Two Trains Running

May 2, 2005
Vachss's latest, set in 1959, leaves recurring character Burke behind to explore the teeming, clannish, race-driven underside of American politics. The Southern town of Locke City, at the mountainous foot of the rust belt, has become the vice-driven fief of one Royal Beaumont, a wheelchair-bound "hillbilly" who indulges in casual incest and rules the town by force. When the New York mafia tries to cut in on the action, Beaumont fights back, determined to protect his stake—and the town's racial composition, especially with a stealthy local black militant cell gaining in strength. Michael Shalare's Irish mob arrives and proposes a truce on the grounds that once "our man" Kennedy gets in, the Italians will be "told" to leave, and racial as well as monetary order will be preserved. The book is broken by episodic bursts of dialogue with time-stamp headings ("1959 October 04 Sunday 20:46"); the dialogue itself doesn't feel differentiated enough from tough guy to tough guy, and smacks of faux periodisms. Some of what Greil Marcus called the "old, weird America" surfaces, but any scene with a woman in it yields awkward results. The pace is good and the plot is riveting, though the telescoped sociopolitics feel rigged from the start, as does a bloody climax. 15-city author tour.

Starred review from July 15, 2005
Locke City, a Southern mill town turned tourist mecca, is controlled by the firm but benevolent hand of local crime tsar Royal Beaumont. When the New York mafia arrives, he hires former undercover FBI agent Walker Dett to protect his interests. In short snippets of action and dialog, Vachss ("Down Here") creates a broad picture of crime in Locke City, from teenage street gangs to crooked national politicians, with the Ku Klux Klan, militant African Americans, and other factions woven into a shocking climax. A riveting page-turner that marks a definite change of direction from the author's dark Burke thrillers (e.g., "Pain Management"), this book will attract Vachss devotees and crime fiction aficionados alike. Recommended for public libraries.[See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 2/15/05.] -Thomas L. Kilpatrick, formerly with Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale

Copyright 2005 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2005
It's 1959 in Locke City, a wide-open town somewhere near the intersection of Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky. A homegrown gang of "mountain men" control the jukeboxes, gambling, and prostitution, but its grip on vice is threatened by encroachment from the Mafia. Royal Beaumont, wheelchair-bound leader of the local underworld, summons mercenary Walker Dett, a cold-blooded tactician and killing machine, to help solve his problem. This great, pulpy microcosm suddenly goes macro, however, as even more forces are revealed to be fighting for power--an Irish gang, several youth gangs, and black militants--and there's pressure coming down on the crooks from above to help deliver the 1960 presidential election for Kennedy. Though Vachss has praiseworthy ambition, Locke City isn't quite big enough to support the weight of the allegory--and do we really need another take on America's Twentieth-Century Turning Point? It's slow, too, and so dialogue-heavy it's like James Ellroy by way of Studs Terkel. Hard to say whether fans of Vachss' brutal Burke series will follow him back into the past.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)