“James lives life like he was shot out of a cannon,” Helen Knode, his ex-wife, tells me. Of the many women in Ellroy’s life, Helen has come closest to understanding him. Understanding Ellroy, both the scope and the meaning of his extraordinary life, is a task I have spent more than a decade undertaking. I first met Ellroy in person in 2009. I was an unknown PhD candidate back then, and I was amazed at the generosity he extended towards me when there was little I could give him in return. Over the next ten years I stayed in Ellroy’s orbit, authoring three books on his work and hundreds of articles before I had an epiphany: someone needed, hell, I needed, to write James Ellroy’s biography.
In one sense James Ellroy needs no introduction. To be even remotely knowledgeable of twentieth-century American literature or crime fiction is to know Ellroy. With his garish Hawaiian shirts, lanky physique, mesmerizing speaking style, and penchant for barking like a dog, Ellroy makes sure he won’t go unnoticed. However, his distinctive and self-styled Demon Dog persona runs deeper than its physical manifestation. It’s all there in his ferocious competitiveness, tireless work ethic, and prodigious output. His writing has pushed the boundaries of genre, and he has never given up on striving for new literary achievements. This ambition, in part, stems from his struggle with addiction. His mother was a heavy drinker and, after her murder and the death of his father, Ellroy fell into a spiral of alcohol and drug abuse as a young man. He joined Alcoholics Anonymous at the age of twenty-seven and, barring a couple of relapses, has been sober ever since. But the addictive side of his character remains in everything from his unyielding ambition, voracious appetite for women, right down to the copious amounts of coffee he consumes daily.
While remarkable and often inspiring, the story of Ellroy’s life is also tinged with melancholy, and not just by the various traumas he has endured. Rather, Ellroy’s seven decades cover a rapidly vanishing world. He has lived through and profited from the rise and fall of Hollywood and publishing. It would be impossible for another Ellroy to ascend in the same circumstances today, but if society was to become too safe and monotonous it might create the conditions to which a self-styled polemicist like Ellroy could step into the void.
Ellroy is a brilliant reader of people’s thoughts and motivations. As such, he is skilled at giving people what they want, whether it be outrage or empathy, and that sort of talent rarely goes out of style. Humor is present in everything he does. He can take sheer glee from his capacity to offend, and yet he can be equally kind and thoughtful. Ellroy has been so candid to me there were times I was unsure whether he had appointed me as his biographer or executioner, but that is entirely in keeping with his character.
Joyce Carol Oates described Ellroy as “the American Dostoyevsky.” The comparison is not merely a literary one. Ellroy’s extraordinary, harrowing, and inspiring life has been so mythologized, demythologized, and re-mythologized in the public eye, not least by the author himself, that it is difficult to believe that this book is his first full-length biography. All I ask is that, whether you are an admirer or a detractor of Ellroy, take all your preconceptions of him and leave them at the door. Perhaps the biggest irony of all is that, in my view, Ellroy’s life is the great untold story of American literature.
For the multitude of interviews I have conducted with Ellroy’s friends, colleagues, and ex-partners, my subjects seemed relieved to finally give their testimony and part with the history they had witnessed in the life of an author who can be equally dazzling and infuriating. With such an abundance of voices in this story, I have avoided any ham-fisted attempts to psychoanalyze Ellroy. He is not introspective. His character can be deduced through his actions, and as such, I don’t always follow a strict chronology. The structure of the book is broadly sequential, but Ellroy is often juggling a dozen projects and people at once. It is more appropriate to focus on one episode of his life at length, before moving onto another.
I feel I have talked enough about my own hand in the book and can feel Ellroy peering over my shoulder and saying, “Steve, you slimy limey, stop talking about yourself and get to the part about me.”
The book launch of Love Me Fierce in Danger: The Life of James Ellroy took place at Linghams Booksellers in Heswall on February 28th and was a truly extraordinary evening. It was heartening to see so many people attend who are fascinated by Ellroy’s life and work.
The event was filmed by my good friend Radu Spulber. He edited the film into six easy to digest parts. Part one is below. You can find the full playlist on YouTube. I hope you enjoy these videos of me describing Ellroy’s life and the writing process behind his biography. And if you do, why not buy the book!
Alice and the Fly is the debut novel of James Rice. It is a haunting tale, written from the point of view of a cripplingly shy young man named Greg, which touches on themes such as loneliness, isolation and mental health. It’s a terrific read: sometimes funny, sometimes sad. I’ve known James for some time. He is charming and self-deprecating, but I’ve never been in any doubt of the burning talent that drives him as an author. James agreed to be interviewed by me about the genesis and writing process of Alice and the Fly.
Interviewer: Tell me about the genesis of Alice and the Fly. How did you get from the germ of an idea to what every writer covets – a book deal?
Rice: I first started Alice… as a teenager. I can’t remember exactly where the idea came from, but there were various versions of it – a short story, a screenplay, a concept album (don’t ask). None of them ever really worked. A few years later I was studying for an MA in Creative Writing and I decided that I wanted to use that time to work on a novel, so I was looking back through old ideas. I came up with an opening chapter, with Greg and Alice on the bus, and I was quite pleased with that, but I didn’t really understand how I could go from this one scene to a whole novel.
Around the same time, I heard about Writing on the Wall’s “Pulp Idol” writing competition, so I submitted to that. Which was a turning point for me. The judges liked my opening. I had to perform readings in front of large groups of people and it kept getting a good reaction and that was a huge boost in confidence. One of the judges was an editor at Tindal Street Press. He was very encouraging – gave me his card and told me to keep writing. And so I did. For the next four years. I think I’d have probably given up if I didn’t have that card.
In the end Tindal Street were bought out by another publisher and the editor I knew left long before I finished Alice…, but I kept writing. I submitted to several agents. Eventually I managed to convince one to read it, and her reaction was encouraging. There was a lot of back-and-forth there – the novel was too long, it was too short, there was too much humour, too much sadness, etc. There were several six-hour Megabus trips to London. Everything she said was 100% correct though, so I appreciated that. Some people don’t like their writing being edited but I’ve always found it incredibly useful – someone taking the time to sit down and look at your work, try and make it the best possible version of itself.
Eventually we had something that felt like a novel and she agreed to submit it for publication. Then the emails stopped and there was just this deadly silence for what felt like years (but was probably months). I didn’t want to hassle the agency, so I just waited, wondering if I’d ever hear from them again. And then one evening I got the call. Hodder and Stoughton had said yes and wanted to meet me. A week later there I was, eating croissant in the office of a publishing house. It was all very surreal. There’s still a part of me that doesn’t believe any of it really happened. That’s mostly been my experience of writing novels – 99% of it is staring at a word document for hours on end, but occasionally there are moments like that that which make it all worthwhile. Although, maybe not. If I’m honest with myself, when it comes down to it, I’m definitely more of a sit-down-with-a-word-document kind of guy.
Interviewer: Name some writers you grew up reading. Who were your first loves as a writer, and did any of them work their way into Alice and the Fly as influences?
Rice: I didn’t read that much growing up, if I’m honest. There was a teacher who got me to read a few children’s novels. I remember her giving me The Indian in the Cupboard and Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet books – I enjoyed them. And there were these Bruce Coville books about aliens that my dad bought me. But I wasn’t one of those Matilda-type children who carries piles of books everywhere and make friends with their local librarian. I wrote a lot as a child, even without being much of a reader. I had a big imagination.
I was in my late-teens when I started to properly read, and I made up for it then. I read a lot of American stuff; I remember working my way through all of those masculine authors like Bukowski, McCarthy, Hemingway. Then I remember trying to counter that with yet more Americans, only this time of the opposite sex: Flannery O’Connor, Joyce Carol Oates, Amy Homes. After that I tried to broaden my horizons.
I always find this question difficult because the truth is I’ll read anything and everything as long as it’s well-written, and I believe everything I read influences my writing. I did an exercise in a class I was teaching once where I picked out every book from my shelves which had a direct link to something in my first novel. So, not just an influence, but a specific example whereby I could pick out something that I used (i.e. stole) whilst writing Alice…. The pile got very big. After a while it fell over and it was at that point I gave up. Lesson is: everything is an influence, in one way or another. So read everything.
