The Best of Whatever—Peter Farris

Favorite Books of 2010

I read a lot of great stuff this year...

But I should preface this list with the admission that I haven't read every '10 release I would have liked. In fact, I'm staring at the city skyline of TBR stacks in my office and I can see from here Ron Rash's Burning Bright, Joseph Wambaugh's Hollywood Hills, Hilary Davidson's The Damage Done and a just-published posthumous collection by Barry Hannah: Long, Lost, Happy—four titles that I'm sure belong here based on reputation and reviews alone. Probably fodder for another blog post, right? For the paperback enthusiasts: The Best Fiction Released Last Year That I Didn't Read Until This Year...or something like that.

Anyway, here's some recommendations for what to spend those holiday gift cards on:

JAMES ELLROY – THE HILLIKER CURSE: MY PURSUIT OF WOMEN

A perfect companion to Ellroy's first foray into memoir-land with My Dark Places, The Hilliker Curse is an absolutely fascinating piece of literary psychoanalysis. I couldn't help but feel like a voyeur while reading this, as Ellroy meticulously catalogs his relationships with women in that telegraphic prose that belongs in the Smithsonian. Every obsession, spank session, brood job, perv-out, tryst, toxic relationship, divorce, heartbreak and awkward interaction is all there on the page—the minutiae of Ellroy's sexual history, with his mother's ghost languishing over him through the decades. I'm convinced that Ellroy is a functional sociopath, and if it wasn't for his literary success he'd be on a park bench somewhere, eye-fucking women from afar, rubbing himself through his pants. Thank god we discovered and appreciated his talents while he was still alive. But after reading The Hilliker Curse, I couldn't help but feel bad for Ellroy. Despite the public persona he's cultivated during a bestselling career, underneath was a fragile personality, a man seeking love and sex on his own selfish terms, and a life full of personal disasters to show for it. Certainly not the best place to start if you're curious about James Ellroy, but an amazing peek behind the curtain of a genius.

JOHN RECTOR – THE COLD KISS

I recently got hip to what is technically John Rector's debut novel, although you don't have to read more than a few pages to figure he's got a few (publishable) books hibernating on a hard drive, and another (The Grove) that I'm eager to read. Rector's prose is so economical, so effortless that my first impression was that Raymond Carver had, uh, risen from the grave, watched Fargo and decided to write crime-noir fiction. What I loved about The Cold Kiss was Rector's ability to pile on the bad, a technique I'm a big fan of. As in how much bad can my main characters take? And how many bad (but not stupid) decisions can they make? That makes for great fiction, which The Cold Kiss most certainly is.

PETER RICHMOND – BADASSES: THE LEGEND OF SNAKE, FOO, DR. DEATH, AND JOHN MADDEN’S OAKLAND RAIDERS

The novel that landed me an agent was partially inspired by Peter Gent's North Dallas Forty, and to a larger extent inspired by the Oakland Raiders teams of the 1970's. Although my novel was set in the world of NASCAR, it was the spirit of that renegade franchise that captivated my imagination and influenced the writing without a doubt. Peter Richmond's tale of the NFL's wildest decade, and in particular the most outlaw squad ever to step on a football field, proved to be one of my favorite non-fiction reads of the past decade. Drugs, booze, hookers, pistols, gambling, driving motorcycles through a bar...and that was just training camp. Jack "the Assassin" Tatum, George "the Hit Man" Atkinson, Kenny "the Snake" Stabler, Gene "the Governor" Upshaw, Fred "Freddy" Biletnikoff and John "Tooz" Matuszak. Today's game is a Pop Warner grab-ass by comparison.

TOM FRANKLIN – CROOKED LETTER, CROOKED LETTER

I've been a big fan of Tom Franklin for years now, one of the South's best talents (along with Ron Rash and William Gay) that seem hell bent on carrying the torch lit by Harry Crews, Larry Brown, Barry Hannah and before them Flannery O'Connor, Faulkner, Welty, Erskine Caldwell and Thomas Wolfe. But Crooked Letter works on so many levels: a crime novel at its core, a coming-of-age story full of estrangement and tragedy that could appeal to a mass audience, and a commentary on the lies and misunderstandings that can haunt a life spent in the “country”…all written by a guy firmly rooted in the aforementioned literary tradition. It's a challenge for a marketing department, sure, but all I know is that Tom Franklin can write like a motherfucker. Nobody has captured race relations and rural decay in the 21st Century South quite like Franklin has with this novel, the fringe existence of folks in his Mississippi no different from what you might find in Georgia, South Carolina or Alabama and no less depressing. Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter has heart and soul, an authenticity you can't teach, and that magic that the finest storytellers are able to perform.

