The best books and moments of 2015, featuring James Ellroy not punching me in the face.

For me, the most memorable literary moment of 2015 happened outside a movie theater.

I'd bought my dad and I front row tickets to see James Ellroy introduce the movie version of L.A. Confidential at the Alamo Drafthouse. I brought along my personal copy of the legendary crime novel, on the off-chance Ellroy decided to do a signing. And on my way to Littleton, I stopped by Tattered Cover and purchased one of my own books because, well, I don't know why. But I did.

Ellroy gets onstage and tells the crowd that the movie we're about to see is simplistic and badly acted, and it succeeds only because it's "a model of filmic proficiency" and because of the genius of the source material. He admonishes us for sacrificing a night of our "sex lives and drug habits" to sit through it. He then walks offstage, leaving us to our film.

Afterwards Ellroy comes back onstage and does a long and generous Q&A. To my dismay, the audience's questions focus not on his books, but on his opinions of various TV shows. Anyway, the Q&A concludes and - gasp! - Ellroy says he'll sign books in the lobby.

I get in line, trying to figure out what I'll say to one of the greatest novelists ever. Minutes blur by. I reach the table. He signs my copy of L.A Confidential. I take a deep breath and blurt, "I know you don't need writers pushing their books at you, but I wrote this and I want you to have it." I thrust Sin Walks Into the Desert into James Ellroy's hands, fully expecting him to beat me to death with it.

He looks at my book, looks at me, and says something like, "Yeah, OK."

Success! I was alive! I start to retreat. When all of a sudden my dad jumps in front of me and tells James Fucking Ellroy, "It's such a good book, you really have to read it."

Time stops. My jaw hits the floor. Ellroy looks at my dad. My dad doubles down, literally says, "I'm his dad, so I know it's a great book."

I'm too old to be embarrassed by my parents, high school-style. But I just stand there, unable to move. Finally James Ellroy looks at me, sort-of smiles, and says, "You better take good care of this one. He's a good man."

I say something like, "Yes sir," or "You bet," grab my dad and shuffle towards the door.

End scene.

Meeting James Ellroy was great. He's everything you hope and fear. But what really made the night special was being there with the best man I know and the best friend I have. My dad.

My year-in-books did have a few highlights that actually involved reading. With the exception of a single Louis Lamour novel I picked up late one night at a roadside jerky stand somewhere between New Orleans and Texas, I didn't venture outside the crime genre. Here are some of the books that stood out:

Best Impossible Crime Book: Without a doubt, the dizzying, grisly 1981 novel, The Tokyo Zodiac Murders. The book opens with a man murdered in a locked room. Beside him, police find a long letter detailing his plan to chop up his daughters and use their parts to construct the perfect woman. Days after his death, the murders are carried out. The Tokyo Zodiac Murders requires the reader to uncover clues within painstaking explanations of alchemy, astrology and geographic data. But the big reveal, when it comes, is brilliant.

Book That Most Made Me Want To Take A Shower: At The End of a Dull Day's protagonist is a sociopath. He murders. He manipulates. He desperately defends the money he thinks he's earned and the status he thinks he deserves. I think less of myself for having finished this book. And loving it made me feel downright filthy.

Best Climax: I wrote pretty extensively how deeply the short stories in Zane Lovitt's debut collection, The Midnight Promise, affected me. Each story builds on the last, getting grimmer and grittier as a self-loathing private eye tries to fulfill his self-centered death wish. The book ends as he hits rock bottom, and that final story haunted me for a long time.

Best Mayhem, Best Title & Most Alcohol Consumed: Frank Sinatra In A Blender wins 2015's Triple Crown. The damn thing is just chaos incarnate. Crazy cool characters, bullets flying, and everyone is full-scale fall-down loaded the entire time.

Best Repurposing of the English Language: Donnybrook! I already wrote a post about how enamored I was with the pure audaciousness of this novel. You can check out my reasoning here.

I'd like to end this post with a moment of silence for William McIlvanney, who passed away this year. McIlvanney's greatest hero was Laidlaw, a cop clinging desperately to the idea that even the most wretched lives matter. In the final lines of The Papers of Tony Veitch, Laidlaw pulls an elderly woman from a cab queue to dance in the rain to the tuneless noises of a homeless man's harmonica. It's a defiant and wonderful scene, defining what makes the crime genre special. Life must have meaning, if detectives are willing to work so hard to uncover the facts that surround its miserable end.

The authors I keep giving money to

It's easy to give a mediocre book a three or four star rating and move on. I do it all the time. I don't want to tank anybody's average. A truer test of how much I like an author is whether I repeatedly trade cash for his or her books. In my library of paperback crime, here are the writers who have the most shelf space:

Six books: James Ellroy, Elmore Leonard, Raymond Chandler

I can't imagine I'd get much argument if I said these three were the holy trinity of American crime.

