Crime and Humanity

There is crime.

Then there are crimes against humanity—crimes “so odious they constitute a serious attack on human dignity, grave humiliation or degradation of one or more human beings. These crimes are not isolated or sporadic events, but are part of either a government policy or a wide practice of atrocities tolerated or condoned by a government or a de facto authority.”

Of course, all crimes are crimes against humanity—the humanity of the criminal, which dies a little more with each inhumane act, no less than that of his or her victims. Even crimes perpetrated against our planet are ultimately crimes against humanity (a type of slow, indirect suicide).

Though all crimes are crimes against our humanness, certain inhumane acts reach a threshold that requires a new classification. Crimes against humanity are crimes that are part of a widespread or systematic practice.

The film “Defiance” deals with just such crimes.

Hiding in the deep forests of German occupied Poland during World War II, the four Bielski brothers take on the seemingly impossible tasks of foraging for food, finding weapons, and surviving—and not just for themselves but for a large mass of fleeing Polish Jews. Based on a true story, the Bielski brothers and their band of fellow Jews recreate a type of modern Exodus, their wandering camp attracting additional numbers each day. The group’s modern day Moses, Tuvia Bielski, attempts to lead his “children of Israel” to a Promised Land of safety, and in the process does what Oskar Schindler also did—saves innocent people from crimes against humanity carried out by evil people.

“Defiance” is a fine film with particularly good performances, but instead of praising or critiquing it, I want to focus here on the thought and reactions this movie provoked in me.

History is full of crimes against humanity—and not just history. As you read this they are happening all around the world. However, the Holocaust ranks at the top or near it of any list of humanity’s systematic inhumanity to fellow humans.

I can’t call a film like “Defiance” entertaining, but only because it does so much more than entertain. I found it to be moving and thought-provoking, and as I watched the horrific and heroic together, I couldn’t help but think of Shakespeare words, “What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals.”

But, of course, that’s only half the story.

Humanity is an unparalleled dichotomy—capable of compassion and cruelty, divinity and depravity, civility and inhumanity.

Actually, it is inaccurate to continue referring to crimes against humanity as inhumane. They are obviously all too human. In one sense, history is a record of human cruelties.

But there’s another history, too. The history of humanity’s compassion, wisdom, kindness, of its intellectual, spiritual, scientific, and artistic achievements.

We are animal and angel, breath of God, dust of the earth.

We like to think of the best and noblest we’re capable of as human and the most cruel and brutal as inhumane, but the truth is, the great paradox of humanity is, we are both, capable of staggering compassion and shocking brutality.

“Defiance” deals with far more than the depravity of humanity, the barbarism that lies just beneath the surface, the shockingly animalistic brutality of the mob mentality our species is cable of. “Defiance” also deals with those who refuse to return hate with more hate, who would rather die as humans than exist as animals.

But perhaps more than anything else, “Defiance” reminded me of what Chris Hedges calls the “myth of moral progress.” In his books “American Fascists” and “I Don’t Believe in Atheists,” Hedges argues that religious Fundamentalist and the new atheists both believe the same fallacy—albeit for very different reasons—that humans are getting better, that we as a species are progressing morally.

That the Holocaust happened so recently, that systematic rape, genocide, and ethnic cleansing is happening right now around the world, reminds us that even as some among us are capable of acts of compassion and creativity so extraordinary we call them divine, others are capable of brutality so horrendous we want to claim it’s not even human.

“Defiance” reminds us not only of the extremes humanity is capable of, but that those divergent capacities reside within us all. We all have angels and demons, humanity and inhumanity. This paradox is who we are—lowly dirt and lofty spirit—and it’s a crime against our own humanity to ever forget it.

How to Read a Film

Rarely is a film as good as the book it’s based on—never if it’s a good book.

“The Reader” is a good book. The adaptation of “The Reader” starring Kate Winslet in her best performance in a career of truly amazing acting, though not as good as the book, is as good as adaptations of good books get.

There are few things I believe in more than the transformatative power of reading. “The Reader” explores that power, celebrating reading and being read to.

