By ANDREW VACHSS (Knopf; 1993)

Any post-1990 work of fiction claiming to “revitalize the hard-boiled tradition” can be scorned, if not dismissed entirely, as, quite simply, this is the state of the art in neo-noir.  Written by the famed attorney-novelist Andrew Vachss, SHELLA is as harsh, unsparing and flat-out brilliant as noir fiction gets.

Vachss is best known for the bestselling Burke series of novels that to these eyes are potent but vastly overwritten.  That’s not an issue with Vachss’ the non-Burke affiliated SHELLA, which is terse and compact with nary a wasted word.  This is in keeping with the noir template, whose minimalist aesthetic Vachss takes to entirely new, almost poetic heights.  That extends to the violent content, which is quite plentiful and detailed, and never sanitized in the slightest.

The first person narrator is a guy who goes by, variously, John (as in John Doe) and Ghost, and doesn’t “look like anything.”  He’s a hit man with little in the way of intelligence, and a moral compass that’s skewed at best.  Redemption of a sort would appear to be in the cards after he takes up with the tough but pure-hearted Shella, a stripper-prostitute traumatized by childhood abuse, but then John/Ghost is incarcerated for killing a psychopath he catches tormenting Shella, and the relationship falls apart.

After getting out of prison John finds that Shella has vanished, and to find her he embarks on a sordid quest through the underworld.  Involved are pornographers, perverts, an Indian mobster, a white supremacist cult, a dog fighting ring and a great deal of naked brutality, all of it colored by John’s not-always-idyllic memories of Shella.

This sordid milieu is one Vachss, who as an attorney specializes in defending children against grown-up predators (with his fiction written to finance his legal practice), knows quite well.  As he himself has stated, Vachss doesn’t have to go looking for inspiration for the scumbags and lowlifes he writes about, as they’re taken from the all-too-real people he deals with on a daily basis.  As ugly as the details of SHELLA’s debauched universe sometimes are (particularly in the chapters dealing with child abuse and white supremacy), I suspect they fall far short of the reality.