Charles Ardai (left: photo by Mary Reagan) and Max Phillips have brought about a revolution in crime fiction. In creating the publishing vehicle HARD CASE CRIME, they’ve brought back the pulp feel to crime novels. The books, adorned with wonderfully painted covers—mostly of scantily clad women—have caught the eye of nearly everyone in the crime fiction community. Stephen King, Ken Bruen, and Jason Starr have all aligned their names with the group, and its popularity has been rapidly climbing. I talked to Charles about his adventure into the publishing industry.
Dave White: Tell us about Hard Case Crime and how you started it.
Charles Ardai: Max Phillips and I were both readers and fans of hardboiled crime novels, in particular the sort of hardboiled crime novels published in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s by imprints such as Gold Medal, Popular Library, and Pocket Books: lean, gripping stories, told with (and often written at) ferocious velocity, bound behind lusciously painted covers, printed in a size you could cram in your back pocket, and sold for two bits in a drugstore rack. Nobody was publishing books like that any more, and we regretted it both as readers and as writers: As readers it meant we had to haunt yard sales and Internet auctions to get our crime fiction fix, and as writers, well, we’d just been born too late to be Gold Medal authors working cheek-by-jowl with guys like Day Keene, Charles Williams, David Goodis, and Gil Brewer (not to mention young up-and-coming types like Lawrence Block, Donald Westlake, and Elmore Leonard). We wanted new books to read that offered the same sort of pleasures as the old ones.
Cut to two weeks later. Most ideas cooked up in a sake-soaked brain vanish as the alcohol evaporates, but here we were, Max and I, in the Blue Bar of the Algonquin Hotel, and we’d each brought something to show the other. He’d dummied up some sample covers, showing what a revival of the old pulp paperback style might look like – and because he’s a graphic design genius, they were stunning. But it went further than that. Because we didn’t actually own the rights to any books at the time, Max had made up a fictitious title ("FADE TO BLONDE") by a fictitious author ("Forrest DeVoe Jr.") and given it a fictitious tagline in the grand pulp style ("She Was a Little Taste of Heaven – And a One-Way Ticket to Hell!").
Meanwhile, I’d taken on the editorial challenge and put together a list of great pulp novels that had been out of print for decades and very much deserved to be revived, plus a list of current authors who could be counted on to write new work in the classic vein.
Was it worth three years of our lives? The other day, I walked into the big Barnes & Noble on Fifth Avenue and saw six Hard Case Crime books staring out at me from the "new releases" tower at the front of the store, with all the visual impact books like this must have had in the old days.
Worth it? Oh, yeah.
DW: What appeals to you about noir and hard boiled stories?
CA: I've been a mystery reader all my life, starting with all the usual things kids read: Sherlock Holmes, the Hardy Boys, the Three Investigators. But somewhere along the way, I became a little more cynical and my tastes shifted toward darker material, and when I discovered that there were writers who not only shared my world view but explored it in all its sinister, grim, and shocking glory, it was a revelation. About the time I was discovering that the world can be a twisted and corrupt and uncaring place, where people in positions of authority often don't have your best interests at heart and if you want to see justice done you may have no choice but to do it yourself, I discovered that people like Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain and Cornell Woolrich had explored all these ideas with an eloquence that verged on poetry. (Of course, I also discovered that people like Robert Browning and Thomas Hardy has explored the same ideas literally in poetry, and that led me to spend my college years studying poetry extensively -- but that's another story. Though if I hadn't, who knows if I'd have titled my first detective novel "LITTLE GIRL LOST" and named the detective Mr. Blake?) The bottom line is that noir and hardboiled crime fiction spoke to something in me, resonated on some private frequency that made me say, "Yes. There are truths about the world that can best be told in this language, in this vocabulary."
DW: Is there a story behind getting Stephen King to write you a book?