DUANE SWIERZCZYNSKI – EXPIRATION DATE

Expiration Date really defies categorization. This is the second novel by Duane Swierczynski that I've read, and a brain-busting treat it is, with dialogue that pops and sizzles and a plot that I can only describe as galloping. His latest is unique in that it refuses to sit still or be defined by genre trappings. It's a thinking-man's thriller, a post-modern mystery, a love letter to his hometown of Philadelphia, a sci-fi noir and ultimately, a story about a man scouring the Microfiche of his shattered family history for closure. Not to simplify what Swierczy pulls off here, but ED really does for astral projection what Inception did for dreams or 12 Monkeys did for time travel...all with an ending that is absolutely knee-buckling. But the highest compliment I can offer to any work of fiction is to say how much I learned by reading it. And I learned a helluva lot about writing by reading Expiration Date.

DAVID J. SCHOW – INTERNECINE

My review from Amazon with a few alterations:

Schow has written the thriller of the year...

But INTERNECINE is not just a thriller. It's a satire, a spy novel, a roid-raging Doc Savage action yarn and a post-modern gun porn masterpiece. INTERNECINE is seven novels working seamlessly at once.

1) GUNS: As in Stephen Hunter would give this novel an enthusiastic double tap. The weapons are exotic, realistic, loud on the page, sinister when holstered, blamming and blaaaawhing every other paragraph and killing EVERYONE. INTERNECINE is righteous literary Peckinpah.

2) LOS ANGELES: INTERNECINE is one of the best novels about L.A. well...ever. Bruce Wagner would smirk with jealousy. Michael Connelly would scratch his goatee in admiration. James Ellroy would shrug his shoulders in arrogant indifference and Raymond Chandler would barf up his liquid lunch in appreciation.

3) SATIRE: This is the post-modern, ironic, meta-transgressive Don Delillo novel Chuck Palahniuk wishes he could write. But Schow is too articulate, too original and far too deft to mimic any voice but the one he's created in INTERNECINE. It is a first person narrative that should be studied in writing seminars.

Believe the hype here, folks. Want to read a thriller with brains? Put down the Patterson and Koontz novels for that flight and let INTERNECINE be your legacy at the crash site.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Peter Farris is a writer from Cobb County, Georgia. His debut novel will be published by Tom Doherty Associates/Forge Books next winter. Find him raving and drooling at the Sentence Salvo

The Best of Whatever—Andrew Nette

When I started making a list of my top ten reads for 2010 I found to my horror I hadn't read as may books compared to previous years. I suppose that's what comes from spending so much time on the manuscript for my own novel, which hopefully will see the light of day in 2011. In no particular order, my top ten reads for 2010 are:

Garry Disher, Wyatt (Text Publishing): Australia's answer to Parker. Wyatt is an old-school heist man increasingly out of sorts in a high tech world. Veteran Australian crime writer Garry Disher wrote six Wyatt novels in the nineties. It was nearly a decade before he would produce a seventh, Wyatt, in 2010. Great writing and a tough, gritty plot. Here's hoping it won't be another ten years before the next one.

Martin Limon (Soho Crime): Jade Lady Burning: I don't know why it took me so long to discover Limon, but now I have I'm a convert. Hard-boiled action on the streets of seventies Seoul. What's not to like.

Megan Abbott, The Song Is You (Pocket Books): The woman who seems to be on everyone's list of best reads for 2010. Probably because she's so bloody good.

Richard Stark, The Handle (University of Chicago Press): I knocked off a few of the Parker novels pre-1997 Parker novels this year. The Handle was the best. Parker is employed by his nemesis the Outfit to knock over a casino on an island in the Gulf of Mexico.

David Whish Wilson, Line of Sight (Penguin Viking): A great tale of corrupt cops and the murder, set in seventies Western Australia (yeah, I know, there's a bit of seventies theme going on). Great stuff, partly based on fact.

Tom Robb Smith, Child 44 (Pocket Books): I love a good piece of historical crime fiction and Robb Smith's tale of a disgraced secret service officer investigating a serial killer in Stalin's Soviet Union, fit the bill perfectly.

