hard case crime - creator interview.

Charles Ardai and business partner Max Phillips, were dismayed at the lack of slim pacey paperbacks in the shops - the kinds of book they picked up on the second hand stalls and both shared a deep love for, the pulps from writers like Mickey Spillane and Richard Stark. And so they decided to start up their own publishing imprint which would print original works written in the style of the pulps and classic long out of print titles.

Given the modern day market, where huge building brick like tomes are in vogue and slim, cheap, paperbacks are yesterday's product this must have seemed a risky, maybe even insane, business idea.

"Risky commercially, perhaps -- but commercial success was never our main concern. I mean, of course we wanted the line to succeed and prosper. Who wouldn't? But first we wanted it to be good, and to be good at what we wanted it to be good at. We didn't start by asking the question "How can we make some money publishing books?" and come up with the answer "Publishing old-fashioned crime novels might work"; we started by asking the question "Wouldn't it be great if someone started publishing old-fashioned crime novels again?" And you know what? If we'd published a handful and it had turned out that there was no market for them, we'd have stopped and been satisfied with the handful we'd done, content to have done something we cared about and done it well. Not every business venture has to succeed -- indeed, only a very small percentage ever do. But what happened instead was that the first handful of books did very well. They didn't sell at (or anywhere near) best-seller levels, but they sold well enough; and in terms of critical esteem and attention, they soared. People loved them. Newspapers and magazines raved about them. Every single original novel we published in our first year was nominated for either the Shamus Award, the Edgar Award, or both -- and we won one of each. So...we published another handful. And those did well, too, although not quite as well in terms of sales, the novelty having worn off a little. At which point we were lucky enough to get to publish a new novel by Stephen King, his first since announcing what he'd described as his retirement from writing fiction. And that one did sell at best-seller levels -- we put out more than one million copies. Nothing we've done since has been comparable in terms of commercial success, but the line has survived and we're very proud of it. Did we know when we started that it would still be around five years later? That we'd wind up publishing not a handful of books but fifty, sixty, more? No. What we knew was that we'd be publishing books we loved, and we hoped at least some other people might like them too. That was enough."

The passion seemed to pay off and far from the originally hopes for half a dozen titles the imprint recently published their 50th title - Fifty to One written by Ardai himself and something of a departure for the imprint - it's still hardboiled crime but a comedy also with each chapter named after an hard case title and in sequence too, with the story cleverly invented around these titles.

Not an easy task but then Charles Ardai was up to it having already published hardboiled fiction under his pen-name, Richard Aleas. And far from mere vanity projects these books, published by Hard Case Crime, have gained massive critical and fan approval. The detective John Blake, named after the romantic poet, is the kind of noble everyman character Chandler would have approved of.

Hard Case crime continues to be a success but if the company folded tomorrow, not that this is likely given the current crop of excellent titles, then the name Hard Case Crime is secured in the history of pulp fiction. It'll be mentioned alongside such pulp pushers as Gold Medal and popular library.

"I like to think that we have reminded people about certain types of storytelling, and ways of presenting books visually, that had largely been forgotten. Book covers had become so boring -- large type, minimal illustration, nothing like the gorgeous, sexy painted covers of the early days of paperbacks. And books had become so thick -- 350 pages, 400 pages, 500. Where were the lean stories of the 1950s, the ones that hooked you on page one with a dead body or a man on the run or a naked woman getting out of the shower (or all three) and then hauled you bodily through the rest of the plot in five- or six-page chunks, ending finally with a breathless, heart-stopping finale on page 176 or 192 (or, sometimes, 144 or 128)? Where were the covers that made you respond with almost Pavlovian intensity, with a quickening of your pulse and a stirring in your groin? Sure, some of them were ridiculous -- some were even offensive -- but tell the truth: could you stop yourself from peeking at them? Could you walk away if you had coins enough in your pocket to buy them? These were books. These were vehicles for popular entertainment every bit as compelling and exciting as today the latest hot videogame or TV show or movie is. They sold more than a hundred thousand copies per book, not sometimes, not once in a while, but every single time -- every time, every one, over and over again, month in and month out, for two decades. This was the stuff the masses consumed for pleasure. That's why the format grew to be known as the 'mass-market' paperback. This was how ordinary Joes got their first exposure to literature -- to Shakespeare and Mary Shelley, to Poe, to Orwell, to Pearl Buck and James Hilton and William Faulkner. And it was how they got their weekly diet of mayhem and titillation, of action and suspense, of sexy repartee and comic mischance. They had radio, they had film, eventually they had television, but through it all they also read books, and the reason they read books -- one of the reasons -- was that the books were readable, intensely, irresistibly so.

I like to think maybe more people remember this tradition and appreciate just how rich a tradition it was because of our efforts to revive it. I like to think we haven't only been preaching to the choir -- that we've led at least some people who'd otherwise never have tried a book like this to give one a shot. And I hope we've done something to prevent some awfully good writers -- not geniuses but journeymen of exceptional skill and passion, with so much to offer readers -- from being utterly forgotten."


Mission accomplished then - but given the current financial situation how healthy does he see the book trade remaining over the coming months?


