Wednesday Paperback Cover

This cover for Hard Case's debut hardcover novel hit me right between the eyes.

The Return of Hard Case

Here is the latest news from Charles Ardai regarding the return of Hard Case Crime. I'm just gonna reprint the entire statement in full since I'm sure it's of interest.

We've got some big news to announce today: After a year's hiatus, Hard Case Crime will be returning to bookstores with new titles in 2011, thanks to a deal we just signed with UK-based Titan Publishing.

Titan is a publisher both of fiction and of gorgeous art books focusing on pop culture such as movie poster art, pin-ups, newspaper comic strips, and Golden Age comic books, and has worked with filmmakers such as J.J. Abrams, Joss Whedon, and George Lucas. Titan has been around for 30 years, has more than 200 employees, and in addition to publishing books also has a magazine division, a retail division (Titan owns the famous Forbidden Planet bookstore in London, and until recently co-owned the Murder One mystery bookstore with Maxim Jakubowski), and a merchandise division that produces items such as t-shirts, sculptures, and accessories.

We look forward to exploring ways we might develop some cool Hard Case Crime products with them! But first things first: books. Hard Case Crime will relaunch in September/October 2011 with four new books, including CHOKE HOLD by Christa Faust (sequel to her Edgar Award-nominated MONEY SHOT), QUARRY'S EX by Max Allan Collins (the latest in the popular series of hit man novels by the author of "Road to Perdition"), and two never-before-published novels by MWA Grand Masters (names to be announced shortly).

Additionally, Titan Publishing plans to acquire all existing stock of Hard Case Crime's backlist from Dorchester Publishing and to resume shipping these titles to booksellers immediately. New books will be published in paperback (possibly some in hardcover as well!); ebook editions will also be released across multiple platforms. Titan is distributed in the U.S. and Canada by Random House. We're very excited about working with Titan (indeed, we had offers from five publishers and chose Titan over several that were much larger and better-known) -- they love pulp fiction as much as we do and appreciate that in books like ours the visual dimension is just as important as the storytelling. It's hard to imagine a better home for Hard Case Crime.

Hard Case Goes Hardcover

While Hard Case may be looking for a new publisher for some of its titles, Charles Ardai is still moving forward with other projects, including the first Hard Case title(s) in hardcover. Next year, Subterranean Press will publish a double by Lawrence Block featuring his old titles 69 Barrow Street and Strange Fruit as a hardcover with new Robert McGinnis cover art.

Hard Times for Hard Case

The title of this post probably isn't accurate. It ought to say tough times for Dorchester, since it's Dorchester publishing, the company that's been putting out Hard Case Crime, that's dropping mass market paperbacks in favor of electronic publishing paired with print on demand for certain titles. "Hard Times for Dorchester" isn't alliterative, though, so screw it.

As a long time member of the Hard Case Crime book club, I was surprised when I read this news last week, as I had just received my copy of Murder Is My Business in the mail along with a new Dorchester catalog, which made no mention of the switch as far as I can remember. (I threw it out, so I can't go back and check). After Hard Case's earlier decision to scale back in the face of the economic difficulties that face us all, I was kind of disappointed. Now the news comes that Dorchester's decision has pushed publication of any further Hard Case Crime titles back until late next year. This is a bummer, and I hope not an ominous portent of things to come.

Publishing is definitely in flux at the moment, and it's hard to tell how I feel about it. On the one hand, the idea of a Kindle or Nook appeals to me. After all, I ran out of space for books in my old place, and then, when it caught fire, I ended up losing about four-fifths of my collection. If I had had an e-reader, insurance would have covered replacing the device, and I would have still had all of my collection. On the other hand, the part of me who likes owning books, the physical object, isn't ready to give them up. The whole point of Hard Case is that they're objects with original artwork that you can collect and keep on a shelf. It wouldn't be the same if they were just e-books. And that doesn't just go for Hard Case. I like having books around, even if they take up too much space, and I don't know that I'm thrilled with where it looks like publishing is going. Perhaps this makes me some sort of old crank, and I'm now in the same category as septuagenarians who get nostalgic for rotary phones, but I guess we all get old eventually, if we're lucky.

The Colorado Kid gets turned into something it's not

Stephen King's supremely shitty entry in the Hard Case Crime lineup has been optioned for a television show for the Syfy (I, know, I know, Syfy. Was there something wrong with Sci-Fi?) network for a TV show called Haven. Here's the show's description:

Syfy's all-new one-hour drama series Haven, starring Emily Rose (Jericho, Brothers and Sisters) is based on the novella The Colorado Kid from renowned author Stephen King. The series follows the shrewd and confident FBI agent Audrey Parker (Rose) who has a lost past, and arrives in the small town of Haven, Maine on a routine case. Before long, her natural curiosity lands her in the epicenter of activity in this curious enclave, which turns out to be a longtime refuge for people that are affected by a range of supernatural afflictions.

