Andrew Vachss is one of the most physically recognizable novelist/attorneys on the planet. From the pages of Parade, where he is contributing editor, or his book jackets, there he is: thin, harshly handsome, and unsmiling, wearing a perpetual black patch over his right eye, hurt in a childhood accident. In fact, one wonders whether he ever smiles at all.

He's seen enough to wipe any joviality from his face. From his office on Lexington Avenue, Vachss wages a war against child abuse—through his work as a New York City attorney and through his writing. He defends only children and all of his writing is aimed at exposing the abuses against children.

Just out of school, Vachss (pronounced "Vax") worked as a federal investigator in sexually transmitted diseases and found the trails kept ending with children, filling him "with a rage that still flames today."

He became a case worker in New York City's Department of Welfare, went to Biafra where he witnessed the massive abuse of children, worked as a juvenile probation officer, and says he "just kept trying stuff and not getting back from it what I needed and also not making a contribution I wanted to make."

The turning point came when he was hired to run a maximum security prison for violent youth. He says he finally got it, "the absolute inescapable connection between today's victim and tomorrow's predator and it was at that point I decided to go to law school specifically and solely so I could represent children."

Law degree in hand, he found it impossible to earn a living defending only children, so he split his practice: half were children, the other half was conventional criminal defense. "Shooters, stabbers, the guys who paid the bills." The success of his first novel allowed him to stop practicing criminal defense and represent children and write.

And he has written it all: dozens upon dozens of articles, comic books, songs, plays, speeches, textbooks, and more than 17 novels which have garnered him fellowships and awards, from the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière to the Raymond Chandler Award. His most recent novel is Only Child, published by Knopf.

On my radio show, and later over the phone, Andrew Vachss talked about his work as an attorney and as a writer.

Q: I first became aware of you many years ago through your articles in Parade. You're an attorney in private practice specializing in crimes against children and a novelist. Tell me about this.

A: Well, actually, there's no distinction. One's an organic extension of the other. The novels are simply my way of speaking to a bigger jury than I'd ever find in a courthouse.

Q: Your books are difficult because of what you're writing about—crimes against children—yet you bring such reality to these novels.

A: Without what you're calling "reality" infused into the novels, there wouldn't be any novels. The other stuff I engraft is to not only make the material readable but I hope entertaining enough so that I can get you to swallow the whole meal. But in fact, I never have to look around for inspiration or face a blank computer screen.

Q: You've said you're not trying to entertain so much as to incite anger in your readers.

A: That's my ultimate goal. If I have a goal for the books it's that when you're done, you will be angry, because this is America and people don't act unless they're angry. It takes a lot of work to make Americans angry; we have so many things to be angry about at any one time. I'm at war. There's an enemy. I want to inflict as much damage as I can before I'm done. No one has a knockout punch, when it comes to child abuse. It's a game played financially, emotionally, it's all-consuming, but there's no way to finish it. So if I want a bigger share of your emotions, this is my method and that's the sole goal of the books. However, I acknowledge that unless the book is engaging, unless the book has its own narrative force, I'm never going to get the opportunity to make you angry.

Q: The writing of your current novel, Only Child, is wonderfully literary. I'm curious what sort of switch you make between writing fiction and journalism.

A: I don't actually feel there is a switch, except that in a novel you have more space, you have more latitude. The one thing The New York Times and Parade have in common is a word length limit and restrictions on what words you can use. If you remove those, I don't believe you would see a difference. It is a different process because when you're writing nonfiction, you often have to speak in epigrams. You're space-limited, and you have a deadline, none of which apply to the novel. In nonfiction, you don't have the big canvas to paint on, and you have to make sure the logic chain is perfect. Because what I write about is controversial, I have to make my case and defend my case and anticipate the attacks on my case, all within a very short number of words. That's always on my mind.

Q: What do you believe has more effect on your readers: your novels or your nonfiction?