Interviewer: Greg is a painfully shy young man, and a lot of his story inevitably brings up issues of mental health. Both in how it affects individuals and how society reacts to it. Did you do a lot of research in the mental health field?
Rice: I did all the usual stuff; I read, I watched documentaries, I researched case studies. But a lot of this was near the end, to be honest – I avoided trying to get too much into the medical side of things early on because I didn’t really want the book to be about that. I wasn’t trying to do one of those mental health books that get put on an NHS reading list to help people better understand specific medical conditions. Not that there’s anything wrong with that (other people do those books much better than I ever could) – but that wasn’t what I wanted to write. Greg had these ‘visions’ and people didn’t understand them and a doctor would more than likely diagnose them as a form of psychosis, and that’s as much as I wanted to get into it, in terms of ‘mental health writing’. To Greg they were real, and they were real for me too. Most of the research was done to make sure the story I was telling was believable in the ‘real world’ – even if that isn’t the world I was really interested in.
In terms of shyness – I knew where I was with that. I was shy as a child and awkward in my teenage years. I felt out of synch with everyone and everything – I think that’s a pretty universal experience, so a lot of the novel was a reflection on that. And how what’s happening inside someone’s head can be very different to how everyone else is perceiving them.
Author James Rice
Interviewer: You incorporate different medium into the novel, from journals to transcripts of police interviews. Why did you decide on this innovative approach?
Rice: The idea of the book being a journal came early on. I wanted it be first-person, but addressed to Alice because there’s a certain sweetness to that. The word ‘you’ is very romantic when used in this way (e.g. 90% of love songs are addressed to “you”). But there are some drawbacks to this format. Just having the world as seen from Greg’s p.o.v. is quite limiting. Also teen-narrated novels can get a bit repetitive. I read a lot of teen-narrated novels at the time of writing Alice… and by the end these sorts of narrators where always starting to grate on me.
Also, my editor thought the novel needed more momentum. She thought the reader needed a sense of the drama to come. So the idea for police transcripts came along quite late in the writing process, as a way of addressing both of these issues; they give the reader a break from Greg’s voice, whilst letting them know something dramatic is coming in the final act. It also gave me the opportunity to write some dialogue, which was nice. (I like writing dialogue.)
Interviewer:Alice and the Fly garnered some terrific reviews which must be very gratifying. Did you receive any feedback from readers who personally identified with Greg’s struggles?
Rice: The reviews were good, yes. I try not to read them because I have that irritating author knack for just concentrating on the negative – so a review will be gushing with praise but then have one suggestion for something that could have worked better and I’ll fall into this utter pit of despair over it. I have a friend who reads them and sends me anything he thinks I’ll find interesting or funny (e.g. the reviewer who accused me of product placement because I mention Waitrose).
I did have readers contacting me, and still do, from time to time. (There was a little boost during the covid lockdown, which was I think due to everyone finally getting round to reading all those books they bought over the last few years.) Sometimes it’s because of the mental health aspect but usually just because they really connected with Greg and want to tell me they enjoyed the book and that’s always nice. I never know what to say though. I’m not very good with compliments.
Interviewer: Your follow-up novel Walk approaches a somewhat different subject – two friends walking across Wales. But digging deeper, it appears there are some parallels. What inspired you to write this novel?
Rice: I wrote Alice… because I wanted to write about a particular time in my life – those awkward teenage school years – but in a way that felt authentic. It was very much a reflection on a particular period of life – even if the end product was complete fiction.
Walk is the same. It’s a reflection on those early-twenties years; that post-university time when you have to get on with the business of living. The horrible grinding struggle of that. I knew that’s what I wanted to write about for my next novel, but I didn’t have any structure or format for it. Then my friend asked me to walk Offa’s Dyke with him and it was as we were walking that I decided this was going to be the basis for my next novel: two dumb city-boys trying to cross a country together and failing at every turn.
I thought it was going to be easy. I struggled writing Alice… because I had never written a novel before, so I was very ill-disciplined when it came to structure, whereas the path they take in Walk is a sort of structure in itself. I had a timeframe and a geographic location to plan the novel along. It made it seem a bit less abstract for me. Turned out I was wrong – Walk was the most difficult thing I’ve ever written. Some of this is for technical reasons (the footnoted sections were challenging…) but there’s also the inbuilt need for a writer to try and push themselves beyond their abilities. I think this was true in the case of Walk. I think there’s a really good novel there, but I spent the entire process unsure as to whether I was quite good enough to write it. Hopefully I did ok.
In the latest episode of Highbrow Lowbrow our theme is conflict on film. My pick is the cynical WWII film Play Dirty starring Michael Caine. Dan talks about the cult dieselpunk classic Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.
Love Me Fierce in Danger: The Life of James Ellroy has been published for a little under three months now, and so far the reviews and the response from readers has been incredible. I have done a number of interviews to promote the book. You’ll find my latest one below.
Duane Tucker is an actor and writer who was a friend of Ellroy’s for many years, and therefore figures in the biography. If you’re well-versed in Ellroy’s life and writing, you may recognise the name. Tucker interviewed Ellroy for Armchair Detective in 1984. That interview is shrouded in mystery. I won’t go into the details here, but let’s just say that Ellroy was at the beginning of his writing career and had few publicity opportunities at his disposal, so the interview was very helpful in establishing his author profile. Also, Tucker is the type of interviewer who has an uncanny knack for asking the questions that authors want to answer.
I was delighted that Tucker agreed to interview me about Love Me Fierce in Danger: The Life of James Ellroy, and it required no arm-twisting whatsoever. The interview is below. Enjoy:
Tucker: Congratulations on the Ellroy biography. It’s a dazzling take on a truly ikonic author.
Powell: Thank you! I’m glad I did the Demon Dog justice. He’s quite the character.
Tucker: Yes, I can attest to that. My first question would be, why Ellroy and why now?
Powell: Because Ellroy is one of the most significant figures in American literature of the twentieth and early twenty-first century. Note that I said literature, and not just crime fiction, although he has excelled in that as well. His LA Quartet novels are classics of the genre. With the Underworld USA trilogy, he began to draw the attention of more highbrow critics. In terms of ‘Why Now’, I have been planning this book for years. When I began my academic research on Ellroy there weren’t many scholarly articles published on him. Over the years that began to change, and with each article and book I published on Ellroy, I began to build up more material on the author which I realised could be useful for writing his biography. It’s difficult to believe no one has written a biography of Ellroy before now. He has all the ingredients of a fascinating life (murdered mother, early life of crime etc). I thought if no one else is going to write Ellroy’s life-story then I’ll do it myself.
Tucker: But someone else has written Ellroy’s life-story…
Powell: Ellroy himself!
Tucker: Exactly.
Powell: Ellroy has written two memoirs (My Dark Places and The Hilliker Curse), but neither book follows a chronological structure and both leave massive gaps in his biography. Having looked at everything published on Ellroy, I realised that decades of his life were unaccounted for. I could use his memoirs as sources, but I would scrupulously fact-check everything in them through the available documentation, witness testimony etc. I found that Ellroy’s life-story is far more compelling when told from an objective perspective, and not by the man himself.
Tucker: But you know Ellroy. Didn’t that lead to pressure to portray him favourably?
Powell: Indeed I do and I was honoured that Ellroy entrusted me with the massive task of being his biographer. But I knew from the start that I would be going over some controversial territory. Particularly, the tailspin Ellroy went through after his second divorce when he was going from one mad love affair to another. But there was no pressure from Ellroy. He was keen for me to talk to the women involved, and even if they had mixed feelings about Ellroy they would usually give me a balanced portrayal. They told me about his loving side as well as occasional cruel behaviour. It was these contradictory impulses that I wanted to get on the page.
Tucker: Describe the average working day in your life as James Ellroy’s biographer?
Powell: That would depend entirely on what point I was up to in the project at any given time. I may have been searching for people who knew Ellroy at some point in their lives, and seeing if they would agree to be interviewed. Finding people meant combing through marriage records, electoral registers, college yearbooks etc. The internet makes it easier as many of these records are now digitised. If my interview subject was a Hollywood celebrity, then I’d often have to get past their managers, agents and lawyers before I would be allowed to talk to them. Fortunately, most of the people I contacted did agree to be interviewed and their voices are included in the book. Knowing James Ellroy is an intense experience in itself, and people were more than willing to give me their testimony of the man and his era.
