Andrew Vachss

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Andrew Vachss (2011)

Andrew Henry Vachss (born October 19, 1942 in New York City , † December 27, 2021 ) was an American author who worked full-time as a lawyer. He only represented children and young people in legal proceedings and repeatedly addressed and attacked neglect, abuse and sexual violence against children in all their manifestations in his literary works. Vachss mainly wrote (crime) novels, but also appeared as an author of short stories, comics, essays and newspaper articles. His last name is pronounced "Väx".

Life

Prior to his legal and writing career, Andrew Vachss worked as a special investigator for venereal diseases for the US Department of Health in 1965/1966 . He later worked as a social worker and project manager for various municipal projects. In 1969, in the war zone of Biafra , he oversaw the use of donations and relief supplies and tried to find a land route through which relief supplies and medical supplies could get into the war-torn country after the seaports were blocked and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) removed from the Nigerian one Government had been excluded. All attempts failed; Biafra experienced the world-famous famine and Vachss returned to the USA after suffering from severe malaria. In 1972/1973 he directed the ANDROS II maximum security prison for violent juveniles in Roslindale , Massachusetts , and subsequently worked for various agencies in the fields of education, juvenile justice and the penal system.

1975 closed Vachss his studies in law at the New England School of Law in Boston , Massachusetts, magna cum laude from. From 1976 he worked as a lawyer and limited his area of ​​responsibility exclusively to matters relating to children and young people.

Vachss was a director of the ChildTrauma Academy at Baylor University in Houston , Texas , and a member and advisor on the Advisory Panel on Catastrophic Child Abuse of the New York State Office of Mental Health. He helped draft the U.S. Child Protection Act, which the Clinton administration passed in 1993 .

He was a member of the PEN and Writers Guild of America writers' associations .

plant

Andrew Vachss was a hardboiled crime thriller genre of more than 20 novels and two volumes of short stories. He has written lyrics and comics, authored two non-fiction books on juvenile delinquency and child abuse, and published countless articles in various magazines.

The main character in most of the Vachss novels is the private investigator Burke, a former criminal, whom Vachss describes as follows:

"Burke is the prototype of the abused child: suspicious, hyper-vigilant, alternately frightened and violently angry, and deeply with his' adopted family." connected. [In Burke's world, DNA doesn't make a man a brother or a woman a sister - you are what you do.] He's not a 'White Knight' à la Chandler. Burke (no first name: his birth certificate is 'Baby Boy Burke' because he was abandoned by his mother, a prostitute, and his father is unknown) was brought up in brutality: in orphanages, nursing homes and juvenile prisons. He is an unlicensed private investigator who lives 'under the radar', a professional criminal who has served two prison terms. He is a mercenary who would describe his trade as 'violence for money'. His two balancing characteristics are his unconditional, total love for his 'adopted family' and his relentless hatred of those who hurt children ... just as he was hurt. ”- Andrew Vachss in CHANCES, issue 2/2003

Critics accuse Vachss of depicting violence and promoting vigilante justice in his narratives.

Vachss' first work A Bomb Built in Hell did not find a publisher in 1973 because the novel was perceived as too violent at the time. Vachs's portrayal of a heavily armed young man who at the end of the story enters a school with the intention of killing the students and teachers was dismissed as an unrealistic horror story at the time. The previously unpublished manuscript of the novel was made available in 2000 by amazon.com for a short time as an online version and provided with a warning about the “graphic representation of violence”. In 2004 the first publication in book form took place under the title Eisgott in German translation.

dogs

Another major theme that runs through Vachss' work is his love for dogs, especially breeds like the Doberman and Pitbulls, which are considered dangerous. Vachss was of the opinion that with dogs as well as humans you get what you raise yourself: "you get what you raise".

Vachss was a passionate campaigner against the abuse of animals, such as in dog fights, and against breed-specific bans. With his fellow writer friend James Colbert, Vachss trained therapy dogs for abused children. The dogs have a calming influence on the traumatized children and increase the feeling of security for the previous victims. During her tenure as the District Attorney in New York, Vachss' wife Alice regularly had one of these dogs, Sheba, with her when she spoke to abused children.

Awards

factories

Non-fiction

  • The Life-Style Violent Juvenile: The Secure Treatment Approach (1979)
  • The Child-Abuse Delinquency Connection - A Lawyer's View (1989)
  • About evil. Andrew Vachss in conversation with Claus Leggewie (1994)

Novels

The Burke series

  • Flood (1985) (German Kata , Ullstein 1988)
  • Strega (1987) (German Strega , Ullstein 1989)
  • Blue Belle (1988) (German Blue Belle , Ullstein 1990)
  • Hard Candy (1989) (German Hard Candy , Ullstein 1991)
  • Blossom (1990) (German Blossom , Ullstein 1992)
  • Sacrifice (1991) (German cult , Ullstein 1993)
  • Down in the Zero (1994) (German Deep in the Abyss , Eichborn 1995)
  • Footsteps of the Hawk (1995) (dt. The steps of the Falcon calibration fount 1996)
  • False Allegations (1996) (German treason , Eichborn 1997)
  • Safe House (1998) (German Safe House , Eichborn 1999)
  • Choice of Evil (1999)
  • Dead and Gone (2000)
  • Pain Management (2001)
  • Only Child (2002)
  • Down Here (2004)
  • Mask Market (2006)
  • Terminal (2007)
  • Another Life (2008)

Other novels

  • A Bomb Built In Hell (1973) (German Eisgott , Kreuzfeuer 2004)
  • Shella (1993)
  • Batman - The Business of Evil (German Bastei 1996)
  • The Getaway Man (2003) (German The Driver , Rowohlt 2008)
  • Two Trains Running (2005)
  • Haiku (2009)

Short stories

  • The world is reborn with every child (Ger. Eichborn 1994)
  • Crossfire (German Heyne 1998)
  • Born Bad (German Eichborn 2002)

comics

  • Predator: Race War (1995)
  • Batman: The Business of Evil (1995)
  • Hard looks with different artists (German JOCHEN Enterprises 1994)
  • Underground with Hannu Lukkarinen (German writer and reader, 1998)

Stage plays

  • placebo
  • Warlord
  • Replay
    • In German translation by Eichborn Verlag, 2002, as "Replay / Brücke / Placebo," in 3 acts

literature

  • Martin Böttcher: Examination of the genre of the “hard boiled detective novel” in Crumley and Vachss . Tectum-Verlag, Marburg 1996

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ È morto lo scrittore Andrew Vachss
  2. ^ Author profile at Rowohlt Verlag
  3. ^ President Clinton signs the National Child Protection Act . The Zero - The Official Website of Andrew Vachss. Retrieved January 10, 2019.
  4. ↑ Review of Born Bad on www.stephanmaus.de
  5. ↑ Ice God by Andrew Vachss. Kreuzfeuer Verlag, archived from the original on October 8, 2007 ; Retrieved February 25, 2014 .
personal data
SURNAME Vachss, Andrew
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Vachss, Andrew Henry; Vachss, Andrew H.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American lawyer and writer
BIRTH DATE October 19, 1942
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City
DATE OF DEATH December 27, 2021