A: I don't know. Typically, the Parade articles have a wider circulation than any book would and the response is proportionate, in terms of numbers. But I think in terms of lasting impact, the books actually seem to do a better job.

Q: As far as one or the other being more enjoyable?

A: (laughter) I really never got to write anything for fun. I got a chance to write a Batman comic and I wrote it about the child sex tourism business. Needless to say, it wasn't a big hit with the Batman fans but I managed to reach a whole bunch of people who wouldn't have read a conventional novel. It doesn't matter who invites me to the party or what kind of music they're playing, I only do this one dance. My original writing was nonfiction and I switched to fiction to gain a wider audience and it's been more successful than my wildest dreams but it's the same material. In my experience, you can write all the nonfiction you want but you won't reach the same jury pool that fiction does.

Q: The writing of your novels and the tone and voice of your journalism are so different.

A: They have to be. If I were having an argument in a poolroom and an argument in a courtroom, I would conduct myself differently and be prepared for very different kinds of objections. So it is with journalism and being a novelist. There are different codes that you have to adhere to to do it properly, to do it effectively. I'm able to do that. But it's not the big jump that it appears to be because the foundation to both of them is exactly the same.

Q: What do you see as your role as journalist and as novelist?

A: It's one and the same. As an attorney, if I represent a child, I am going to have the maximum impact. For the participants, the stakes couldn't be higher. Whereas with the writing, I'm going up against child abuse. When I write a book, the jury is exponentially larger.

Q: You were an attorney for something like 10 years before you started writing or publishing fiction.

A: I was a lawyer for 10 years before I got a book published, yes. (laughter) I had the agent everybody dreams of: Victor Chapin. He read a short story I wrote for some tiny literary magazine and told me I was going to be this great novelist. But everything I wrote was universally rejected, every single thing. Always the same letters: what a brilliant writer I was, what a literary gift I had, but the material was so outrageous. Victor kept saying, "I know you're not going to abandon the reason you write, but can you just tone it down a little bit?" Year after year I would do that. Finally, I wrote a book called Flood and Victor called me up and said, "We're rich, we've done it. This is the brass ring, kid," and he died two days later. I looked up at the sky and said, "Thanks a lot," and threw the manuscript in a drawer.

Years later, I was interviewed by a journalist about one of my cases and he said what everybody says: "You ought to write a book." I said I did write an expletive-deleted book but it died with my friend and my agent. He asked to look at it and showed it to a friend who showed it to a friend who showed it to a friend and a very small publishing house run by a guy who's infamous in the publishing world, Donald I. Fine, paid me a couple of dollars for the book. After that, it exploded.

Q: You said you struggled "year after year" sending stuff out. How many years?

A : Oh, a dozen years, easily.

Q: What kept you going?

A: Victor Chapin kept me going. If the agent who had sustained me all these years had not done so, I'm sure I would have just given it up. The people who persist are the people who have a need to write that comes from inside them as opposed to someone like me who saw writing as a weapon of war. The truth about writing that nobody wants to say, but everyone knows, is it's not a meritocracy. It's not a question of something you can measure quantitatively, like who can lift the most weight or run the fastest. There are people who have not been published who are better writers than those people who have been published.

Q: And yet you have more than a dozen novels and many journalistic pieces and apparently so very much to say.

A: (laughter) Well, actually, I've got this one tune that I can play and I can play it on a lot of different instruments, and I got pretty good at playing it. But the truth is the material I write about will never be in short supply. I only wish there were nothing in my field to write about anymore, but there's no danger of that.

Q: How is it you're so prolific while working as an attorney? Many writers who are far less busy than you have a hard time getting writing done.

A: I think it's more the seamlessness. In other words, if you had to write a novel about being a radio host of a show about writing, that would be a lot easier for you than writing a novel about a comedy of manners. Well, I'm writing about what I do, so the seamlessness makes it a lot easier for me to be prolific.

Q: Earlier you said something about fighting the war through your fiction.

