[In the following review, Nicholson compliments Vachss for the entertainment value his work provides, but criticizes him for a lack of character development and utilizing formulaic plots.]

Reading Andrew Vachss is a sordid pleasure, like eating a tub of greasy, buttered popcorn while watching a double feature of kung-fu movies. Afterwards, bloated and bleary-eyed, most adults of reasonable intelligence will feel a little guilty at having wasted so much time, for Vachss' novels—Flood, Strega, and his latest, Blue Belle—are examples of the novel as comic book, the novel as television. Taken together, they remind one of the comment made by the producer of a television action show starring Lee Majors. During a story conference, a new writer asked about the motivation of the character Majors played.

"Motivation?" said the producer. "What motivation? The show's about a 14-year-old kid and his two buddies who are 13 and how they all go about having adventures." Which just about sums it up. Consider the following:

Vachss' hero, Burke, is an ex-con with a soft spot for abused children. He lives with a large and dangerous dog named Pansy. Unlike most New Yorkers, the two live rent-free (Burke once "did a favor" for the landlord), in rooms booby-trapped against unauthorized entry. Burke makes some of his money running scams involving phony Social Security numbers, unauthorized government checks and advertisements recruiting mercenaries. In terms of the genre and for convenience's sake we might call him a private eye or an investigator, except that he has no license and no listing in the telephone book. Burke drives a primer-gray Plymouth with (need it be said?) an exceedingly powerful engine and a 40-gallon gas tank. The Plymouth too is booby trapped.

One of Burke's sidekicks is Max, a mute Mongolian martial arts expert. Another is Michelle, a transvestite prostitute saving to have a sex-change operation. The third is Mole (Vachss seems to like M's), a Zionist electronics genius who lives beneath a junkyard populated by dozens of rusting cars and packs of wild dogs. Mole makes many of the booby traps, including lighters that look like ordinary butane lighters but are filled with napalm.

The plot of a Vachss novel goes something like this: A beautiful woman seeks Burke's assistance in finding someone who abuses and/or murders children. Burke and the woman join forces to go after the child abuser. The beautiful woman, spirited and independent, has trouble doing what Burke tells her to do. She and Burke argue. She and Burke make love. Burke calls on his buddies—Max, Michelle and Mole—for help in tracking down the child abuser. Burke gets beaten up (sometimes by the beautiful and spirited woman). Burke finds the child abuser. Burke kills the child abuser. The beautiful woman dies or goes somewhere Burke cannot follow; either way, Burke loses her.

In Blue Belle, the beautiful woman is named Belle, and the child abuser drives a van around New York, shooting teen prostitutes through the back door. Belle and Burke argue. Belle and Burke make love. Burke calls on his buddies—Max, Michelle and Mole—for help in tracking down the child abuser. Burke gets beaten up. Burke … well, surely you get the point.

Vachss deals, as do many television shows, in broad strokes. And as on most big-city, urban crime shows, blacks exist as either pimps or prostitutes. In Blue Belle, the pimp is Marques (those M's again), who recruits Belle to hire Burke to find the killer. The killers' victims are young white girls, but there are several, unnamed, black prostitutes Burke encounters as he proceeds with his investigation. Racial epithets are freely tossed around. Their use does not, however, add to the depiction of a gritty twilight world; instead, they come off as a cheap way of authenticating the atmosphere in which the characters move.

Those characters, Burke, Max, Mole, Michelle, are less characters than types or collections of traits; Max, for example, is literally the strong, silent type. And the plot of the novel is less a series of incidents flowing organically from the interaction of particular, realized human beings than a string of events that must happen if Vachss is to keep the story going. That he does and does well, for there is an undeniable raw power to Blue Belle that keeps the reader turning the pages.

But sheer narrative drive is only part of what has kept readers coming back for more. The key to the attraction of the novels lies in Burke's role as fantasy figure. He is a hero of our times, a kind of urban Tarzan, lord of the asphalt jungle. Like other tough-guy, private investigator heroes, Burke lives by his own moral code in an amoral world. But to an unprecedented extent, he lives in the twilight between the legal and the illegal. He strives to be his own man, knowing he is not truly part of the system, and knowing too that he can never escape it. Burke's solution, then, is to devise ways to make the system work for him.

Some of this is occasionally moving, as when Burke reminisces about his stints in prison and the reasons for his choices. These have a ring of authenticity. Much of the novel, however, reads like the fantasies of a fed-up New Yorker: Burke never comes home to find a notice that the telephone company is going to cut off his telephone; he's managed to tap into the line used by his upstairs neighbors. He owns nothing in his own name (something he reminds us of constantly), so nothing can be taken from him. With a booby-trapped apartment—poison darts, explosives and an attack dog—he never has to worry about burglars. Burke just may be the ultimate urban paranoid—you can't call him, and when he calls you, it's from a phone booth Mole has rigged up to relay the call several times so that it can't be tapped.

All this technology, like so much else in Blue Belle and Vachss' other novels, while possible, just isn't credible. The effect of Vachss' exaggeration, for this reader at least, is the opposite of what he intends: His characters are larger than life, but it is distortion, not mythmaking, and Blue Belle, like its predecessors, isn't about people we can recognize in situations that, no matter how fantastic, compel our belief.

Despite Burke's moral stance against child abuse and exploitation, despite Vachss' energetic rendering of the sensational, there is, in the end, little to engage the reader in Blue Belle. At a time when a substantial case can be made that the mystery (or, if you prefer, crime novel or thriller) ought to be promoted from the strait jacket of genre fiction, Vachss has expanded the genre's conventions without testing their limits. Burke remains the same from novel to novel, which is comforting for those who dislike surprises, but disappointing for those readers who believe that even the characters of a mere detective story should show some evidence of the human capability to react and change.