“The Reader” is based on the novel of the same name by Bernhard Schlink, which I reviewed here a few weeks ago.

It’s a deeply resonate story—made no less so because I could see where it was headed from the very beginning.

The story of “The Reader” is a simple one, a love story of sorts filled with eroticism, secrets, horror, and compassion—all of which unfold against the haunted landscape of postwar Germany.

When he falls ill on his way home from school, fifteen-year-old Michael Berg is rescued by Hanna Schmitz, a woman twice his age. In time she becomes his lover—then she inexplicably disappears. When Michael next sees her, he is a young law student, and she is on trial for a hideous crime. As he watches her refuse to defend her innocence, Michael gradually realizes that Hanna may be guarding a secret she considers even more shameful than murder.

There’s a line in the film that I’m not sure is in the book that goes something like “all Western literature springs from characters who have something to hide.

Secrets.

As Frederick Buechner says, “I am my secrets, as you are yours.”
Hanna Schmitz has secrets—several big ones—as does Michael Berg and the entire country of Germany, and, as usual, Buechner is right. He or she or they are his or her or their secrets.

“The Reader” is a faithful adaptation of the book, a beautifully shot film, with an extraordinary cast. It’s powerful and profound, and erotic—it’s eroticism coming no less from Michael reading to Hanna than the two enjoying what happens when words become flesh.

David Cross, who plays the young Michael Berg gives a great performance, Ralph Fiennes, one of my favorite actors and the man who will forever be for me Maurice Bendrix from “The End of the Affair” does his usual stellar job, but it is Kate Winslet who really proves again that she is the actress of her generation. Brave and beautiful and bare—her breasts alone are worth the price of admission—Kate Winslet is also brutal and altogether Brilliant. That she also turns in such a powerhouse performance in “Revolutionary Road” in the same year is truly astounding.

In what is truly a rare occurrence,“The Reader” the book and the film has my highest recommendation. Read it—or have it read to you—as soon as you can. Then see the film (if for no other reason than to see Kate as God made her). The power and force of language on display—whether reading book or film—are astonishing. As you read either the elegant novel or its evocative adaptation, it will also read you—and haunt you in the way only profoundly true art can, and you’ll be grateful that it does.

How do you read a film? Just like a book. You let it read you.

My Blues Christmas

A couple of days before Christmas, I got an offer I couldn’t refuse—to write a story for a new crime fiction collection that features such writers as James Lee Burke, John Grisham, and Charlaine Harris, author of the books that inspired the HBO show, “True Blood.” The book is called “Delta Blues,” features an introduction by Morgan Freeman, and when it’s published in October, the release party will be at Ground Zero, his blues club in Clarksdale, Mississippi.

Dropping everything else to research and write and rewrite my story, “Death at the Crossroads,” I’ll always remember 2008 as my Blues Christmas. While everyone else was doing the “Jingle Bell Rock,” I was having myself one mean “Blue, Blues Christmas.”

As I read accounts of the music birthed in the Delta, and subsisted on a diet of nothing but the blues, I spent a lot of time with Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and several other artists whose lives and music are featured in Darnell Martin’s “Cadillac Records.” This enhanced my enjoyment of the feature immeasurably, transforming what would have been an interesting, enjoyable movie with great music into something far more personally resonant.

But even without my literary journey to the crossroads, I would have thoroughly enjoyed “Cadillac Records” and highly recommended it.

The film is a much fictionalized story of the founding and flourishing of Chess Records in 1950s Chicago. Started by Leonard Chess, the label recorded and promoted artists who would become some of the greatest names in blues and R&B—artists shuch as Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Chuck Berry and Etta James.

Director, Darnell Martin, who also wrote the script, takes great liberties with the Chess story, but by doing so tells a dramatic and compelling yarn with one of the year’s best soundtracks.