A: It's simply another arrow in the quiver, another grenade, another bomb. It is a weapon. If you're a working class person like I am, how do you reach tons and tons and tons of people? I don't own a newspaper, I don't have a TV show or a radio program. The only way a person like me reaches that giant jury that I'm always conceptualizing in my mind is through writing.

Q: I take it you don't do research because it's all right there in front of you every day, but what about plot and story?

A: As far as the process is concerned, I do the reverse of what most people do. I write the entire book in my head, so if you saw me working you would say, "My god, he's writing so fast," when in fact, all I'm doing at that point is transcribing. I'm done when I sit down at the keyboard.

Q: How long might you dwell on a story?

A: The only honest answer is constantly. I'm working on something all the time, every day of my life. I'm never removed from it. It's just a question of extracting what I need to make a particular book. I never try to get it all in—it's impossible. What I need is a theme to drive the book. I'm more of a journalist than I am a writer. If you gave me an assignment and said, here's a million dollars, write a romance, I'd probably have to give you your money back. I only know how to do the one thing. And I don't work like most writers do, anyway. I don't take advances. I've been with the same publisher for 15, 18 years. When I'm done with a book, I give it to the boss and I say, do you want it? He says yes and they publish it. I get a contract when the book's in galleys.

Q: Writing has been a vehicle, a very useable, practical vehicle for you, as opposed to, again, getting back to the word: entertaining.

A: For me, it's been a superb vehicle, beyond my wildest dreams. But if it were not entertaining in some way, I'm not a fool. I understand my career depends on my last book. Nobody gives you bouquets in this business for winning literary awards. You have to move units. If the books were not, at least at some level, perceived as entertaining, they would not have succeeded.

Q: When you were first writing, sending your stuff out, were you worried about being controversial?

A: There was no question of being worried about it. My first unpublished novel was rejected by everybody. That book ended with a deeply disturbed and disaffected young man walking into a high school with a duffel bag full of weapons making an attempt to kill everybody in the place and then killing himself. I wrote that 25 years ago. It's way past controversial. To me, controversial means there's an argument. No offense, but it was only book reviewers saying that. It wasn't cops and it wasn't criminals, it wasn't perpetrators and it wasn't victims, it wasn't whores and it wasn't nuns. It was just book reviewers.

Q: Have there been books that changed your life?

A: When I was a small child, I read Scottsboro Boy by Haywood Patterson and Earl Conrad, books that galvanized me, and I remember to this day, Cell 2455, Death Row by Caryl Chessman, having a profound impact on me. At that age, I read exclusively nonfiction.

Q: What's your opinion of the state of journalism today?

A: There are lots of superb journalists running around, but there's a sloppiness in journalism. Journalists decide what they're going to say and look around for a statistic to support what they're saying. There are right-wing and left-wing journalists. I have problems with both. I don't think journalism should be about bias; it should only be about truth. Anything else should be labeled something else. I wrote a series about this, what happens when journalism dies. If people don't have a place to go for the truth, then hell's out of the bag. There's a lot of piety in political journalism and it doesn't feel truthful to me. I'm a fan of journalism. It's probably the high art, as far as I'm concerned, more than music, sculpture. And when it's done right, it's a tool for change. In fact, to my mind, journalism is the tool for progressive change all over the world. When there isn't a free press and an honest press, there really isn't a chance for a just society, an equitable one. It's no accident that every time there's a revolution, they take over the radio station.

Q: Last words?

A: What I said about writing not being a meritocracy is absolutely true, but it's also true that spectators don't win fights, and the one fighting technique I have never seen fail yet, is to just keep getting up. People shouldn't be discouraged because they can go from everybody saying that they would never be published and all of a sudden, it's all done. You never know. You're just punching a wall, punching a wall, your hands are bloody and broken, and then all of a sudden the wall's done, not from any one punch but from the accumulated weight of all the punches. This is not a business for people who give up easily.

For more information about Andrew Vachss, visit www.andrewvachss.com.