William Lindsay Gresham, Nightmare Alley (Rinehart): An oldie but a goodie.

Jame's Ellroy, Blood's a Rover (Century): Not Ellroy's best, but an average book by Ellroy still makes my top 10.

Angela Savage, The Half Child (Text): Full disclosure, Angela is my partner and he book set in Thailand featuring female PI Jayne Keeney is great.

Peter Thompson, Pacific Fury (William Heinemann Australia): A brilliantly written warts and all account of WWII in the Asia Pacific from an Australian perspective (that means there's heaps of detail on what self promoting bastard MacArthur was).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Andrew Nette lived in Southeast Asia for six years in the nineties and was based in Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand, as well as traveling around the wider region. Nette has reviewed film and books for Crime Factory, Friday’s Forgotten Books and Back Alley Noir, the official on-line forum of the US-based Film Noir Foundation. He has also completed a crime novel titled Cambodia Darkness and Light. You can read more of his reviews at Pulp Curry

The Best of Whatever---Benjamin Whitmer

First, I should apologize for how abysmally ignorant I am when it comes crime fiction. All I can say is that thanks to Keith Rawson, Brian Lindenmuth and Jedidiah Ayres, amongst others, I’m learning a little something, so next year’s list is gonna be a hell of a lot better. I’m keeping a notebook of all the book recommendations I’ve gotten, and I’m working through it slowly. Eric Beetner, Craig Clevenger, James Sallis, Jonathon Woods, Megan Abbott, Hilary Davidson, Anthony N. Smith, Daniel Woodrell -- I’m so damned behind I get embarrassed to go out in public. And that’s not even counting the new stuff I’ve yet to read by authors I follow, like Stephen Graham Jones and Gary Phillips.

But, anyway, I know folks have been including other stuff besides books in their lists, but the fact is, excepting my family and friends, I don’t really give a shit about anything else. Gun parts, maybe, but I’m betting an ode to my 1911’s new Cylinder & Slide 4.5 pound trigger pull set wouldn’t enthuse much of anybody besides myself.

So, books, in no particular order (and, yeah, I’m sorry, there are eleven of them -- I couldn’t figure out the one to bump):

Blood’s a Rover by James Ellroy. I’ve liked Ellroy for years, but I thought this one was the big one, his great white whale. It may not the most nuanced depiction of government repression, but it’s sure as hell among the most compelling, and the conspiracy-fueled paranoia puts it among the likes of Hunter S. Thompson and William S. Burroughs.

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano. This book killed me. A movement of young poets, The Visceral Realists, hitting hard against the established literature of their day, and what it cost them. The beauty of refusing to compromise, and the breakdown afterward.

The Chieu Hoi Saloon by Michael Harris. Stephen Graham Jones talked recently in an interview about how some writers write to live, write like each book has got to be the one that can save their life. Like Jones, those are the only books I care about, and this is one of them.

A Glass of Water by Jimmy Santiago Baca. I’ve been a fan of Baca’s poetry for years, and this, his first novel, sure as hell didn’t disappoint. Beautiful and brutal.

Twilight by William Gay. My first William Gay, and now I’m stocking up on everything he’s ever written. Jesus, what a book.

A Better Angel by Chris Adrian. There were moments reading this collection of short stories when I wanted to crawl out of my own skin. And now that I know what he knows about us, about human nature and all that shit, I probably should have.

Poachers by Tom Franklin. I came up with the short story “Poachers” by luck of the draw for a Spinetingler Magazine review, and went after the whole collection by way of context. Not knowing that it would leave me crawling around the floor looking for the other half of my brain.

Lethal Injection by Jim Nisbet. A subtle reflection on death in not-so-subtle -- in all the right ways -- garb. Hardcore, politically-charged, experimental crime fiction, yeah, I’d like a lot more of that.

The Chandler Apartments by Owen Hill. A bisexual, Berkeley, book-buying, poet detective on a murder case. It’s just as funny and violent as you’d hope it would be. A wonderful book.

Late Rain, by Lynn Kostoff. This one snuck up on me. It’s impeccably plotted and paced, sure, but just when you think you’ve got it figured out, all the lights come on in one brilliant passage that makes you have to go back and reread the whole damn thing. Which is, of course, even better than the first time around.

The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schultz. Strange, poetic, dreamlike, “a fabric of nightmares and hashish,” with one of the greatest and most scathing allegories for American commercialism ever put to paper. Not for everyone. Not always for me. But, yeah, amazing.