All the major players of “Cadillac Records” emerge as fully-formed individuals and are brought to life by Eamonn Walker (Howlin' Wolf), Columbus Short (Little Walter), Mos Def (Chuck Berry), and Beyoncé Knowles (Etta James) in powerful performances, but the finest work is done by Adrien Brody (Leonard Chess) and Jeffrey Wright (Muddy Waters). And as fine as Brody’s performance is as the charming, flawed, father-figure Leonard Chess, Jeffrey Wright’s Muddy Waters is on a level with Frank Langella’s Nixon, for both actors actually seem to become the men they’re playing. (More on “Frost/Nixon” soon.)

There’s a truth to “Cadillac Records.” Though much of what’s in the film never actually happened—or didn’t happen in exactly the way it’s depicted, it’s true to a time and a place and a people that great and enduring music was born out of. If you brought Chess or Muddy or Wolf back and set them down in a dark theater showing the move their lives inspired, they might say what Muddy says when, as a sharecropper in the Deep South, he hears Alan Lomax’s recording of his music, “I feel like I’m meeting myself for the first time.” But I don’t think they’d deny that it was, in fact, themselves.

My 2008 Holidays were some of the best and bluest ever. I’m thrilled that my story “Death at the Crossroads” will be in the upcoming “Delta Blues” collection, and I’m honored that my writing could be inspired and informed by the blues born in the region where my family is originally from, and I’ll forever link the legacy of the Chess label and the film “Cadillac Records” with the experience.

Fifty-To-One (Hard Case Crime Part 4)

Odds are against any new business these days, but longshots don’t come any longer than independent publishing ventures. But whether the odds are fifty-to-one or far greater, Hard Case Crime beat them. How? I asked Ardai.

“The single biggest challenge is that people don’t read for pleasure the way they used to. There’re too many demands on everyone’s time and too many other forms of entertainment, and the mass public has by and large fallen out of the reading habit. Oh, there are always runaway bestsellers, books that “everyone has to read”—“Harry Potter,” “The Da Vinci Code.” But you can’t build a steady business, month in and month out, on the gamble that one day one of your books will catch fire the way those hits did. When you’re putting out a new book every month,especially if you’re selling it at a low cover price the way we are, it can be a real challenge to get each book into enough paying customers’ hands to keep the line in the black. This ultimately boils down to a distribution challenge—how can we get all the booksellers in the country to carry our books, and to keep carrying them, and to order enough copies of each to make it possible for us to keep going? We’re very fortunate to have Dorchester Publishing overseeing that side of the business—they’re magnificent at it. But it’s a challenge for them, too. It’s a challenge for everyone in the publishing business.”

What would you say is the state of crime fiction publishing today?

“I don’t think crime fiction has ever been stronger, especially in the hard-boiled or noir or dark side of the field. There have been high points in the past, of course—can’t complain about the days when Chandler and Hammett were at the top of their game—but if you look at the authors who are working today, both the old pros and the young up-and-comers, you realize there has been a flowering of talent like never before. Crime novels receive a level of serious attention today that they never did in the old days, both from critics and from readers. Major literary authors are trying their hands at the genre and in some cases doing an excellent job. Overall, I think it’s a fantastic time to be a reader of crime fiction.”

How many of your titles are original? How many are reprints? Do you see that increasing in the future?

“We originally set out to make the line half reprints and half originals, but it’s come out to be something more like two-third reprints, one-third originals, for the simple reason that I can always find an outstanding reprint to do (I just have to look on my shelves) while for the originals I’m at the mercy of how often someone writes an outstanding book and chooses to submit it to us. I’ll always do another great reprint rather than buy a mediocre original.”

How do you go about publishing the classic pulps? How do they most often come to your attention? How do you track down the rights? Anybody from the “golden age” that you really want to reprint, but haven’t been able to yet? Are there any manuscripts floating around from back then that were never published that might be now?

“As I say, I start by going to my shelves, which contain thousands of old books. I also get recommendations from friends, and from strangers, and hunt down copies of obscure books when I hear about them. Having found a book I want to reprint, I start calling around and Googling and generally carrying on like a detective, trying to find any sign of where the author might be or, if the author is deceased (as many of ours are), where his or her heirs might be. In some cases, the search is easy: The author is alive, has a web site with a contact address, and that’s that. In other cases, it’s hard—I spent several years trying to track down Day Keene’s estate for instance, and Steve Fisher’s, and the estate of the Robert B. Parker who died in 1955. It can be frustrating sometimes, but it’s also great fun and makes for some great cocktail party stories.