CA: Yes. We set out to publish new work by up-and-coming writers and to reprint lost work by writers who may have been well-known once but today are mostly forgotten -- people like Day Keene and Wade Miller and Charles Williams and even Earle Stanley Gardner. I mean, back in his day, Gardner was the best-selling author of all time, but today I'd bet few people you stopped on the street could tell you who he was. (Though they may still recognize the name "Perry Mason.") The one thing all these authors, old and new, have in common -- other than having written terrific books we wanted to publish -- is that readers wouldn't recognize their names. And that would be a significant challenge at retail.
To try to address this, it occurred to us that it would be very helpful if we could get an author who is currently well known and whose work is widely loved to say a few words in support of our books and our authors. And Stephen King was an obvious choice -- not only is he one of the world's most popular and widely read authors, but he's made it clear over the years that he has the same passion for classic crime fiction that we do. For heaven's sake, he even named the evil pseudonym in THE DARK HALF "George Stark" after Donald Westlake's pseudonym Richard Stark!
So I wrote to Stephen King, sending him some samples of our books and asking whether he might consider writing us a blurb that we could feature on our books. I didn't know him -- it was really just a shot in the dark. But a few months later he got back in touch with us. What he said was that he would not feel comfortable writing us a blurb, because what he really wanted to do was write us a book instead.
Needless to say, we were floored. And when, a few months after that, the manuscript for THE COLORADO KID arrived, we were floored again. It's very different from our other books, in the sense that it's not hardboiled at all in tone -- but it's quintessential noir, a story about an ordinary man struggling against malign forces he can neither understand nor escape. At the same time, it's a meta-story about storytelling and about how investigators can be born out of an encounter with the naggingly unanswerable. Just a wonderful book.
DW: How did you get Ken Bruen and Jason Starr to collaborate on a book?
CA: That one was Jason's idea. I'd been talking with Jason about getting a book from him but somehow we hadn't found the right opportunity. Meanwhile, Jason was a huge fan of Ken's work and had just met him for the first time on one of Ken's trips to New York, and the two of them started talking about how much they would enjoy writing a book together, collaborating on it transcontinentally via e-mail. Ken dropped me a note to run the idea by me and I said, "It sounds great to me if you can get Jason on board," and he said "It was Jason's idea in the first place!" I believe the core of the storyline came from an idea Jason had been kicking around for a while, but needless to say it got transformed utterly once Ken got into the mix. Characters who were, I think, Puerto Rican in the original conception became Irish and Irish-American, for instance. And the plot went off in new directions. But the writing went extremely quickly (especially when you consider the challenge of the co-authors' physical separation, not to mention their extremely busy schedules), and I was delighted when the manuscript landed in my mailbox.
Interestingly, in classic pulp fashion, we'd already had the cover painted before the book was actually written -- the three of us went out for dinner at a former speakeasy in Times Square on a rainy night, and over drinks we cooked up the image of the hands holding a camera in extreme close-up with the adulterous couple reflected in the camera lens. I didn't know much about the story at that point, but by god, I knew it was going to have that scene in it somewhere...
DW: Tell us about your own writing. What is the inspiration behind Little Girl Lost?
CA: I started writing LITTLE GIRL LOST about ten years before I finished it. I wrote the first chapter and then couldn't go any further. I think I was intimidated by the need to write something Fine with a capital 'F' -- after all, I was studying Literature at the time (with a capital 'L'), and you can get paralyzed trying to write as well as Thomas Hardy or E.M. Forster (another great noir writer, incidentally) or Fitzgerald or whomever.
So instead of finishing the book, I put it aside and contented myself with writing short stories for various magazines and anthologies. Which was not a bad thing to do -- great practice -- but it also wasn't the same as making progress on a novel.
