This December Sherlock Holmes find an unlikely home - with purveyors of fine hardboiled fiction, Hard Case Crime. At first it may seem odd to find Holmes and Conan Doyle sitting alongside the pulp masters but not so, says Hard Case Crime's head bruiser, Charles Ardai.
Over to you Charles Ardai
People who know Hard Case Crime as the home of hardboiled and noir crime fiction in the vein of Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and Mickey Spillane might never have expected to see Sherlock Holmes turn up in our pages – but as a lifelong fan of Conan Doyle's great creation, I’ve been eager to get him in there ever since I launched the line five years ago.
Why? Two reasons. First, as a tip of the hat to the great pulp tradition of presenting classic novels behind lurid cover art. Back when paperbacks were new, Mary Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN was published with a bosomy redhead on the cover, George Orwell’s 1984 got a sexy lass in a cleavage-baring jumpsuit, and Bantam’s cover for THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES showed a lady in a skintight dress, tied up with enough rope to rig a schooner. I thought it would be fun to see if we could come up with a cover for a Holmes novel that would be just as lurid, while remaining true to the story (something the old-time publishers didn’t seem to care too much about).
The second reason was even more important, though: I felt that THE VALLEY OF FEAR fit perfectly into our line (Leslie Klinger, the man behind THE NEW ANNOTATED SHERLOCK HOLMES, has called it “the first real hardboiled detective story”) and I very much wanted to expose a new audience to it. Anyone who thinks of the Holmes novels as stiff or staid has for sure never read this one, and the most brutal noir endings of Cain or Cornell Woolrich can’t top VALLEY’s soul-chilling final scene. The book opens with a man having been murdered with a blast of a sawed-off shotgun to the face, for he
aven's sake, and half the story follows an undercover Pinkerton detective in America, infiltrating the sort of corrupt and violent secret society that would give Dan Brown the shivers. But do people realize this when they think about the book? Most don't. They think, "Sherlock Holmes...it must all be gaslights and hansom cabs and muttonchops and Victorian England." They forget that this final Holmes novel was written at the start of World War I, when the world had become a very different place than the 1880s of A STUDY IN SCARLET. (For comparison's sake, just think how different 1974 was from 1947!) I liked the idea of getting readers to take a new look at this most underappreciated of the Holmes novels, and perhaps getting some people to try it who otherwise never would. (Who knows, maybe including some whose first exposure to Holmes will be through the forthcoming movie, which reaches theaters just days after our edition arrives in stores.)
aven's sake, and half the story follows an undercover Pinkerton detective in America, infiltrating the sort of corrupt and violent secret society that would give Dan Brown the shivers. But do people realize this when they think about the book? Most don't. They think, "Sherlock Holmes...it must all be gaslights and hansom cabs and muttonchops and Victorian England." They forget that this final Holmes novel was written at the start of World War I, when the world had become a very different place than the 1880s of A STUDY IN SCARLET. (For comparison's sake, just think how different 1974 was from 1947!) I liked the idea of getting readers to take a new look at this most underappreciated of the Holmes novels, and perhaps getting some people to try it who otherwise never would. (Who knows, maybe including some whose first exposure to Holmes will be through the forthcoming movie, which reaches theaters just days after our edition arrives in stores.)There’s actually a third reason, too: I thought it would be fun to create a one-of-a-kind collectible for any Sherlockian library. While I realized that some die-hard Sherlockians might consider our cover art to be sacrilege (or at least a bit too tawdry for the dignified Conan Doyle), I figured most would probably get into the spirit of the thing and would enjoy having a copy to show off to friends as the most unusual cover in their collection of Holmesiana.
Thanks Charles and bring it on Hard Case Crime - The Archive already owns The Valley of Fear in several editions but the new edition is already on order.
Thanks Charles and bring it on Hard Case Crime - The Archive already owns The Valley of Fear in several editions but the new edition is already on order.
3 comments:
Very nice article.
Never thought of this novel as hardboiled. But it's been a long time since I read it, so it definitely merits another look, this time in the Hard Case edition.
As Conan Doyle himself said, Holmes plays only "a subsidiary part in this story". Nor is it his activities which make the novel "hardboiled". Too, the structure of the book (story within a story) is very much of its own and earlier times rather than of any pulp or paperback era. When I used this great novel to provide some of the basics for my western Blast to Oblivion, these were among the characteristics that had to be adjusted for a modern readership. For a full discussion, you will need to click to www.blackhorsewesterns.com/bhe13
The reaction of the Holmes community on both sides of the Atlantic can be found in "Hoofprints" at the same URL but /bhe14 , and the book is soon to be reissued in large-print by Ulverscroft.
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