Other days might be focused entirely of writing and then redrafting.
Tucker: Speaking of Ellroy’s era, reading the book it occurred to me that he has lived through several major time periods. When researching the book was there any particular place and time that you would really love to have lived through?
Powell: Just one – Venice Beach in the late 1970s. Ellroy had joined Alcoholics Anonymous and was sober, happy and motivated to start his writing career. He was dating and doing all of the enjoyable things in life that addiction will rob from you. Plus, the people he was in AA with were the most extraordinary group you can imagine. Many of them went on to great careers in business, law and the arts. At the time though they were young and just starting their life again after getting sober. They called themselves ‘debris by the sea’.
Tucker: Are you pleased with the reaction to the book so far?
Powell: The reviews have been strong, and the response from readers has been fantastic. I think the book has broad appeal and is not just for Ellroy fans or readers of literary biography. The story really starts with the birth of his parents, and if you follow their lives through to where Ellroy is today then that’s over a hundred years of American history as the backdrop. Ellroy truly has lived through several eras.
I am pleased to report that Highbrow Lowbrow is back! In this special action-movie episode, I discuss one of my favourite chase/road movies Midnight Run. My podcast co-host Dan Slattery’s pick is the time-bending political thriller Vantage Point. You can listen to the full episode here. Enjoy!
Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin in Midnight Run.
Elmore ‘Dutch’ Leonard was one of the most influential crime writers of the twentieth century, and his work has been adapted for the small and silver screen dozens of times, with results ranging from the sublime Jackie Brown to the ridiculous Stick. In his new book Paperback Celluloid: Elmore Leonard on Film, Andy Rohmer gives us an overview of Leonard’s life and career, and then analyses, one by one, every novel by Leonard that was adapted for the screen and its subsequent film adaptation. Frequently he finds that great Leonard novels make for lousy movies. In some rare cases, the adaptation exceeds the source material.
Rohmer has painstakingly researched his subject. He divulges key details about the production of the films and the writing of the novels, for example, whether it was written during Leonard’s early Western phase, or was it influenced by the author’s embrace of sobriety and rejection of Catholicism. The author also engages with the key biographies and literary criticism. Rohmer’s own style of film criticism is modelled on Cahiers du Cinema, being both generous in its appraisal of films that work well and scathingly witty about the ones that don’t, with plenty of fascinating trivia in between. I highly recommend this book. It’s an arresting look at Leonard’s filmography/bibliography which is often bitingly funny in a way that embraces what Elmore Leonard fans will recognise as Dutch’s sense of ‘Cool’.
Now for the final Leonardian twist… Andy Rohmer is the pseudonym of Eduardo Ramos.
Ramos is a Portuguese diplomat who has served his country in Tokyo, Beijing, Berlin, and most recently, New York City. And, like the last man standing in an Elmore Leonard novel, he has run off with the writing honours as Paperback Celluloid: Elmore Leonard on Film is a terrific book which will appeal to fans of Leonard’s work as well as Western and Crime film enthusiasts. The even better news is that it is the first volume of a new series written by Rohmer/Ramos called Writers-on-Film. I heartily recommend that you buy this book and keep an eye for future volumes in the series.
John A. Curley is an author and private investigator based in New York City. His crime novels Bonds, Sorrows and Harbingers featuring PI Jonathan Creed are vintage hardboiled tales in the mould of Robert B. Parker and Mickey Spillane. Child Protection is a key theme and the Creed novels, like Andrew Vachss’s Burke series, are noted for their authenticity as Curley has brought his own experiences and used real cases as a basis in his fiction.
Curley and Andrew Vachss were both friends and colleagues, sharing a mutual interest in child protection. But to call it merely an interest would be to do both men a disservice. For Curley and Vachss, making the US a safer place for children was nothing short of a lifelong vocation and quest. This is why I first began talking to Curley and subsequently started devouring the Creed novels. I had interviewed Vachss when I was researching Love Me Fierce in Danger: The Life of James Ellroy, and I was eager to hear about Curley’s memories of Vachss who sadly died in November 2021.
Curley is an absolute joy to interview. Most authors are quite guarded as they prefer to play the publicity game, and rarely stray into other topics. Curley tells you exactly what is on his mind. He’s a New Yorker through and through, and although this part of the interview was designed to be more about the Creed novels, he still talks about Vachss a lot as Vachss’s influence on Curley’s life and work as both an author and a pioneer in child protection has been so comprehensive.
John A. Curley
Curley: Andrew Vachss told me that I reminded him of something he wrote in the short story ‘Mission’. There was a real-life parallel between myself and that character and the reason we’re talking from here, and not a prison cell, is when I found out that someone had hurt this child he (the perpetrator) wasn’t where he was supposed to be when I went for him. It was just very similar to the story, and that inspired me.
Years ago I had written a horror novel. Back in the Nineties it was supposed to be published. My cousin worked for a publishing house. She read it. She thought it was great. She was going to bring it to her boss. And she went on vacation and had a stroke and lost the only copy. So I kind of threw writing away at that point, and that interaction with Andrew inspired me to write again. So I wrote a short story. Put it on Amazon. I made a posting about it, ‘Andrew, you inspired me to write this’, and then he didn’t respond. So I was going to take it down. And he responded a day later. ‘Wait, you wrote this. I don’t have a Kindle, but I will get a Kindle.’ and I said, ‘I’ll send it to you’ and I sent it to his website. About a week later, June 5th, 2015, I’m walking out to work and he calls my cell. ‘You did some good writing here, but you gotta fix a few things. You got some time to talk?’
I said, yeah. I texted my secretary that I won’t be in, and we had a two hour writing class. When he would say I did something good, I’d go. ‘I really did something good, Andrew?’
He’d be like ‘John, if I gotta stop to reassure you every time I tell you you did something good. I don’t have that kind of time, Kid. So you want me to tell you what you could fix?
In 2015, I sent him a short story based on an experience I had when I was a young PI and there were shotguns pulled, and it was terrifying and I used that. Everything I use, except for the Satan worship aspect of Harbingers, about children being hurt is either something a ‘Child of the Secret’ has told me about or something I’ve experienced. So I wrote this short story, and the characters have to threaten somebody, and they rack the shell into the shotgun chamber, and I write something like there’s no sound that brings quiet to a room like racking a shell into a chamber. Because even if you don’t know about shotguns, if it’s in your general direction, you’re finished if he pulls the trigger. But in the next paragraph I wrote the truth. This was done for effect because no professional walks into a room with an unloaded gun. It just doesn’t work like that, and he called me. My wife came running downstairs and said, Andrew Vachss is on the phone and I said, ‘What’s up, Papa?’
He said, ‘You did something that is genius. Nobody’s done that. Not Hammett, not Chandler, not Parker.’
And when he said that a chill went down my spine, and I said, ‘Papa, that’s some pretty amazing company you just put me with.’
He goes. ‘It’s fair. No one’s ever done it.’
He had that quality, Steve, if he considered you a protege or a pupil. I have a self-deprecating sense of humour. I do have a massive ego. I try to curtail that with self-deprecating humour.
I said, ‘You know me, Andrew, strong as an ox and almost as smart’ quoting one of the Spenser novels.
And he was quiet for a second, and he said, ‘Why would you say that John?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Because you’re a smart guy. You’re handsome. You speak well. You get people’s attention. Why do you put yourself down like that?’
Later on I would tell him. ‘Look, I do that so people are more at ease with me. I don’t want them to see the other side. It’s not that it’s fake. I can laugh at myself. I take what I do seriously, but I don’t take myself seriously.’
He said, ‘Well, you have a lot to offer John. You might want to remember that.’
And that’s Andrew to me. (When he died) it was like I lost my father again. People have always asked me, Did you do badly without your father? And obviously my father had issues, but at heart he was a good man. And I would say no, as much as I miss him. I’ve had many fathers step into the role from my friend Sal’s father, who treated us like we were family, to my first Martial Arts instructor to guys when I was in my early… I started working as a PI before I was 21. It’s just something I wanted to do. In fact, I’ve just had my thirty-sixth anniversary on March 13th, and I’m still doing it because I can’t sing or dance I guess.