“We do hear about unpublished manuscripts floating around from time to time. Two years ago, for instance, we published “The Last Match” by David Dodge, which had never been published before. And in 2009, we’ll be bringing out, for the first time, lost novels by science-fiction great Roger Zelazny (“The Dead Man’s Brother”) and “Doc Savage” creator Lester Dent (“Honey in His Mouth”). Just the other day I started reading Richard Prather’s final, unpublished Shell Scott novel. It’s days like this when I think I have the best job in the world.”

To celebrate and commemorate Hard Cases’ fifth year and fiftieth book, Ardai penned “Fifty-to-One,” a comic crime novel with each chapter title named after the first forty-nine Hard Case Crime books. Fun, fast-paced, and highly entertaining, “Fifty-To-One” is a fitting tribute to as fine an independent crime publishing house as you’ll find. I asked Ardai to share with me how “Fifty-To-One” came about, what the experience of writing it was like, and if it turned out to be more or less difficult than he imagined?

“It was a lark. My last two books (written as “Richard Aleas”) were grim and bleak, really tragic, so I set out to do something light and frothy this time. That’s not necessarily easier to write or even more fun (it feels good to write a really dark book), but it was a new sort of pleasure and the writing itself went very quickly. (As it had to, since I was under a very tight deadline.) The challenge of writing the story to fit our 50 book titles in sequence was a bear -- but, you know, what’s life without challenges? I grumbled a lot while I was in the middle of it, but looking back on it, I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything. Someone described the book to me as having the quality of a bedtime story, the sort a parent might make up for his child based on elements the child demands the parent include—“Can there be a bear in it, daddy? I want a bear!”—and I think that’s about right. When I hit chapter 24, which had to be called “The Guns of Heaven,” I knew there had to be guns in it; when I got to the next chapter, named after “The Last Match,” I knew there had to be a match in it, of some sort. The sort you use to light cigarettes? The sort you get when two people who were meant for each other meet? A boxing match...? That was up to me. But by god, there had to be a match of some sort, or I wasn’t doing my job. I think, fortunately, that I was able to pull it off. You can’t take the book too seriously—it’s a confection, like a souffle—but if you like souffles, you’ll have a big smile on your face when you finish this one.”

Rush out and pick up a copy of “Fifty-To-One” or any other of the first forty-nine Hard Case Crime titles(or all of them as I have)—and not just for the entertaining story inside, but the amazing art on the outside. Odds are good you’ll have a very good time. And at just seven dollars, you’ll get more kiss kiss, bang bang for your disposable buck than you could anywhere else.

Out of the Past (Hard Case Crime Part 3)

Though many of the titles published by Hard Case Crime are contemporary, the entire line has a retro feel. Hard Case Crime is obviously the heir apparent to both the pulp mags and paperback houses of the past. I asked Ardai to give us a little pulp history and to tell us which publications his most give homage to.

“There were pulps and then there were paperback publishers—not the same thing. The best of the crime pulps was indisputably “Black Mask,” where “The Maltese Falcon” and many other classics first appeared. Other memorable pulps included “Detective Fiction Weekly” and “Dime Detective,” and you might also count “Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine,” which debuted in 1941, as a sort of quasi-pulp.
“As for paperback publishers, while Signet made the first big splash with their paperback editions of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer novels, the king of the genre was indisputably Gold Medal, the first publisher to publish original crime novels (as opposed to reprints of previously
released hardcovers) in paperback. Other great houses included Dell, Avon, Graphic, Lion, Bantam, Pocket, and Popular Library.”

Tell me about the literary quality of pulp fiction—both in the past and in what you’re doing. How do they stack up with other enduring works of literature?