And now, not to get all weepy, but the one thing I’d put at the top of my list that ain’t fiction is finding this crime fiction community. Being introduced to the great crowd of slouching misfits and killers at Crimefactory, Spinetingler, Temporary Knucksline, Do Some Damage, Crimespree Magazine, The Pulp Primer, Hardboiled Wonderland, and all the other websites, focal points, autonomous zones, and internet dives that I’ve been trolling lately, has been a fucking revelation to me.

So, an end-of-year wish for all of you, from my very favorite crime -- or, at least, adventure -- writer:

“Gulp down your tears and hie aloft to the royal-mast with your hearts; for your friends who have gone before are clearing out the seven-storied heavens, and making refugees of long-pampered Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael, against your coming. Here ye strike but splintered hearts together-- there, ye shall strike unsplinterable glasses!”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Benjamin Whitmer was born in 1972 and raised on back-to-the-land communes and counterculture enclaves ranging from Southern Ohio to Upstate New York. One of his earliest and happiest memories is of standing by the side of a country road with his mother, hitchhiking to parts unknown. Since then, he’s been a factory grunt, a vacuum salesman, a convalescent, a high-school dropout, a semi-truck loader, an activist, a kitchen-table gunsmith, a squatter, a college professor, a dishwasher, a technical writer, and a petty thief.

He’s published fiction and non-fiction in a number of magazines, anthologies, and essay collections. His debut novel is Pike, published by Switchblade (PM Press) He Blogs at Kick Him, Honey

Rawson’s best of Whatever—#8: Savages by Don Winslow

Fuck You

It’s either one of the campiest opening chapters of a novel ever written or one of the most innovative.

Time will tell.

But it sets the tone perfectly for Don Winlow’s masterful novel, Savages.

Savages is the story of Ben and Chon, two high end pot dealers whose personalities are a literal yen and yang—Chon is an enraged ex-navy seal and Ben an unfocused world saving progeny of two wealthy psychologists—who, realistically, have nothing in common other than their expertise at growing high end herb and their unflappable devotion to their slacker (I really could find no other word which more appropriately describes her) shared girlfriend Ophelia, but for one reason or another their partnership works and has made them both very wealthy.

Not long after Ben returns home from one of his ‘humanitarian’ trips to an impoverished 3^rd world nation, Chon shows Ben a video of six decapitated drug dealers. The video is sent by a ruthless Baja drug cartel. They want Ben and Chon to become partners with them and if they don’t…..

Headless.

Neither Ben or Chon want anything to do with the cartel, so instead of partnering with the cartel, they decide to walk away with the vast amount of money they’ve earned and move on with their lives. The cartel’s response to Ben and Chon’s counter offer is to kidnap Ophelia and force them into working for the cartel, or to pay off what the business may gross over its life time.

20 million dollars.

The boys decide to go for the pay off by ripping off the cartel which has taken Ophelia.

The novel’s clipped, ultra fast paced language perfectly captures the new dialect of a generation weaned on the Internet and text messaging. The stylized prose is vastly innovative for an American novelist, bringing to it a staccato rhythm (I don’t think most reviewers have pointed out that certain passages and chapters very much mirror the writing style of Ken Bruen.) which drives the narrative with neck break precision, forcing the reader to turn pages as if they were scrolling through an absorbing website. Although Ben and Chon are the focus of the novel, it is Winslow’s supporting cast which, for me, drive the novel. Ophelia is vacuous, an almost non-entity who is looking for someone—anyone—to provide some sort of direction in her life, and yet she is the force who drives Chon and Ben. The head of the Baja cartel, Elena, has the feel of someone who has had the violent legacy of her family laid upon her shoulders and she has no choice but soldier on despite her lack of desire. And Elena’s U.S. enforcer, Miguel Arroyo aka Lado—a character which Winslow could’ve allowed to easily slip into parody—in every way mirrors the American capitalism at its most perverted.

Winslow has been a long time favorite (The Power of the Dog is absolutely classic and in my opinion ranks as one of the all time great modern crime novels alongside Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential and Bruen’s the Guards) and with Savages he’s cemented himself not only as great crime writer, but as a great contemporary novelist, and out of all the fantastic crime novels I’ve read this year, it is the one which I have pressed into the hands of casual readers of crime fiction the most.