Powell: When you first created Jonathan Creed, I can hear a lot of him in you, the sense of humour and everything. But I presume you didn’t want him to be a carbon copy of you?
Curley: There are differences. I’ve had a lot of people say to me, is that a biography? No, we do have some of the same likes and dislikes. I like a good cigar and some port wine. I get to have a little fun with Creed, because in the real world there are highs and lows with business. His business is constantly successful. I also get to communicate what I’ve seen through him, so there are a lot of parallels. But we’re not exactly the same. Creed is strong, and you can’t do what I do and not be strong. You go grab a girl before she’s sold (to the sex trade), and when the cops get there they put her in the ambulance. And the cop says she’s asking for you because she knows you’re here, and you got her out. And you sit there, and you listen to what the gang did to her for the last three days. You take that shit and you pull it inside. Creed can deal with that stuff a little bit easier. But by the same token in the first novel (Bonds) he’s shot. He loses a couple of people he really loves and you don’t just bounce back from that. I can’t have that or the guy’s Superman. So there are a lot of similar experiences there. He’s still catting around in his forties. Love hasn’t actually worked out for him yet. He’s what I wish I could be if the world worked a little bit better. But there are definite differences, and we’ve shared some of the same pain. In Sorrows, Creed and Todd are not getting along, and I have known plenty of guys like that, and they’re spiralling down to a confrontation.
I was extremely fortunate when I was signed by Rough Edges Press. I think there is great value in crime fiction. I believe that it does act as a vehicle for social change, but real social change. I think a lot of the younger generation now are missing the role models. I read the Spenser novels when I was ten. I’m a product of what you get when you read Spenser novels and then become a PI. I discovered Vachss in my early twenties and knew immediately, just from my limited experience, what he was doing was real. My editor at the time was James Reasoner who’s written over 400 novels. He’s a legend. He’s written Walker Texas Ranger Novels, the Lone Ranger. He’s written PI fiction, Westerns. The guy’s an incredible writer. He’s a brilliant man, and I was in a conversation with him and I said, ‘I don’t want to kill somebody in this book.’ And he said, ‘Well, we don’t want to piss off the fans, but you need something super intense.’ At just about the same time a friend of mine who’s a columnist out in the Midwest, Steve Brown, Great guy, Scottish. Brilliant man. Degree in anthropology. Taught English all over the world. Has run waste management plants. There’s this movie called Darker than Amber.
Powell: You reference it in the novel, the fight at the end?
Curley: That looks real! I’m a guy who’s been punched. So I know what’s real and what’s not. And then I’m curious so I look it up. William Smith, he was a bodybuilder, a martial artist, he’s an ex-Boxer. And Rod Taylor – tough amateur boxer. The very first take one of them breaks the other guy’s nose, and the next take the other guy breaks his three ribs, and they have to be physically separated, and as I’m watching this, Oh God, it’s not something I talk about often. In 1988, I’m working for a company. Guy calls me, do you want to make 100 bucks? Husband beat the wife. All you gotta do is sit in her living room. He’ll be in jail. Don’t worry about it. The guy was an ex-cop. I figured he knew what he was talking about. So I’m young, I’m strong, I’m doing boxing and kickboxing at the time. I got my little overnight bag. Go to Queens, go bebopping into this woman’s house and I didn’t have any experience, or I might have seen the husband sitting in his car watching the house. And I might have been prepared when the front door exploded and this man, who is twice my size, has been a gymrat his whole life, a powerlifter. The door exploded this big 6’4 (man yells) ‘I knew you were fucking somebody’. My God, the horror of that! I haven’t talked about that for years. It’s funny now, but it was not at the time. When I was boxing, and when I was training people to do boxing, there was a rule. You never use a white towel because you put the white towel on and they look at the blood and freak, because there’s so much of it. I was wearing a white dress shirt, and I knew it took the cops seven minutes to get there, because by the time they got there we were both on the floor. I was just starting to get up! And the cop helped me sit up against the wall, and he’s out, and they’re trying to cuff me, and the wife is screaming, ‘That’s my bodyguard!’ And the house is in complete disarray. Everything’s broken. There’s blood everywhere, mine and his and I’m looking up at the ceiling and there’s blood ON THE CEILING! I can’t figure out how it got there! And then I look at my shirt and I look like a Jackson Pollack painting. It looks like somebody threw a bucket of paint on me and a cop couldn’t get me to tell him what my name was, because I couldn’t recall it. He said, ‘You’re going to the hospital.’ And I took that and I started remembering it. I’ve said this before and I’m not ashamed of it. I used to keep tabs on this guy. That’s how much it impacted me. He died in 2014, because at the time I was in my early twenties and he was close to 50. And I was happy. I was happy that there’s no chance of round two happening. They let me out of the hospital the next day with a concussion. He was in the hospital for three or four days, because I got his kidneys a little bit, and he was bleeding.
So I took that and I put it in Sorrows. I’m not going to tell you who wins. Even Creed would not be ashamed to lose to a guy like Todd, as much as he doesn’t like him. We have a saying – Contempt will kill you. Just because you don’t like somebody, does not mean that they are weak. That’s very wise for people to remember. Now I’m re-emerged in this horrible memory. Thanks to my friend Steve, telling me about that movie, and I put that in the book. But then what I’ll do is send it to all of the violence experts I know and I’ll get their feedback. What do you think of this? And overwhelmingly they said it was awesome. When you’re talking about tasting the blood at the back of your throat when your nose gets broken. And all of them said, so when did this actually happen to you? And I would write back, How did you know? And they responded, Nobody writes like this unless it’s happened to them.
So I do try to keep it as real as I can. I think you can entertain people and be real at the same time. There’s nothing wrong with this. I love Die Hard like the next guy. A friend of mine is an actor, Patrick Kilpatrick. He’s been a bad guy in every movie in the Eighties and he’s in a great movie with Bruce Willis called Last Man Standing. I told him you were so good in that movie that I will forgive you for getting picked up by a .45 round and thrown out the door. A little thing about physics, if your bullet was to knock somebody backwards it would knock you (the shooter) backwards. That’s not how it works in reality. Also the greatest movie line in history which he (Kilpatrick) sets up. He says to Willis, ‘I guess you’ll have to kill me’ and he says to him, ‘It’ll hurt if I do.’ Great line. I have that stored in my head. I’m waiting to use that for the right time. You can watch a movie like that, or read a book like that to be entertained, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But for me, I can only write what I know. If it’s not me, it’ll be something close to me. I’m counting on 36 years of experience.
Powell: Do you see the books as being kind of educational about the work that you do, because I didn’t know until I read Vachss’s Burke novels that there was a whole vernacular that had been built up around child protection. ‘Transcenders’ and ‘Children of the Secret’. I was unfamiliar with these terms.
Curley: I can’t do that like he can. I don’t think anybody can. I wouldn’t put myself in his class, but that is my goal. I do want to write truth through fiction. Like Vachss, I am overly acquainted with the justice system. We don’t have a justice system. We have a legal system. People don’t understand that, yet it’s to their peril. I try to give them snippets of it. A homicide case I’m working on. A lawyer calls me. His name is Pat Brackley. I regard him as one of the best criminal attorneys I’ve ever worked for, one of the best in the city. He calls me. I had just had shoulder surgery on my right shoulder, and I wasn’t allowed to move it for three months. It was a Saturday. It was raining. He calls me and says I got a homicide, and that’s music to my years because I don’t get disability (benefits), I work for myself. ‘Great, I’ll assign one of my investigators to it’.
He’s says ‘Well, I kind of need somebody in the Bronx tonight.’
I look out the window and it’s snowing. It’s Saturday at 4 O’Clock. I have six blankets on me, a heating pad, my sling and I’m watching Spongebob. ‘Pat, do you think I sit around waiting for you to call, or that I have guys in glass cases and I break it for them to come out. I need time. When is the jury selection?’