As the townspeople's dormant abilities begin to express themselves, Audrey helps keep these forces at bay while discovering the many secrets of Haven — including one surrounding her own surprising connections to this extraordinary place.

Now here's the description of The Colorado Kid:

On an island off the coast of Maine, a man is found dead. There’s no identification on the body. Only the dogged work of a pair of local newspapermen and a graduate student in forensics turns up any clues, and it’s more than a year before the man is identified.

And that’s just the beginning of the mystery. Because the more they learn about the man and the baffling circumstances of his death, the less they understand. Was it an impossible crime? Or something stranger still...?

No one but Stephen King could tell this story about the darkness at the heart of the unknown and our compulsion to investigate the unexplained. With echoes of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon and the work of Graham Greene, one of the world’s great storytellers presents a moving and surprising tale whose subject is nothing less than the nature of mystery itself...

Do these two descriptions even seem remotely similar? Call me cynical, but it seems like someone bought the only Stephen King novel not under option just so they could put his name on a new series in hopes of getting people to watch it.

Call me when someone options Money Shot for a television show. I'd watch that.

Your Delayed Wednesday Paperback Cover

Glen Orbik's cover for Christa Faust's forthcoming sequel to Money Shot, Choke Hold. I'd link, but it's not even up on Hard Case's website yet. I have to go smoke a cigarette now.

Review of The Corspe Wore Pasties

Whatever else you can say about burlesque performer Jonny Porkpie's novel, The Corpse Wore Pasties (Hard Case Crime, 2009), it certainly wins the prize for book with the most underwear similes ever. It's all bra straps and g-strings as Porkpie rushes around New York trying to solve a murder in this not quite roman à clef of a novel.

Porkpie is both the detective and the main suspect in the murder of performer Victoria Vice, after handing her what was supposed to be a prop bottle of poison during a performance. The bottle wasn't a prop, and Victoria was a serial thief, ripping off other burlesque performer's acts as a matter of routine, so there is no shortage of suspects.

Porkpie never takes the book, or himself, too seriously, which is good because he makes the debut mystery author mistake of telegraphing the culprit early on in the story to anyone who's paying attention. The novel works better as a ribald comedy than as a murder mystery. Fortunately, Porkpie can be pretty funny, and his sense of showmanship translates pretty well onto the page. He knows how to create and amusing scene and milk it for all its worth.

Delayed Paperback Cover

Sorry for the delay. Anyway, this one's from Hard Case, and I like it.

Vertical Covers and and Interview

J. Kingston Pierce over at Killer Covers has a great interview with Charles Ardai. Where does he find the time every week for KC? Seriously.

Wednesday Paperback Cover

Great, I'm immortal for sure.

The Valley of Fear

Hard Case has announced their second December title. They're going way back to republish the final Sherlock Holmes book, The Valley of Fear, a description of which can be read here. I don't think Glen Orbik's artwork would have been approved for a cover of The Strand.

An Unpublished Westlake and Burying the Lede

Good news for those who thought the latest Dortmunder novel was going to be the late Donald Westlake's last published novel. In April, after taking a three month hiatus, Hard Case Crime, will return with Memory, Westlake's final novel.

From the desription:

It's a beautifully written, heartbreaking story about a man who suffers an assault (after being caught in bed with another man's wife) and wakes up in a hospital bed suffering from a peculiar sort of brain damage that doesn't make him unable to function but does make it hard for him to form new memories or retain old ones. Stuck far from home (and struggling even to remember where home used to be), paranoid about the attentions of the police, and desperate to reconstruct his lost life, Paul Cole sets out on an extraordinary private investigation: a missing persons case in which he himself is the missing person.


And I can't help but feel that the latest Hard Case newsletter has sort of buried the lede. Down toward the bottom, after announcing Westlake's book and teasing the still unnamed second December title, Ardai announces that Hard Case is going to go to bimonthly publication instead of monthly. He tries to spin, saying it will provide time to drum up more interest and allow readers to get to the books, but the message between the lines is, "If you like these books buy more of them. Times are tough all around, but they're still half the price of movie ticket."

Review of Hard Feelings

You can divide Jason Starr's novels pretty easily into his early work and his later, more commercial work. His earlier novels are noir stories of doomed characters who are painfully oblivious to their own inevitable destruction, while his more recent work has been more slick and commercial, even if he hasn't quite been able to bring himself to write a happy ending yet. Fake I.D. (Hard Case Crime, 2009) is Starr's third novel, coming between Nothing Personal, and the award winning Hard Feelings, the novel that put Starr on the map. It definitely belongs to Starr's early period.