"Not very. When the chief executive of Barnes & Noble announces in advance of the Christmas season that the season will be "horrible," the worst in his entire career as a bookseller; when major publishers conduct layoffs and freeze acquisitions, however briefly; when bookstores go out of business left and right...you know you're in serious trouble. Make no mistake: The book business is in serious trouble. It's never been much of a business in economic terms -- if you wanted to make good money, you'd be better off trading stocks or selling widgets or laying bricks. So when there's a downturn in the publishing business it's not a turn from ludicrously profitable to slightly less so; it's a turn from lousy to can't survive. I wouldn't be surprised to see some publishers go under and others consolidate. No guarantee that we'll still be around a year or two from now. But you can't worry about that. You just have to keep plugging along, putting out the best books you can, as long as you can."

Hard Case Crime then has succeeded where others have failed so what advise would Charles give to prospective hardboiled scribblers out there?

"

Well, write a good book. That's number one, and you'd be surprised (or maybe you wouldn't) how many people fail to follow that simple piece of advice. Of course, it's not their fault -- writing a good book isn't easy and most people just can't do it. Desire is not the same thing as talent, enthusiasm isn't always matched by ability, and there are more people in the world who can put pen to paper than there are writers. So my second piece of advice to writers is the old Socratic saw, Know Thyself. I get submissions from people who think they've written THE MALTESE FALCON, if not the Bible, and it's just obviously unpublishable, to such an extreme extent that no objective reader could possibly reach a different conclusion. Know thyself. Look at what you're writing, compare it to the books you enjoy reading, and ask whether it's comparable. If you can't tell, ask a friend to do this comparison, one who's willing to be honest with you. And if the answer is no, if your writing isn't at a comparable level of quality, don't submit it to a publisher. Sit down and write something else, something better. And until your work is at that level, keep working at your craft. You don't open a French restaurant if the best meal you can cook is some inedible caricature of coq au vin; don't bring the equivalent in novel terms to a publisher.

What if you have written a good book? Well, the next hurdle if to figure out whether it's the particular sort of good book we publish. Does your book have ghosts in it? Vampires? The undead? Well, we don't publish supernatural or fantasy novels, so we'd be the wrong publisher to send it to. Sometimes it's subtler: We don't publish a lot of comedies, especially not broad ones or ones that spoof the genre. We very rarely publish political novels. We tend to go for something more classically hardboiled or noir rather than the more modern sort of Hollywood-inflected 'thriller' about clever-monickered serial killers playing cat-and-mouse games with the police. How can you find out what sort of book we publish? It's simple: Read our books. If you don't want to pony up the seven or eight bucks apiece it would cost to buy them, you can find sample chapters from all of them for free on our Web site, www.hardcasecrime.com. Read what we publish, learn what we like -- and then submit a book to us if yours is similar. And good. It's got to be good.

And even then, don't be surprised -- or discouraged -- if we say no. We get more than 1,000 submissions per year and can only buy 4 or 5 original novels. That means we have to say no to more than 99% of the books we see, including some that are very good. Even if yours is good, the odds are less than 1 in 10 that we'll buy it. But that doesn't mean some other publisher won't, and they might even pay you more for it than we could. (Almost anyone can pay more than we can.)"

The Hard Case Crime series never fails to delight - it wopuld be nice if some other publishers would come along and do a similar thing for other pulp genres - westerns, horror etc. Does Charles ever see Hard Case doing this?

"

Well, we are branching out into pulp adventure fiction next year: In May we'll publish HUNT AT THE WELL OF ETERNITY, the first in a series of novels about a two-fisted modern-day adventurer named Gabriel Hunt, and additional volumes will follow every few months after that. The books will be published under Gabriel Hunt's name, but will actually be written by some old Hard Case Crime hands (me, David J. Schow, Christa Faust) as well as some friends of the family (James Reasoner, Nick Kaufmann, Raymond Benson). The books are intended to harken back to the style of H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs and Sax Rohmer, or Doc Savage and The Avenger, or Indiana Jones. They're a ton of fun to write and edit, and again, it's a type of book you just don't see being published anymore -- inexplicably so, when you consider just how popular the genre is at the movies.

Will we ever experiment with other genres? It's hard to say. There are only so many hours in the day, and Hard Case Crime has zero full-time employees -- it's just me, working on it part-time, and a handful of freelancers working as hard as they possibly can. But who knows? If we find another genre we have a real passion for, we might give it a try.

Richard's own writing is very much in the hardboiled school - I wonder who his influences were in the first place as relating to his own output? I meantion that I very much enjoyed his debut novel, Little Girl Lost.

"

Thanks -- I'm glad you liked it. When I reread it, of course, I spot all the flaws: I should have done this, I should have done that. But it was a first novel. It had all of a first novel's flaws, but also, I hope, a first novel's virtues. I am very pleased it was so well received and that readers continue to discover and enjoy it. (The sequel, SONGS OF INNOCENCE, is a better book, but also darker; I could imagine some readers enjoying the first one more.)