He goes, ‘The jury is already picked’, which means it’s going to trial on Monday. Here’s the problem. The jury was picked on Thursday. On Friday the DA, this is the prosecutor, sends him a letter saying ‘There was a homeless guy up in the Bronx named Jose who frequented that neighbourhood in the Summer three years ago, and he supported your client’s account of the shooting. I’m sorry we forgot to tell you about this.’
Ask me how many times something like that has happened, and I’ll tell you almost every friggin’ time. People don’t get that until they’re sitting across from me and they’re jammed up or their kid is jammed up, and they say I can’t believe that the system is like this. By the way, I found Jose and had him in court, and we got a hung jury on that (case). Our client, who is a drug dealer… I make no apologies for that. Due process is an important but difficult principle. He wasn’t on trial for being a drug dealer. We would all be better off if he was in prison. But he’s on trial for murder, and there was no real proof he was a murderer. He decided he wanted to lower our fees, and so the lawyer said get another lawyer to represent you when they retry you. We had basically gotten the victory. The legal aid lawyer he got did not do as well and he’s in prison right now. You see things like that. It’s not all of the time. Most of the time the cops are right. 95 percent of the time they are right when they arrest the people that they arrest. There’s a figure going around, two percent of the people currently incarcerated aren’t guilty. The first thing you have to do is separate them from people that are guilty of other things, but just happened to get nailed on this and they shouldn’t have. But they’ve done three other killings. Those people shouldn’t be there but who cares. Even if it’s just one percent of two million, that’s a lot of people that are locked up that shouldn’t be.
If you can tell the story and make people understand that this is what happens, and at the same time you can entertain them. And thus far, judging from the hundreds of messages I’ve got and some of the reviews I’ve got, I’m succeeding. If you can do that, then that to me is a worthwhile effort, and obviously there’s a mercenary aspect to it. The primary goal here is to bring attention to what’s wrong with the system. I have adopted Andrew’s viewpoint. I shared it even before I read it. He said, ‘The most important case I work on is not a homicide per se. It’s when someone is accused of abuse, or there is an allegation of abuse, and the judge makes the wrong decision.’
The way the system works is when you are arrested and charged with a crime. Nobody cares whether you did it or not. Not the prosecutor and not the defence, because now it’s the prosecutor’s job to put you away, and it’s the defence’s job to get you off. That’s the system. Shouldn’t be that way, especially with children. People have asked me, how could you work on a case where someone’s accused of child abuse? Easy. You just said the word. They’re accused of it. Andrew himself acknowledged the prevalence of false accusations. He would often say ‘if you don’t think children lie then you haven’t spent a day in family court.’ It was his job to get through the lies. That’s why we need law guardians to have someone specifically looking out for the child. My clients know, by the way, I’ll do anything I can to help you but if I find out that you raped a child, I’ll withdraw from the case. I can’t talk about it. I’m working for your attorney, but I’m not going to pull any strings. I’m not going to work any miracles for you.
You wouldn’t think that the problem would be prosecutors. But as prosecutors, most of them have designs on political careers. Once they’ve determined you’re going to be tried you’re a notch on their belt. If you give them a plea which could end up destroying your life, that’s a victory to them and they run on their records. Now you’ve got these idiotic, progressive prosecutors. There’s ten witnesses that see this old man, an elderly man in a deli, get beaten up by a much younger guy, and the old man stabs him in self defence in front of witnesses, and the prosecutor locks up the old man. That’s damage now that’s going in a whole other way. And the people that stand between them and the wrongfully accused are the criminal defence attorneys and the private investigators.
In Bonds there was a child that died. In the real case the child didn’t die. We actually saved that child, but the forensics came back and the judge said, ‘Well, I don’t care how bad these forensics are, the father needs to spend time with the children.’
Oh? He’s a sadistic, evil person who beats the mother. Joint parenting. But you know what, If you could work things out with your significant other to the point where you were both being reasonable, you’re probably not going to be in family court. I’ve seen judges, the woman will stand there with a black eye and broken nose from the husband or boyfriend beating her up, and the judge expects them to co-parent. How does that happen? If I see these things, there’s the drama. It might be a little bit more intense. It might be a little bit more concentrated, but there’s nothing that I have written so far in these novels that can’t happen. Even the aspect of the third book which deals with Satanic crimes. In real life Satanic crimes are extraordinarily rare and when they do happen, what you usually find are freaks who enjoy hurting children and they’re using that to mask it. So everything that I’ve written thus far is accurate. The new character I introduced in Harbingers is Hamilton. He lives the first eight years of his life under the stairs, and he is repeatedly raped on video with his parents doing the filming. And people will say to me, as they did to Andrew, that’s just dark fiction. No, that’s the actual story that I was told by someone and I verified.
It’s also important to me if I’m going to give you that horror, then I need people to know that there are still heroes. Chief Mariano is modelled, with his permission, after my partner and very good friend Mike Marino. There’s a great article about Mike in New York Magazine. I look up to this guy. He’s got the balls to be the first man through the door, but he’s got the brains to know when to go through that door. My other partner, Ron, who’s a retired Navy Seal, regards him as he would an Admiral. Mariano is modelled after Marino. I need people to know that there are people like that as well. Mike is somebody who spent his life protecting people and doing the best he could to keep crime down, and he wasn’t a guy that did that from behind a desk. So when you read about those characters, rest assured there are people like that walking around. I’ve sat down with them and I said, ‘Listen. You have qualities that I admire. I would like to base a character on you. In order for me to do that you have to agree that it will be my interpretation of you.’ And they give me their consent. So I’m trying to let people know that there are decent people like that out there still fighting.
We all need to talk to each other. In Sorrows, both political parties are revealed as not being good which is the truth. Andrew would laugh when someone would say, is the right or the left the party of children? He would rattle off ten things that the party did that actually hurt children. Politicians are for the most part sociopathic litmus papers. They change colour to whatever they’re dipped into. You gotta watch TV and hear these people talk, and you just go, ‘My God, who do they think they’re telling this to?’ Anybody that has loyalty to a political party…(sighs). You have loyalty to your friends. You have loyalty to your family of choice. That’s loyalty. Mike calls me at four in the morning, ‘I got a problem.’ I’m there. My friend Clint calls me and says, ‘I need help.’ I’m on a plane. That’s loyalty. You don’t owe that to a political party. They owe it to you. If we can ask them. If we can tell them, Keep your cushy job. Make your pension for working two months out of the year but protect our children. Then we could get it done. That was what Andrew devoted his final days to, and that’s what I’m trying to broach with the books as well. So I’m doing all that hopefully while entertaining people.
Powell: There’s the famous photo of Andrew standing behind President Clinton, as he was signing legislation into law. But you told me in an earlier conversation that Andrew became quite cynical about that particular act.
Curley: Yes, the National Child Protection Act required that States that receive Federal assistance for their court system must appoint a legal guardian for a child where abuse is suspected. The person that is accused of the abuse gets a lawyer. The child should get a legal guardian, and there’s a plethora of reasons. He can say it much better than I, he’s written articles about it, why it should be a legal guardian and not just a caseworker. Less from having to do with what the court wants, and more from having to do what is good for the child. Andrew was famous for that. A lot of judges didn’t like him because he didn’t care what they wanted. He didn’t want their court to move faster. He protected the child. Something people don’t know about him. He had 57 judges find against him. He appealed all of them, and he won 56 of them. Judges don’t like that. So he didn’t have a lot of friends in the judiciary. I know law guardians here in New York and ask them, ‘You ever appeal a case?’ And they look at me like I have two heads.
Andrew Vachss (back row with an eye patch), Oprah Winfrey and President Clinton
They got this whole thing together. Oprah Winfrey was involved, and Clinton was supposed to fix those two words and make it a legal advocate, but he failed to do so. It looked like it was going to go through and it didn’t. Andrew said to me, ‘Clinton wrote a couple of pages about me in his autobiography, but didn’t put down how the act failed to accomplish what we needed it to accomplish.’ And he’s right, and that’s on the Republicans by the way. The Child Protection Act was passed by them, and it gave rise to this entire industry of take a three day or two week course and now you can go out and investigate child abuse. It doesn’t work like that. A legal advocate, if they don’t represent the child properly, can be sued for malpractice. They’re not under the judges’ sway. They get paid, no matter what.