“Look, most pulp novels were pretty poorly written, but that’s true of most novels in general as well. Ted Sturgeon famously said that 99% of anything is crap, and he was probably being generous. The difference between a poorly written literary novel and a poorly written crime novel is that if the prose in a literary novel is weak, there’s often nothing else there for the reader to enjoy, while a crime novel whose prose doesn’t sparkle might still manage to engage the reader on the level of plot or puzzle or suspense or action. So a lot of old crime novels are still fun to read today even if the writing is not the sort to win Pulitzer Prizes, and generally it wasn’t.
“But there were occasional authors who aspired to, and achieved more—authors whose prose did sparkle, whose writing was of a conspicuously higher caliber than the run-of-the-mill stuff the pulp houses were cranking out the other 364 days of the year. Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Ross Macdonald . . . the guys who make up the canon today were doing work every bit as good from a literary point of view as their peers across the genre/mainstream divide. It’s the same story today. Most crime novels are disposable stuff, minor entertainment at best . . . but the ones that are nominated for and win awards, the ones that move readers to rave about them to their friends, those are the ones that achieve something far greater than the norm. I am not saying they transcend the genre, because I don’t believe that’s true—what they do is bring the genre to its highest fulfillment. And that’s why they stick in people’s minds. Asking why is like asking why The Godfather is universally considered a masterpiece and a hundred other gangster pictures aren’t, or why Raiders of the Lost Ark still brings audiences to their feet decades after its release when hundreds of other adventure pictures don’t. The ones that last are the ones that get it all right, the ones that are made with love and care and craft and that extra indefinable spark we call genius. The best-written novels—crime or not, pulp or not—are like this. They leave you feeling moved and changed and like you’ve been shown something you’ve never quite seen that way before.”

Gun to your head, what are your top ten favorite pulps of all time—or the ten best (if the list would be different), or your top ten pulp writers.

“Authors? Off the top of my head I might say Chandler, Hammett, Cain (James), Macdonald (Ross), Woolrich, Block (Lawrence), Goodis, Spillane, Greene (Graham)...that’s nine. Last spot could go to anyone from Elmore Leonard to WR Burnett to Westlake to Charles Williams to Thompson to Willeford . . . lots of choices.
“Favorite books? I’m awfully fond of “The Big Sleep,” “The Fabulous Clipjoint,” “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” “Brighton Rock,” “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” (yes, it’s a spy novel, but it’s noir as hell), “Rendezvous in Black,” “Eight Million Ways to Die,” “Such Men are Dangerous,” “Clean Break,” “The Red Right Hand” . . . again, it’s easy to make lists. But it’s hard to carve them back, since deciding to leave off is much harder than deciding what to put on. And what’s the magic about the number ten, anyway? Anyone who’s looking for some great reading can pick up any of the books or authors mentioned in this paragraph–trust me, you won’t have anything to complain about.
“For that matter, you can pick up any book in our line—you won’t find the best-known classics there (someone else was already publishing “The Big Sleep,” so we couldn’t), but the titles you do find are pretty much guaranteed to get your heart beating a bit faster.”

The Long Hard Look (Hard Case Crime Part II)

Hard Case Crime has one of the most unique and distinctive looks of any imprint being published today. Immediately recognizable on the shelf—whether spine or cover showing—Hard Case Books are not just impressive works of literature, but art objects. I asked Ardai where the name and logo came from.

“Originally we were going to call the line “Kingpin” (hence the crown on top of the gun), but literally the day before we went to register the trademark, Aaron Spelling registered it in connection with a miniseries he was producing about a drug kingpin. Not wanting to fight with Aaron Spelling over it, we went back to the drawing board and came up with a few dozen alternative names—and “Hard Case Crime” was the one that stuck. We kept the logo as it was, even though the crown no longer made much sense.”

Hard Case covers are truly amazing. I asked Ardai to walk me through the process of their creation.

“The decision to do this type of cover was inherent in the premise of Hard Case Crime,” he said. “It wasn’t a separate decision. The whole idea, from the start, was to revive the look and feel of the old pulp paperbacks Max Phillips and I grew up reading.