Fake I.D., which has never appeared in the U.S. before, has a lot in common with Hard Feelings, but it's not quite as accomplished. Tommy Russo is a bartender who wants to be an actor and has a gambling problem. When he is approached by an acquaintance about joining a syndicate to purchase a race horse, he jumps at the chance. Only, Tommy doesn't have the ten thousand dollars needed for the buy in. To get it, he will betray everyone who trusts him.

Russo, unlike Richie Segal in Hard Feelings, does not garner any sympathy from the reader. In Hard Feelings, Segal's downward spiral is precipitated by a face to face encounter with an old acquaintence who molested him. Russo, on the other hand, is narcissistic to a frightening extent without any mitigating factors. He is so repellant that he may make some readers uncomfortable, which is not a criticism, so much as it is a recognition of the fact that Starr is really very good at getting inside the heads of abberant individuals. It's not too difficult to see why this novel would have made U.S. publishers squirm.

Hard Case T Shirts

I briefly interrupt my Memorial Day Weekend to bring you the news of Hard Case Crime Cover Art T-Shirts. They're available starting today.

CBS Sunday Morning segement on Hard Case

This Sunday Morning show segment definitely fits the definition of old news, but I'd never seen it before because I've vowed to commit suicide if I ever become the sort of person who watches network weekend morning shows.

Hey Deabeats: Pay Hard Case

It looks like the recession has finally hit home. When is was just affecting I-bankers and people who bought million dollar homes on $40,000 a year salaries, I really didn't give a shit.

An excerpt from the latest Hard Case Crime newsletter:

After that two-book month (December), we'll be taking a break for a few months to give me a chance to catch up on other work (in particular, the first six books of our new "Gabriel Hunt" adventure series: www.HuntForAdventure.com) and to give some companies who owe us money (you know who you are!) a chance to pay off all their accumulated, overdue bills. But once that's behind us, new Hard Case Crime titles will start coming again -- in fact, we're in the process of buying #64 now, and Greg Manchess is already hard at work on the cover.

A Precedent

When I saw Hard Case Crime's December offering, (or one of their December offerings, I should say. There's a second book coming in December that's still a secret.) The Corpse Wore Pasties, I thought it interesting because it was a murder mystery set in the burlesque world by a burlesque professional. It turns out he's following in the footsteps of Gypsy Rose Lee, famed burlesque performer and author of The G-String Murders.

Hard Case Crime Updates

When I first saw it, I was pretty sure Johnny Porkpie had to be a pseudonym, and I guess it is, in a way, but he is, I am told, The Burlesque Mayor of New York City, and the author of Hard Case's December offering, The Corpse Wore Pasties.

Now, if a murdered stripper sounds familiar, it should, since Charles Ardai's Little Girl Lost was about the exact same thing. Porkpie, who also appears to be the main character of his novel, will have a ways to go to match Ardai's story.

And Leonard Cassuto's review of Fifty-to-One has been posted on the Barnes & Noble Web site. I would like to take issue with the fact the B & N are tardy getting their reviews up. Cassuto obviously wrote it when it was current, referencing fifty titles, but now Hard Case is up to fifty-three. So, B&N editors, here's a tip: It's the Internet. There's no competition for column inches, and thus no real reason to sit on material for this long.

Quarry in the Middle

Hard Case's November title for this year is up on their Web site. It's by Max Allan Collins, who has now penned four original novels for Hard Case and had two novels reprinted in one volume (those two novels happened to be the first two Hard Case novels I actively disliked, so they kind of ended the honeymoon I was having with the series.) Overall, I have mixed feelings about Collins' work, but another Quarry should be a welcome addition to Hard Case's lineup. The First Quarry and The Last Quarry were both decent reads. Thank god it's not another Ms. Tree novel.

Review of The Dead Man's Brother

Hard Case Crime's Charles Ardai is getting to be quite the literary detective. Thanks to his efforts, books that would have never seen the light of day are finding their way into print. Hard Case recently announced the upcoming publication of a brand new Lester Dent novel, and there is also The Dead Man's Brother, a lost adventure novel from science fiction author Roger Zelazny.

Zelazny won six Hugos and three Nebulas, but never published a crime novel during his lifetime, so The Dead Man's Brother is a noteable artifact. The story follows Ovid Wiley, a former art smuggler turned respectable gallery owner who finds his former smuggling partner dead in his place of work. He is quickly picked up by the police, and then the CIA, which offers to make his trouble go away for a price. Wiley must track down a priest who has absconded with $3 million of the Vatican's dollars. This unwelcome assignment takes Wiley to Rome, where he meets up with his smuggling partner's ex-girlfriend, and then to Brazil, where he and Maria end up involved in local politics.

The story is solid, but not spectacular. Zelazny keeps everything moving along nicely, but it's all territory that's been trod before. It's entertaining, and it shows Zelazny could have easily branched out into other genres, but The Dead Man's Brother is remarkable mainly for it's status as a forgotten novel.