But there have been victories also. There was the incest loophole in New York. What that said in layman’s terms was you rape a child, you’re a monster, you go to jail for twenty years. You rape your own child, sentencing was akin to adultery. Robert Morgenthau was the DA in Manhattan for about forty years, and Andrew wrote an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times saying why the incest loophole had to go. Morgenthau wrote back the next week saying, ‘oh this is bullshit. It’s never actually happened like that.’ And because Andrew was Andrew you could argue with the man, but make sure you’re right. Because the next week, he responded in the New York Times and listed a whole bunch of cases where people raped their children and got a slap on the wrist. and then you didn’t hear back from Morganthau. He also sued the Fresh Air Fund when one of their counsellors was raping children and someone in Morganthau’s family was involved, and he would not step back from that. So Andrew didn’t care. His thing was the kids, and he had rules. He never violated his rules, and that’s how people knew they could trust him. That’s hard for anybody to say with a straight face. I wish I could say I’ve never broken a rule. Sometimes you’re given a whole bunch of shit choices, and you just take the worst choice when all your rules come into conflict with each other. When it came to children, Andrew never compromised. You didn’t have to make friends with the judges. That was his strength, and the kids knew that they could trust him.
Powell: Describe your latest book, but also where your career is going next as a writer.
Curley: A lot of that, ladies and gentlemen, has to do with how well the books sell. You’re a writer, so you know getting published itself is a miracle. I have a good friend, Brian Drake, who writes Scott Stiletto and a bunch of great characters, who was talking to me and who admired Andrew, and he brought me to the attention of the publishing house. Which, by the way, makes everybody that I know that writes hate my guts. When I wrote Bonds I had it in my head – write a novel, stay within the confines of the genre, kind of delve into what Andrew does. I didn’t think it would be good enough to publish. So as a lark I sent it to five places. I sent them the book. Three of them sent me a form letter saying we’re not taking submissions. A wonderful lady wrote me back, her and her husband read it. She said to re-edit it, but it was great. We only do Agatha Christie type of fiction, not noir. Some jerk at a publishing house in Boston wrote back, ‘It’s all cliched and we are only interested in cutting edge fiction.’ And I read that and I was annoyed. Look, it’s not the next Maltese Falcon, but I know I’ve paid for stuff that wasn’t this good, and writing is subjective. But I was angry. And there’s that male ego we mentioned, and I turn on the computer I look at this guy and guess what, before he had a publishing house which published some of his own novels he was a writer for Diagnosis: Murder. And he’s telling me not to be cliched! I’m not gonna have some overweight desk jockey who lives with his mother tell me what’s cliched. The next time I got a murder case or a kid getting abused, ride around with my investigators and tell me if it’s cliched language because that’s how we talk.
And of course, Andrew, when I told him this he goes, ‘Why would you do that?’ And I said ‘I had to get it out of my system.’ He said ‘Good, because if you don’t get it out of your system you’ll be writing that all day long.’
I do believe Sorrows and Harbingers got better as I went along. You find your rhythm. All of a sudden my friend Brian mentions me (to the publisher), we chat a little back and forth, and I’m published. I’m pretty sure there were contracts taken out on me. I send my neighbour to start my car in the morning. I just tell him, ‘Look, I have trouble walking today. Could you start my car?’ And he’s like, ‘If you think somebody is going to blow it up, John, I got one of those remote control starters.’
I hope that it’s going to continue. I have a lot that I want to say. I’m not Andrew, I can’t write like him, but I believe I write well enough that people will appreciate it, and thus far the reaction is that they do. I grew up on the Spenser novels. Spenser was iconic. He stood for what was right. He knew how to fight. He knew how to shoot, but that wasn’t what he did as a choice. That’s a good role model for a kid, because we do have a somewhat violent world and sometimes those things happen. But here’s a guy that uses his brains. I watched what Ace Atkins did with the Spenser character. He starts off. He makes a few mistakes, and Parker would make mistakes because he’s an English professor and not a not a PI or anything. Hammett was a real detective and he had a slight edge over Chandler. Marlowe was almost celibate. You could read a Race Williams novel, remember him? First PI novel. I’m re-reading them. And if you replaced a little bit of the language, added cell phones and made the substitution of the fascists for Antifa it would be (set) today. It would be real. There is truth in crime fiction. There is truth in noir. It’s real. It’s a valuable asset, especially for kids. In the old television shows those characters were the same as in the books. They didn’t kill people unnecessarily. They tried to help people. We should all be trying to help each other. To this day the Mortgage Company ain’t always happy that I do more than my share of pro bono work, or I take money on a case which I have to because it’s how I make a living, and it’s not what I should take on the case.
People don’t understand how much work goes into it. There are issues we need to explore. I had a client who had an adult child who was mentally ill with multiple diseases diagnosed, and had attempted suicide three times. But now because he was over the age of 21, they don’t know what to do with him. And that’s kind of one of the books that I’m working on now. It goes into that. This kid should be confined, and having dealt with him and he’s not a threat always. But if he’s not on his medication he’s going to end up one of those people that pushes somebody in front of a subway car. It’s gonna happen. My partner is 6’5 and well over 300 pounds and he was a Navy Seal, and the kid was ready to launch himself at my partner. As you can imagine, I wouldn’t… unless I had brass knuckles, or I was hitting him when he wasn’t looking and I can hit. That’s not something you want to do, and he was armed. The kid was not based in reality at the time. We have to do something with those people. At the same time we have to balance that by not taking away people’s rights. So what do politicians do? They put band-aids on, and it shouldn’t be that way. These are things that we can explore in crime fiction like no other genre. I’ve made postings and written articles and told people – get a book, a Spenser novel. It doesn’t have to be one of mine. I’d appreciate it if it was. If the kid’s a sophomore in High School, he’s ready for it. There’s not gratuitous sex in it. Like Spenser, unlike Burke, you don’t need to know what Creed does in the bedroom.
The FBI and the Justice Department stopped counting what they thought were false accusations, because they estimated 10% of all accusations were false, but when they looked at the data it was closer to 20%. So they stopped. And by the way, false accusation is a crime. You get accused of molesting a child, and you didn’t do it there is a stigma attached to you forever. That’s what happens. All of these things can be written about in no other genre like crime fiction. And it’s all right there in front of me. I defy anyone to find something I’ve written about that does not have a basis in reality. I have personally not dealt with Satanic crimes as in Harbingers. But I spent hours researching it, and as I was hobbled at the time I didn’t have much else to do, and I was becoming a pain around the house! You can bring these things to light. A bunch of people that I know are interested in forming a production company and maybe making the stories into television or movies. And I keep telling them half kidding, let’s do it while I’m still young enough to play Creed. I want a shot. They say you can’t do that. I say ‘Listen, Mickey Spillane got a blockbuster with The Girl Hunters and he was horrible. I can do a better job with Creed than Mickey Spillane did with Mike Hammer. But it was a kick to see him do it.’
As far as the future goes, at this point it’s conjecture. I have every hope that it’s gonna work out. I am insanely appreciative of the fact that I am with a publishing house called Rough Edges Press. What’s more appropriate than that? Wolf Pack is their parent company, and my editor’s name is Patience. How can you do better? Mike Ray, a writer himself, is the guy that owns the company. They see the value in the work. So it looks good. They’re a good group of people. Andrew hated publishers, and these guys are nothing like what he described. I’ve run into publishers like that. One guy loved my work, and then he saw that politically I lean towards fiscal conservatism. I don’t care what you do in your bedroom as a consenting adult. It’s not my business. I don’t care what your religion is as long as you don’t hurt people. What I do care about is how the money’s spent. There’s not enough of it spent on our kids. As soon as the guy read a political post, his interest in me dropped. And the guys at Wolf Pack said we don’t care what your politics are. We want you to write well, otherwise we wouldn’t publish it.