“Over the years we’ve found a small, select group of painters who are able to work in the old style and produce covers that wouldn’t have looked out of place on an old Signet or Lion or Graphic book, and for any given new book we buy, we start by asking which of these painters has time available to do it. Many of them are in high demand, as you might imagine, and we sometimes need to book time with them many months in advance. If more than one of our painters is available, we ask which one has a style that feels like a good fit with a particular story. Some of our painters do great action scenes, others do best with more still, posed glamour images. One of our guys loves painting big hands in the foreground of an image. And so on.


“Once we’ve chosen the artist, I prepare a brief summary of the book, including physical descriptions of the characters and descriptions of some scenes it might be fun to illustrate, and the artist spends a few weeks preparing sketches—sometimes just two or three, sometimes as many as fifty. We choose the one we like best, and over the next month or so the artist turns it into a finished painting, which we then shoot, scan digitally, and add cover copy to. Once in a while we help in other ways, such as finding models for an artist or even doing model shoots for them (which of course is great fun), but most of our painters handle that sort of thing for themselves. Occasionally, there’s a painter who really wants to read the book rather than just my summary, and I’m delighted if they do—but it’s rare, and of course it’s not necessary. In the old pulp days the cover art rarely had anything to do with the book behind the cover, and we’re already betraying our pulp selves by, for instance, not sticking a redhead on the cover of “Fade To Blonde,” or a knife on the cover of “The Guns of Heaven.”

I’m a book collector and my collection consists of mostly signed first editions, but I have all Hard Case books, and I can’t imagine them as anything but paperbacks. Can you discuss pulp paperbacks as art objects or why pulp and paperback go so well together? Any ideas why mass market paperbacks aren’t published like they once were and don’t sell like they once did?

“Pulp fiction is meant to be cheap and rapidly consumed,” Ardai said. “It’s not meant to be stored in mylar or saved under glass. These were books that were written quickly and intended for a quick night’s (or afternoon’s, or train ride’s) entertainment, they were meant to be disposable, and they were part of the great democratization of literature—where previously books were the purview of college professors and their ilk, now any ordinary joe with two bits in his pocket could get a novel to read. All of that is bound up in the selection of cheap “pulpwood” paper for the pulp magazines (hence the term “pulp”) and similarly cheap materials for the 25-cent post-war paperbacks. The idea was to make this a literature for the masses, and that meant cheap materials and small size.

“Why are mass-market paperbacks not the mass medium they once were? I think that has more to do with the decline in reading than anything inherent to the mass-market format itself. People don’t read for pleasure the way they once did; they have other entertainment alternatives ranging from TV to iPods to videogames to the Internet. As a consequence, books are once more retreating to be the pleasure objects of a somewhat rarefied segment of society -- the better educated, the better heeled—and so the impetus for the creation and popularity of mass-market paperbacks has eroded. You still see million-copy bestsellers in paperback—the titles and authors that are read by every secretary on the subway—but the concept of midlist books in mass market has almost gone away.”

Next: Out of the Past (Part III)

The Hard Way (Hard Case Crime Part I)

Hard Case Crime’s first fifty books haven’t been easy, but founders Charles Ardai and Max Phillips never expected them to be. After all, they didn’t name their publishing venture Easy Case.

As the company celebrates its fifth year and fiftieth book, I interviewed editor and co-founder, Charles Ardai, about the house, its books, and the history of pulp fiction.

It began, like so many good stories do—with somebody falling in love . . .

“Max Phillips and I both fell in love with the pulp paperback crime novels of the post-war era after finding them at yard sales and garage sales and in libraries when we were growing up,” Ardai said. “Here were these irresistibly lurid, clever, intense, exciting books with gorgeous cover paintings, books that were slender and inexpensive and unpretentious but packed a terrific storytelling punch.”

They say that the best business minds look for a need and meet it, ask what’s missing and answer it, discover a gap and fill it. That’s exactly what Ardai and Phillips did.

“So one night in the winter of 2001,” Ardai said, “we asked each other why we didn’t just start a publishing operation of our own, to revive this wonderful old style of crime novel. And Hard Case Crime was the result.”

