Ruminating In My Pants #7: Best Books of 2008

Okay so I have thought long and hard (ha!) about this and have finally come up with my own little categories for the best books of twenty-aught-eight. Yeah, I know: I'm fucking awesome, but I pale in comparison to these books, these tomes of blood, guts, and - above all - massive fucking cojones.

Enjoy, discuss and fucking COWER in fear at the powerful prose that is about to singe your fucking eyebrows and smooth out your wrinkly, demented brains!

Best New COMIC series: SCALPED by Jason Aaron, R.M. Guera

There ain't much going on in crime comics at the moment (hopefully that will change with Vertigo's Crime Line in 2009) but what's there is fucking CHOICE. Scalped is not just the best thing going in comics but the best thing in crime PERIOD. This stuff is raw and completely uncompromised. Every character gets their time to shine and none of their storylines disappoint at all. If this were even half-way properly adapted into a television show it would hold its own with Deadwood, The Sopranos, and The Wire without a fucking doubt.

Best New STANDALONE Crime Novel: Savage Night by Allan Guthrie

Yeah, my love of Guthrie peppers every line of this little blog so this is probably no surprise - shit, I even predicted this would win back when I first reviewed it - but god damn this book kicked my ass. Guthrie is leading the pack as far as going all the way, taking the genre farther than we ever thought possible. Savage Night is extremely violent, agonizingly suspenseful, pathetically tragic, and absolutely hilarious. It seems the only way he could shock me next go around would be to write a sunny little book about an old lady and her crime solving cats. That said, he'll probably prove me dead-fucking-wrong.

Best New SERIES Crime Novel: Toros & Torsos by Craig McDonald

The Hector Lassiter novels are so ambitious, so meticulously researched, so ingenious that just about anybody who enjoys good fiction can appreciate them. Thankfully for hard-ass pulp fans like me, McDonald also fucking BRINGS IT with the noir goodies as well. For all its scope and history, Toros & Torsos never forgets to first and foremost entertain sick fucks like the Nerd with it's badass lead character, its shocking violence and its twisted, dread-filled plot. This guy covers all the bases in an unforced, refreshing, beautiful way. Hector Lassiter LIVES!

Best NEWLY DISCOVERED Crime Novel: Black Friday by David Goodis

It is always exciting to pick up an old gold standard of the genre and find that yeah, it actually IS a fucking gold fucking standard! The only thing about Black Friday that makes it stick out amongst the great novels of the present is an overall lack of cell phones and the word "fuck," otherwise this shit is as badass as a crime junkie could ask for. It hums along at a breakneck speed with a tight plot and gives you tons of fantastic, darkly shaded characters along the way. Kudos to Serpent's Tail for making more of Goodis's shit available. Keep that shit up!

So there you have it, my meaningless-yet-apparently-necessary list of the best crime novels I read in 2008. Naturally, if you've even glanced at this site before you can tell that I loved the shit out of a ton of other novels last year, but these are the greatest of the great, if such a distinction is possible. I didn't bother with honorable mentions or any of that shit because the Nerd's time is precious...which is why he has a rinky-dink blog...

CATCHING UP #7: BLACK FRIDAY by David Goodis

What continues to amaze me about Goodis is that he gets away with so much despite the highly censored times he was writing in. In Black Friday not only is the violence as nasty as anything you could read today, but the sexual discussion within (impotency, the female sex drive, closing your eyes and making a go of fucking someone who disgusts you - all discussed at great length) is close to what you'd find in a Philip Roth novel. Aside from an overall lack of the word "fuck," Black Friday almost reads like it was written in the present.

The extremely tight plot follows Hart, a desperate man stranded in Philadelphia with not even a buck to his name and no winter jacket. He rips off an overcoat from a retail store and is pursued by the police around town for a while before he stumbles across a man dying in the street. The man offers him eleven grand in thousand dollar bills and Hart takes it, only to then be pursued by the dying man's killers.

A scuffle ensues and Hart ends up killing one the men and earning the respect of the other, Charley. Charley is apparently the head of a gang, a gang that once included the man Hart took the money from before said man betrayed the gang. Naturally, the gang also included the man who Hart killed, Paul, whose sister Myrna is none too happy to see Hart accepted with open arms by Charley after Hart gives the eleven grand back to its rightful owners. The gang now consists of Charley, Mattone, Riccio, Myrna, Hart and Frieda, all of whom live under the same roof. Charley only allows Hart to join them on their next job - a mansion robbery that will go down on Friday the thirteenth (hence the title) - after Hart explains that he is on the lam since murdering his brother back in New Orleans for control of the family fortune. It is Charley's belief that to kill for practical reasons like money makes you a professional, and he'll have nothing but pros in his outfit.

Thing is, Hart's reasons for offing his brother are a little more complicated than that...

This leads to a sort of hyper-intense play of sorts, with most of the action taking place within the gang's hideout. Mattone is an ex-boxer moron whose insecurity makes him challenge Hart at every turn. Myrna seethes with hate for Hart since he killed her brother. Frieda is sexually attracted to him but belongs to Charley who is impotent. She also can tell that Hart isn't a professional. Hart knows that Charley will kill him if he doubts Hart's professionalism in any way. All of this keeps the tension up around eleven.

Then, of course, there's the ill-fated Black Friday heist on the near horizon.

In other words, Black Friday never lets up. It has that perfect mix that we occasionally find in crime fiction where the plot is both extremely simple and agonizingly complicated at the same time. Every character is clearly defined and made vivid in the imagination. The dialogue is both witty and cleverly profound, like it's out of a Ben Hecht-Howard Hawks screenplay.

In other words, it's pure Goodis. Also, if you read the Serpent's Tail edition of the novel, you get a bunch of Goodis short stories as well, most of which kick some solid ass as well.

As I close this review, let me say that things have been rather black in the literary world as of late. We've lost Fletch creator Gregory McDonald, literary wunderkind David Foster Wallace, and now Sughrue/Milo creator James Crumley. Crumley's Bordersnakes was a major part of my noir self-education when I was in junior high, a book that sparked and warped my fragile imagination, and for that I'll never forgive or forget him. May Mr. Crumley, Mr. McDonald, and Mr. Wallace all rest in peace.