Harbingers – I think that’s the best of the three books. I had a very astute reader send me an email saying that Ham, the character that shares the book with Creed, reminds her of Dolarhyde from Red Dragon, except for his benevolence. It shocked me that somebody picked up on that so quick. It’s exactly what I had in mind. In Red Dragon Dolarhyde is a monster, and he’s made himself enormously strong. The weight that they have him cleaning in his basement, you could be on the Olympic team as a heavyweight and clean. He’s enormously strong. It’s the same with Ham. He took the abuse and instead of becoming a monster, he transcends. The whole novel is off of a conversation I had with Andrew. Why is it, you take two kids who are horribly abused, one worse than the next. Things that would make you cry, if you talk about it in depth, (happen) to each of them but one grows up to save children and the other grows up to hurt children. Why? And I said to him at the time maybe the one that transcends, despite the abuse, had someone to love them at some point and show them how to be a human being and the other one didn’t. If that’s the case, you can’t blame the monster for being a monster, but you still have to put it down. It’s almost impossible to save someone like that. For the most part, if you don’t catch a child before it becomes an adult, there’s a calcification point. It’s extremely rare for there to be change afterwards and that’s what the novel explores. You have Ham and this other creature in the book, and they’re at odds. Both abused. One saves. The other destroys. Andrew always said if we could definitively nail that down, it would be a huge accomplishment. It would be like the grand unified theory of child protection. He thought my idea was important, a good one. But there’s no proof of that. Instead, we’ll get the same bullshit over and over again. What was he thinking? The guy that rapes kids does it cause he likes to. I don’t need to know anything else. I don’t need to spend hours trying to figure out a senseless crime as long as it made sense to the thing committing it. There’s your answer.
People discount emotional abuse. Tell a kid he’s nothing but garbage for his whole life, what do you think you’re going to get? Telling a kid that was emotionally abused. Oh, you don’t have any scars, get over it. I’ve had people that were so abused. Raped, burned with cigars beaten, and you know what they’ve told me. They’ve looked me in the eye, and they’ve cried, and they’ve said ‘the worst part of it is, I knew they didn’t love me.’
I think this is the genre to bring all that stuff out.
John A. Curley is an author and private investigator based in New York City. His crime novels Bonds, Sorrows and Harbingers featuring PI Jonathan Creed are vintage hardboiled tales in the mould of Robert B. Parker and Mickey Spillane. Child Protection is a key theme and the Creed novels, like Andrew Vachss’s Burke series, are noted for their authenticity as Curley has brought his own experiences and used real cases as a basis in his fiction.
Curley and Andrew Vachss were both friends and colleagues, sharing a mutual interest in child protection. But to call it merely an interest would be to do both men a disservice. For Curley and Vachss, making the US a safer place for children was nothing short of a lifelong vocation and quest. This is why I first began talking to Curley and subsequently started devouring the Creed novels. I had interviewed Vachss when I was researching Love Me Fierce in Danger: The Life of James Ellroy, and I was eager to hear about Curley’s memories of Vachss who sadly died in November 2021.
I spoke with Curley at length via Zoom. We talked for so long that I decided to split our interview into two parts. The first part, published below, is focused on Curley’s professional relationship and friendship with Andrew Vachss. And in the second part, to be published soon, Curley will discuss the inspiration behind the gripping Jonathan Creed novels.
I’ve interviewed a lot of authors and the first thing I learned was that a good interviewer lets the author do the talking and on occasion directs the conversation towards a certain topic. As a consequence, I have cut my voice out of the transcript below entirely and let Curley tell his story in his own words.
Vachss & Curley by artists Bill Sier and Donna Akers
Andrew (Vachss), by his own admission, was sometimes tough. I didn’t experience any of that because I regarded him as my teacher. I had the same respect for him as I would have for a martial arts instructor or a scholar. It moulded me. If we disagreed about something I would take it for granted he was right, although I might look further into it, and he would always encourage me to do that. But when it came, for example, to child protection. This is all the guy’s done for fifty years. He is the smartest, and that’s not an exaggeration, most logical, toughest guy that I know. If you look at some of the people I work with – retired Navy Seals, Army Intelligence officers, Police Chiefs – that’s high praise. But it was true and they’ve acknowledged that when they’ve spoken and interacted with him. And I would tell people, ‘So you’re gonna tell me he’s wrong based on your personal experience in this little area in which you, your family court case, didn’t go the way it’s supposed to. Logically, do you think he’s wrong?’ He pointed it out to me, just because you have a heart attack you’re not instantly a cardiologist. You have to objectively research, and he is a guy who had such hatred for predators that he objectively dissected them, and looked at them from every possible angle, and came up with common sense solutions to actually decrease significantly what’s happening.
I’ve been a PI for 36 years. I’m not a PI that sits in his basement and does things for insurance companies and things like that. I’ve worked for Fortune 500 companies. I’ve worked on 70 homicides in my 36 year career. I worked on the last Presidential Election. I was the head of the investigation, the Amistad Project, which I cannot speak about because I signed disclosures, and I was working for attorneys, and I’ve done hundreds of custody cases, and what I have seen in my own experience indicates he’s right. So it wasn’t just a blind devotion to him. Whenever we would talk he would patiently hear me out if I disagreed with him. We have a mutual friend, Marc MacYoung. Marc was Andrew’s go to violence expert. He’s like the Albert Einstein of violence. He grew up in Watts in LA as a white kid, so he was the minority in the worst neighbourhood in the country. (He was) first shot when he was fourteen. First Job was knocking over drug dealers with a local Motorcycle Club at sixteen, and he was Andrew’s go to guy. Marc and I got to be very good friends, and we would talk, and we would call Andrew ‘Satan’. He had that voice where he would talk to you like this (affects deep voice), and it would feel like the devil was yelling at you. And one day, I said something to Andrew, in the midst of this really long and tense conversation he stopped, and he said, ‘I haven’t considered that. I’m gonna have to think about this, and we’ll talk in a couple of days.’ So the first thing I did was call Marc and say, I was just talking to Satan because we would always try to show each other up. I talked to him last week, did you? And I said I got him to reconsider his position on something.
John A. Curley
He had a great sense of humour. A lot of people never saw that, because he was so intense about what he did. He asked me to do a job for him. A little job, but I was all excited, and this is about six months after we started speaking regularly. And I would say that we averaged an hour a week (talking) for about seven years and we got to be friends. We would actually bounce ideas of fiction off each other, which was a privilege for me. And for some reason I just had it in my head, I’m going to make Andrew laugh because he is always so serious. I gave him the results of the job, and he says ‘That’s a well done job. Thank you. Where do I send the cheque?’
And I said, ‘After I reimburse you for the writing lessons you can send me a cheque’. I said to him, ‘Do you know what the Captains of Crush are?’
He goes, ‘Never heard of them.’
I said ‘They are industrial strength grippers. The number two. It takes 190 pounds of pressure to close it. I can do that eight times with my right hand. I can almost, but not quite, close the number three, but my hands are average size, so I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do that, I said, but that’s still significant. So, do you know why I do that Andrew?’
And he said, ‘Well, I would imagine some martial arts tearing somebody’s throat out technique.’
‘No, I’m cheap.’
‘Explain.’
‘I will not leave the last little bit of toothpaste in that tube.’
And he laughed for about a minute! And just when I tried to talk he kept laughing, and he said, ‘you gotta give me a minute.’ He had a great sense of humour. The thing about Andrew, he was single minded in his focus. So what I tell people, when it comes to child protection, you can go to his website, read his novels and know everything I learned from him, because it’s all the same. He doesn’t change
I was in my late forties when we first started talking and I’m 56 now, and I wouldn’t think I’d have a father figure at this age but he proved me wrong. His loss is, if I make it through this interview without tearing up, it’s the first one, and I’ve done a couple of dozen. It’s a little intimidating, because a lot of people look in my direction where they used to look in his. I have no idea what he felt made me worth his time, and he never asked for anything, ever, but I knew he wanted people to continue his work. I told him, your fight is mine until the day I die. And it’s easy for me because I can’t improve on what he did. I just advocate for his position. He was a very complex man. I had a conversation with him one day. I was kind of upset by what I had been reading about Critical Race theory.
I said, ‘One of your founding principles is that no child is born bad. Why aren’t you more upset about this?’
And he took a deep breath, and he gave me that voice where I knew I had said something stupid, or I hadn’t thought it out all the way.
He said ‘I would not advocate for that to be part (of the curriculum).’
