Aspiring to the epic in scope, Andrew Vachss' new book, Two Trains Running, tries to tell the story of Locke City, a vice-ridden town controlled by Royal Beaumont. Over the course of the novel, Beaumont's hard-earned mob rule tragically implodes after he brings in an outsider to deal with an Italian gang eager to invade his territory.

Set in 1959, the novel is poised to level a hard-boiled social critique of the corruption that tainted our postwar world. But sadly, Vachss loses his narrative in an avalanche of characters and episodes, at times even giving us a real-time transcript of the events that constitute, and ultimately compromise, his story.

Still, the novel opens with promise, as "A candy-apple red '55 Chevy glided down the serpentine rain-slicked asphalt, an iridescent raft shooting blacktopped rapids."

Atmospheric and thick with suggestive description, this language lures us into this novel's dark underworld, a town that caters to the less-than-respectable desires of its denizens and those who visit it.

As we follow Harley, a young man in his mid-20s, he drives out to Beaumont's complex - a fortress of a house, secure and eminently defensible - to meet with the inner circle of Beaumont's gang. They're debating whether to bring in an outside man, Walker Dett, to help them scare off Dioguardi and his clan, who are encroaching on Beaumont's territory.

Ultimately, they do, and this unleashes a series of violent retaliations that gets the attention of not only Dioguardi, but another mob boss, Mickey Shalare, a mysterious Irish man with political influence who is sent in to put a stop to the inter-gang warfare for a greater good - that of winning the White House for a Democrat and mafia-friendly politician.

As if this isn't plot enough, Vachss adds a slew of side stories that quickly confuse the issue - and his prose style does nothing to help matters. True, gritty realism requires an eye for detail that helps create ambience. But Vachss takes this impulse to an extreme. His inability to sift through the details of his own imagination, separating the mundane from the interesting, derails any sense of energy this novel might have had.

Each chapter - a number are less than a page - is dated and given a precise time, some of which follow minutes after the previous entry. Meant to lend a sense of immediacy to the action, Vachss' strategy instead inundates us with nearly everything that transpires.

For example, early in the novel, hitman Walker Dett eats a meager dinner in his hotel room: "The guest in Room 809 opened the steak sandwich carefully. He removed the lettuce and the tomato, examining each in turn. Dett rolled his right shoulder - a small knife slid out of his sleeve and into his hand. He thumbed the knife open, then meticulously trimmed the outer edges of the lettuce, cored the slice of tomato, and removed every visible trace of fat from the meat before he reassembled the sandwich.

"Dett picked up all the discarded pieces, carried them to the bathroom, and dropped them in the toilet. He flushed, checked to see if everything had disappeared, then washed his hands.

"It took him almost forty-five minutes to eat the sandwich and French Fries."

The first time we read such a scene, it piques our interest into Dett's quirky rituals.

But after four or five such episodes, a reader's patience begins to run thin.

Vachss grapples with many of the important social issues of the late 1950s - racial unrest, gang violence, corrupt politicians, mafia influence, covert FBI investigations.

With an unflinching realist's eyes, he tries to chart the intimate connections between all these forces.

As Beaumont explains to one of his trusted men, "See, the people everyone thinks are running the show, they're really not. None of them, Lymon. That's the way it is, everywhere."

Unfortunately, in the corrupt world of Locke City, such sentiments are not uncommon. Nor are they in crime fiction.

Except for a little teasing suggestion that John F. Kennedy became president because the mob controlled the vote (and how new is that, really?), Vachss relies on exhausted types, motives and scenarios to move his story along and does nothing to reinvigorate such clichés with new life.

For instance, superassassin Dett is plagued by his past and turns to the sassy, yet vulnerable, diner waitress for momentary solace; the hotel clerk is an inflexible and fussy homosexual with fascist sexual fantasies; Beaumont and his sister protectively obsess about each other in a relationship laden with incest.

I could name more, but I won't. As hard as Vachss works to fit all these perverse characters into the web of corruption that is Locke City, they ultimately become caricatures of their types.

An old African-American woman tells Dett before he becomes a gun for hire: "Two trains coming, son . . . Headed for the junction. You can't stop either one. But you can slow the dark one."

Sadly, Vachss loses control of both trains that this heavy-handed omen portends.

Rather than running, as the title suggests, they careen out of control and collide, leaving us with a confusing wreck of a novel.

Geoffrey Bateman teaches writing and literature at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Back to Top