok? Burke readers, let's just say she's right in there with Blue Belle and Ann O.Dyne as classic Vachss Gals. She is love, faith and temptation. She is irresistible. And of course, the force of her personality becomes a major part of the story Vachss is telling. While we're talking about the "fun stuff", let's mention that Vachss' love affair with the American Automobile is in full fettle here, and adds a precise authenticity to the action.

Vachss has fueled Two Trains Running with some first-rate characters; from the afore-mentioned Royal Beaumont Mountain Man Crime Boss (think Burl Ives in Nick Ray's swamp-noir, "Wind Across The Everglades), to Sherman Layne, the only honest cop in the entire story, who is in love with the town madam.

Vachss nods to other themes familiar in his canon....that families are made not born, forged by action and trust, not blood. That crime is often in the intent, not the deed. Part of the joy to regular readers of his work is seeing how those themes get worked in to his story. It's one of the things that make Andrew Vachss a singular writer in this genre. And it's just a small part of what makes Two Trains Running a singular reading experience.