I said ‘I would think not, because it tells white kids that they’re evil and black kids that they’re born stupid if you look at the actual context.’
And he said, ‘I’m still trying to make Texas understand that an 11 year old when she’s impregnated by her father is not gonna show until she’s three or four months along. So their six week ban on abortion isn’t for that situation.’ This is about a year before he passed. He said, ‘I have limited time and I have to choose what I devote my time to. Besides that, why didn’t the opponents take it to court yet? Shouldn’t they have done that instantly? The information is out there.’
And I said, ‘Well, that’s a good question. Why?’
And he said, ‘Because then the opponents are going to stop making money from it. So nobody wants it to go to court.’
He just would peel something back, regardless of what the subject was, and he wasn’t vocal about anything unless it had to do with child protection. Before Roe vs Wade he advocated for a legal guardian to be able to have an abortion done on a child, because if you have an eleven or twelve year old that’s pregnant from a father or a brother that’s life-threatening. So that’s how long he was in the fight! There were conundrums I would come up with workwise. I would go to him when nobody else could figure it out, and he would get it. So he was an invaluable resource for me and I loved him. He was a good man, is a good man, and if there’s some way for him to still be fighting he is. You can take that to the bank. He was not the kind of guy that would back down or give up. I have friends who I work with who are actual Navy Seals, and they tell me that guy Vachss was one tough sonofabitch and that’s praise.
Andrew Vachss
He was a therapist as well to his friends. I have a younger brother that’s bad. He was extremely abusive to his wife and my niece and nephew and we took them in. Eventually he went to prison for repeatedly violating a protection order. They couldn’t nail him for drug dealing, which was his forte, but they did get him for violating the orders of protection so much that he got hard time for it. As I’m sure you can imagine, it was an extraordinarily traumatic time. It’s an easy decision to make – him or the kids. But it’s a hard decision to make, because that’s my little brother. During the pandemic we were watching this show on Netflix called Bloodline, and basically it was the Curley family set in Key West. You have a good brother for lack of a better word, and the evil brother who suffered some horrible abuse, who comes back into their lives and he’s an evil guy. He’s a drug trafficker and he kills people, and the good brother goes to see the mother and the mother is begging him. You have to help your brother, yet he knows it is spiralling down to this point where it’s beyond help, and one of us is going to die. He gets into his truck. He looks in the rearview mirror, and he sees his little brother in the back of the car, but as a child, and he turns around and starts screaming at this image of his brother – Fuck You!
I watched that and I just shut down. I didn’t talk for two days. After my brother had gone to prison, the economy tanked. My wife had gotten breast cancer. I injured myself so severely I was out of work for almost sixteen months. The bank wanted to take the house. It’s one thing after another. It’s almost like there’s no time to deal with this, so I put it away. Then I see the show years later and all of a sudden it all rushes back to me. Out of desperation I called him (Vachss) and we talked for about an hour, and he said, ‘Well, when he turned around, and he was saying fuck you to the image of his brother. Why was he saying that?’
‘Well, that’s easy, fuck you for making me do what I have to do, and for being what you are.’
And he said, ‘Well, you’re leaving something out there. What about the fuck you for your father that made him that way.’ He said, ‘It’s your brother’s fault because he chooses his actions as an adult, and none of the rest of you are doing what he’s doing. But nonetheless, that was the catalyst.’
And I thought, my father was not a bad man. He was one of those guys who thought what he was doing was making his kids strong, and he did what was done to him, and it wasn’t good. But that had a bad effect on my brother.
And then he said to me, ‘What else?’
‘What do you mean?
He goes ‘What else John?’
And I said, ‘I don’t know Andrew, how would you feel if I told you I actually had considered the possibility, and thought about it extensively that my brother or I might end up dead.’
And he said, ‘What would you think of someone who would allow that type of abuse to happen to a woman and a child, especially in their family and do nothing about it?’
‘I wouldn’t think much of someone like that. I wouldn’t keep company with him.’
And he said, ‘Well, that’s the problem with men like you.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Because you think this is the first time I’ve heard this from guys like you. You were thirteen or fourteen dealing with your father’s sudden death.’
(He was murdered. If you’ve ever seen the movie Goodfellas, the Lufthansa heist that happened in the movie. Those guys killed my father.)
He said, ‘You think somehow you should have been able to keep your family together, deal with your own grief at the age of thirteen just turned fourteen, and you’re somehow responsible for your brother going wrong?’
For years I felt that, and all of a sudden this huge weight that I didn’t know was on me was lifted off. And I said, ‘You know, Papa, you could put most therapists out of business’.
He laughed and said, ‘John, this is all I’ve done for the last fifty years. If I couldn’t help you, I wouldn’t be much good.’
But that was Andrew, that was a side of him a lot of people didn’t get to see. He had this really human benevolent, I’ll even say loving, side to him. Andrew was a tough man. He had to be to see what he saw. I have not seen half the tenth of one quarter of what he’s seen, and there are things that I’ve done. I’m no Superman but a few times I’ve walked in places and walked out with kids before they were sold (to the sex trade), and I know what happens and it rips me up to this day. He dealt with that on an almost non-stop basis, and I had no idea how he could do that. He was that strong willed. But there had to be damage inside of him. He’d never let you know about it, but he was human just like the rest of us.
One of his last wishes was that he wanted to make sure that people didn’t know exactly when he died, because him being alive upset a lot of the freaks. He said, ‘Don’t be offended. Someone will let you know when it’s time.’ And the last conversation I had with him was two days before he died, and he did not even talk to me about what was wrong with him. He spent that time trying to help me with something. It’s a really hard thing to not have him.
One of the things about Andrew. He was adamant about this. There is no such thing as selective free speech. There was a time when NAMBLA (the North American Man Boy Love Association), it’s disgusting to even say, they were having their monthly meetings at the New York Public Library. There was an uproar about this, and again, the only time people seem to care about this is when it’s in the news. Back in the Eighties there was little Lisa Steinberg who was murdered in New York by the piece of garbage that adopted her. There was no Internet then, but it was all over the newspapers, the radio, national and local news for the next six months. It was never going to happen again, and everybody jumped on board. But the problem with people over here is they don’t follow through on anything. People are so desensitised when they read a headline every few weeks about a child being murdered. It doesn’t affect them anymore. Oh, there was change. The Bureau of Child Welfare became the Administration for Children Services. With all the garbage that you see on television you don’t see people jump on board with this because it doesn’t bring them any kind of power. I know about violence. I’m a guy you come to when your daughter is being abused by a drug dealer or you’ve run afoul of the white supremacist down the road and you need somebody to make things right. They’re actual jobs by the way. I’ve sat down across from people who’ve told me that they were gonna kill me and mean it. So I have that experience and I understand those things. So the news interviewed Andrew about NAMBLA meetings at the Public Library.
‘You think they should remove them?’
He said, ‘No. Free speech is free speech. I want that freak on television telling people it’s normal for an adult to rape a child because, even as polarized as these things are today, I line up 100 people, 98 of them are going to go – Are you fucking kidding? The other two are freaks or collaborators. I want them out in the open, so that maybe an enterprising young cop can go there and write down licence plate numbers, and might have an idea where to look when the next kid goes missing. What I don’t want is for that to go underground.’
And that makes perfect sense. Because he would logically look at the problem. The gut reaction is – Get them out of there. I’m sure I felt that way too. The turning point for me was when he posted something about somebody hurting a child with an animal, and I did the typical bullshit machismo testosterone response. ‘If I had that bastard, I’d put him on a meat hook in my basement and use him as a heavy bag for a month.’
And he said, ‘What good would that do, John?’
‘Wait a second, aren’t you Andrew Vachss. Don’t you hate these guys?’
‘Well, you feel good, don’t you. You feel you let off a little steam?’
‘I do.’
‘You feel strong?’
‘I do.’
‘You know what would have been good. You calming down, writing a well thought out letter, sending it to that prosecutor saying – I want the Max. No plea deals and I vote – Put that up on Facebook and ask people to do the same thing. Maybe nothing happens, but maybe it will, and you did something.’
End of Part One. In Part Two Curley discusses the inspiration behind his excellent Jonathan Creed series of novels.
The Venetian Vase 