Five books: George Pelecanos, Massimo Carlotto

I'm not sure quite why I keep buying Massimo Carlotto. One of his protagonists is disgusting and the other is dull. But his matter-of-fact tales of perversion, corruption and treachery hooked me so hard I once read three of his books back-to-back-to-back.

Four books: Duane Swierczynski, Sjowall & Walloo, Gene Kerrigan

I'd buy more Gene Kerrigan books if he'd write more! The Rage is a breathtakingly intimate study of low-level gangster violence. And the Midnight Choir is epic story-weaving on the level of The Wire, with the most devastating ending of any book I've ever read.

Three books: Joe R. Lansdale, George V. Higgins, Richard Stark, Dennis Lehane, Paul Auster

I would almost certainly have more Dennis Lehane books if they hadn't all been made into movies. He's a good writer. I just know how most of his stories are going to end.

[Ed. - For more ideas on what to read, check on my Amazon list 11 Crime Writing Cornerstones.]

"The light at the end of the tunnel is just the world on fire"

I was going to link to this article on Grantland because this thought about True Detective: Season Two...

Their union was really just another cosmic prank. They were all doomed, and in the end, the world — the desert, the forest, the ocean, the dark places underground — swallowed them back up. It was done with them, if it ever noticed them at all.

...sort of reminded me of this thought about American Tabloid:

They're three shady characters who think they can use violence, coercion and lies to manipulate the mafia, the CIA, the President, Cuba and the media itself. But at the end, Pete Bondurant, Ward Littell, and Kemper Boyd find they aren't nearly as powerful or as clever as they'd believed.

And given I'd already noted the obvious debt TD:S2 owes to James Ellroy, I found the parallels interesting. But then I read this sentence:

The light at the end of the tunnel is just the world on fire.

And I thought, that's why I'm linking to this article on Grantland. That sentence. That's enough.

Casting American Tabloid

[Ed. - I suppose there might be spoilers in here for the novel American Tabloid by James Ellroy. If you haven't read it, you might want to turn off your computer and punch yourself in the face.]

American Tabloid is about the bad men who write history. Its supporting cast? JFK, Howard Hughes, J. Edgar Hoover and Jimmy Hoffa. Its stars? Three shady characters who think they can use violence, coercion and lies to manipulate the mafia, the CIA, the President, Cuba and the media itself. But at the end, Pete Bondurant, Ward Littell, and Kemper Boyd find they aren't nearly as powerful or as clever as they'd believed.

It's a book that begs for a movie or a miniseries. But like Blood Meridian and Winter's Tale, it may be unfilmable. (Yeah, I know they made Winter's Tale into a movie. Did you f'ing see it?) Partially, that's because of its sprawling plot. And partially it's because if you mess up the casting, even a bit, the whole thing would be doomed.

But the Internet has made a game of it. And I want to play.

Boyd's the easiest. Smooth, cool and charismatic, he's also capable of extreme violence. He's narcissistic. He has an unhealthy obsession with JFK. Oh, and he's handsome enough to make women weep. Sounds like a lot of Hollywood. But Christian Bale showed he can do shallow in American Psycho, violence in The Dark Knight, and sleaze in American Hustle. Matthew McConaughey is an equally brilliant and obvious pick, with the added bonus of having Boyd's Southern accent.

Too easy. Let's move on.

Littell is trickier. At the beginning of the book, he's idealistic and intelligent. But by the end, the world has dragged him into its gutters. And while he's a runt compared to the other two guys, he's no wallflower. He's bold enough to burgle a crime boss's home and cold enough to commit murder. Dream pick? Edward Norton. Runner up? Aidan Gillen. (No one who's seen The Wire is going to disagree with me.)

Finding a Pete Bondurant is just a nightmare. The man's a wrecking ball, a shakedown artist, a brutal killer whose sheer size terrifies everyone around him. There just aren't a lot of huge actors in Hollywood who can, you know, act. Vince Vaughn is an intriguing choice; we'll know soon enough if he has enough darkness inside him to pull it off. Alexander Skarsgard is big and scary, but he's too pretty to be Bondurant. I know this'll be controversial, but I think Vin Diesel might be able to do it.

The wildcard? Timothy Olyphant could play any of the roles. The guy makes everything he's in better.

But the best choice is to be patient and let a couple younger actors age up into the roles. How about Ryan Gosling as Boyd, Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Littell, and Tom Hardy as Bondurant? Yes, we'd have to wait until they all get into their 40s, but that cast would be worth it.

So there it is. Anybody got any other ideas?