Then Max and I came up with the idea for Hard Case Crime, and an important part of the idea was that creating this new imprint would give the two of us a chance to write the Gold Medal books we'd otherwise been born too late to write. Max came up with his book, FADE TO BLONDE, after making up the title and the cover tagline in the course of dummying up some fake covers for use when we pitched publishers. He got hooked on the idea of finding out what this fake book, FADE TO BLONDE, might be about. That left me in need of an idea for my book. So I looked over my file of ideas and found that chapter I'd written ten years earlier, and I decided, the hell with it, I'm finishing it. To liberate myself from any feeling of intimidation or inhibition, I did what so many pulp writers did back in the day, which was to write under a pseudonym. As it turns out, that's what it took. I'd been unable to make any progress on the book for ten years, but Richard Aleas, god bless him, was able to finish it in 60 days.
As for the story itself and what inspired that, it's sort of a classic "what if?" -- what if someone you thought was leading a comfortable, quiet, conservative, bland, and basically happy life turned out to be leading an entirely different life, one that was far more colorful, but also far less happy? How could that come about, and what would the consequences be? To come up with the bits and pieces of the story, I dug back into my own life. I did have a girlfriend at one point who ended up becoming an ophthalmologist, for instance (although she didn't thereafter, to the best of my knowledge, become a murdered stripper). And the bit about the styrofoam bird is true. You can't make stuff like that up.
DW: How do you write? What goes into your writing process?
CA: These days, I don't write nearly enough, since editing Hard Case Crime is an all-consuming task. But I do try to sneak my own writing in the interstices. The process is very simple: I boot up the computer, I have no idea what I'm going to write, I face the damned blinking cursor on one side of the screen and the clock on the other side, and I force myself to start throwing words down. Sometimes they come smoothly and well, sometimes it's a painful and laborious extraction. Sometimes I get up and pace around the room, hoping to dislodge the words stuck in my brain with a bit of vigorous exercise. One way or another, I force myself to get the writing done.
I prefer not to plot too far in advance, but in the case of a complex plot like LITTLE GIRL LOST I did have to sketch out a timetable and an outline in order to make sure everything hung together as needed for the plot to work. I also prefer to write quickly. Pulp should not be excessively polished. You should feel the hot breath of the bill collector on the back of the author's neck. Write, write, write; never look back. That's part of what gives the best pulp novels their tremendous feeling of velocity.
DW: Can we expect to see any more Richard Aleas novels in the future?
CA: I certainly hope so. I am working on a sequel to LITTLE GIRL LOST now called SONGS OF INNOCENCE, which picks up John Blake's story shortly after the end of the first book. He's given up his PI job and is a student in the adult education program up at Columbia, trying to get on with his life, but another dead woman turns up, this one apparently a suicide, and he finds himself drawn into trying to understand her story. I'm excited about this story. Hopefully it won't take another ten years to finish it.
DW: Besides the King and Starr/Bruen novels, what else is coming down the pipeline that you are looking forward to?
CA: We have a number of books we're very excited about. The acclaimed novelist Madison Smartt Bell is an old friend of Max's, and he's allowing us to reprint his wonderful early thriller, STRAIGHT CUT. We're doing a new edition of one of Donald Westlake's rarest (and best) Richard Stark novels, LEMONS NEVER LIE. We have a brand new book from Seymour Shubin, whose first novel, ANYONE'S MY NAME, was a New York Times bestseller half a century ago. We also have a new Quarry novel -- ominously called THE LAST QUARRY -- coming from Max Allan Collins. We're bringing Charles Williams back into print after far too many years of obscurity with a new edition of the long-lost A TOUCH OF DEATH. And we have a detective novel from the great Pete Hamill, THE GUNS OF HEAVEN. Plus a few surprises we can't talk about yet. It's shaping up to be a very exciting year...
Copyright© 2006 Noir Originals
Derringer award winner DAVID WHITE is an 8th Grade English teacher. His stories have been published in Thrilling Detective, Handheld Crime, Hardluck Stories, Shred Of Evidence, Crime Spree and SHOTS UK. He currently resides in New Jersey.