Influences? Lawrence Block, definitely: I've read every book the man wrote and I treasure them; he writes about pain and corruption, and about New York City, in ways that really stay with you, and I've tried to emulate that. Also Ross Macdonald, who was the master of the 'little girl lost' story, where the detective goes digging to find out the sad history behind some young woman's tragic end. One reviewer compared my book to Fredric Brown's Ed and Am Hunter novels, and I admit I do love the first of those, THE FABULOUS CLIPJOINT. I suppose there's a little of Chandler in there -- no one can write about a weary, disillusioned private eye walking the mean streets without Chandler's shade rearing up. Those are some influences. But there's also some Thomas Hardy in there, a bit of Bernard Malamud, a bit of Paul Auster. Having read a lot of authors, I'm bound to have been influenced by a lot."

So what have Hard Case got lined up for 2009?

"We just put out a long-lost novel by Lawrence Block -- KILLING CASTRO -- which has never before appeared under his real name, and in fact hasn't appeared in any form for nearly half a century. Even die-hard fans of Block didn't know about this novel, so it's a real find. Next month will be an even bigger one: a never-before-published crime novel called THE DEAD MAN'S BROTHER by the acclaimed science fiction writer Roger Zelazny, who wrote it in 1971 but never published it; after his death, it was found by his son, who is a fan of our books, and he brought it to our attention. It's an excellent, excellent book, a real buried treasure.

After that we have Donald Westlake's Edgar-nominated first novel, appearing for the first time ever under the title he originally meant for it to have: THE CUTIE. Then a novel called HOUSE DICK, about skullduggery in a Washington, D.C. hotel, penned by convicted Watergate mastermind E. Howard Hunt. The following month is Peter Blauner's outstanding and underappreciated Atlantic City mob/boxing novel, CASINO MOON, featuring a truly stunning cover by a painter who is himself a former Golden Gloves boxer, Ricky Mujica. Next comes Jason Starr's FAKE I.D., which has never been published in America (there were some European editions).

Then we have PASSPORT TO PERIL, a tale of post-WWII intrigue by Robert B. Parker -- but not the Robert B. Parker who writes the Spenser books. This Robert B. Parker died in 1955 after a career as a war correspondent and (clandestinely) as an agent for the OSS, and here he's writing about an American on the run from Germans and Russians in postwar Budapest.

August brings us back to our roots, with a revival of the work of the old-time pulp writer Peter Rabe -- his memorable first novel, STOP THIS MAN!, about a loser who steals a radioactive bar of gold and then has to deal with the consequences. September is a brand new novel by Russell Atwood, who won praise for his first novel, EAST OF A, ten years ago. It's taken him this wrong to write the second adventure of his detective, LOSERS LIVE LONGER, but it was worth the wait. Our October title will be a never-before-published crime novel called HONEY IN HIS MOUTH by Lester Dent, the creator of pulp hero Doc Savage. November will be the latest installment in Max Allan Collins' very popular 'Quarry' series about a ruthless hitman, QUARRY IN THE MIDDLE. (It's a sequel to THE LAST QUARRY and THE FIRST QUARRY.) And December will feature two books: a new novel set in the world of burlesque and striptease by an author who is himself the head of a celebrated modern burlesque troupe (and featuring two gorgeous members of the troupe modeling for the cover), plus a very special reprint of what I think is one of the greatest hardboiled crime novels of all time...but is rarely, if ever, recognized as such. We're not giving the surprise away yet, but I think people will get a real kick out of it when they see it."

No amount of prodding will loosen Richard's lips but the thought is enticing. After all, now that Hard Case has fifty plus titles under it's belt he must know the business. For instance, I ask him, if the reprints sell more than the original stuff.

"Our bestselling author is Stephen King, hands down; that shouldn't surprise anyone. After King, our bestsellers include folks like Lawrence Block and Ed McBain and Donald Westlake -- again, this shouldn't surprise anyone. But it's not necessarily the case that reprints are more popular for us than originals. It's true that our books by Block and Westlake are reprints -- but I have no doubt that if one of those men wrote an original for us it would sell just as well, if not better. And of course the King book was an original. And some of our other originals have done well -- Mickey Spillane's DEAD STREET, for instance. The issue is not so much whether a book is an original or a reprint, it's how well known the author is. Or more precisely how much interest the public has in a given book, which is highly correlated with how well known the author is, but once in a while a less-well-known author commands the public's attention and his or her book does very nicely for us. This happened with my own second novel, SONGS OF INNOCENCE, for instance, after the Washington Post called it "an instant classic" and NPR aired a half-hour interview with me about it. My name is not well known -- certainly my pseudonym isn't. But the book did well because lots of people heard about it and were made curious enough to buy it. Absent that sort of publicity surge, though, the pre-existing interest people have in the work of their favorite authors is the best predictor of good sales. Reprints by authors from the pulp days whom no one remembers will do less well than new novels by popular writers like Max Allan Collins or Ken Bruen and Jason Starr."

So there we have it HARD CASE CRIME
Publishing the book the way they used to.
No shit - told with the velocity of a spinning bullet.


Thanks to Charles Ardai for answering my questions over the festive period. Here's to a particularly hard case filled 2009.