Nothing worth anything is easy, but building a publishing house in today’s market . . .

“Starting a book publishing company is not something anyone rational would do purely for business reasons,” Ardai added. “You have to be a little crazy and you have to be doing it at least partly for love.

“Having come up with the idea, it then took us two full years to find a publisher willing to work with us in the way we wanted. We knew we could pick great books and make them look wonderful—but we knew nothing about actually printing and warehousing and selling and distributing. I met with nearly every major publisher in the business and some minor ones, too, and while pretty much all of them liked the premise (you could see that some of them were salivating at the sight of the covers), most of the big houses were reluctant to get involved, out of fear that we’d never sell enough copies of these books to make it worth their while as a commercial (rather than a purely aesthetic) undertaking. Some publishers were game to give it a try, but only in hardcover or the large, modern trade paperback format—but we really wanted to recreate a specific historical artifact and publishing in those formats just wouldn’t have been the same. So, one by one, we talked with all the publishers out there, and then finally we turned up what turned out to be the perfect partner: Dorchester Publishing, the oldest independent mass market publisher in the country and a true heir to the old paperback houses of the pulp era.”

A lot can happen in five years and fifty books. I asked Ardai to share some of the highs and lows.

“Oh, there are so many of both—where to start? A low point: The first two years of pitching, pitching, pitching, when everyone said “I love it” but no one had yet said “I’ll do it.” We didn’t know if we’d ever be able to convince anyone to let us prove we had something that people would love. A high point: Seeing our first two books hit stores, one by my long-time favorite crime writer, Lawrence Block, the other by my co-founder, Max Phillips. Then, the next month, came another high point: Seeing my own first novel hit stores, behind a cover by the legendary illustrator Robert McGinnis. Low point: When Alan Furst and Gore Vidal told us they would not give us their blessing to reprint their early pulp fiction, even though it’s excellent. High point: When Stephen King said he wanted to write a new book for us. Low point: When first Ed McBain and then Richard Prather and then Mickey Spillane died. High point: Getting to work with giants of the field like McBain and Prather and Spillane, who were all heroes of mine when I was growing up. High point: Watching some of the finest pulp illustrations get painted at our direction by artists whose work is mouth-wateringly good. High point: Seeing our work written up enthusiastically in Time magazine and the “New York Times” and “Playboy,” seeing Hard Case Crime featured on CBS and NPR. High point: Winning the Edgar and the Shamus, both for other people’s work and then for my own. Low point: Realizing that it can’t go on forever—nothing ever does. High point: Knowing it’s gone on this long, that I can point to a shelf filled with 50 excellent books and say, “I did that. I put those in people’s lives and gave pleasure to hundreds of thousands of readers.” And knowing we’ve got the next year’s titles all spec’d out already. Definitely more high points than low. And I’m excited to see what the future will bring.”

The thirteenth book published by Hard Case was by one of the best-selling novelist of all time, Stephen King—interestingly, that book was part of my very first review column. I asked Ardai how he managed to snag an author like King and what it did for the company.

“Stephen King’s book for us, “The Colorado Kid,” has been our best-selling title to date by far, selling almost as many copies as all our other books combined. (The initial print run for the book was more than one million copies.) And the book definitely did help put Hard Case Crime on the map, even though by the time it appeared we'd already published a dozen titles, won an Edgar and a Shamus, appeared in “USA Today” and dozens of other publications, and generally been well received. But having an original novel by Stephen King catapulted the line to a level of public awareness and attention we could never have achieved otherwise. It was very generous of Steve to let us publish the book—and though it’s not your typical Hard Case Crime title (as Steve himself said, it's more "bleu" than "noir"), it’s one I’m extremely fond of and proud to have published. How did it come about? In short, I knew that Steve was a fan of old-fashioned pulp crime fiction since he's said so in numerous places, and I approached him to see if he’d consider writing a blurb for the series. He thought about it for a while and then came back and said he did not want to write a blurb, he wanted to write a book for us instead. Needless to say, I was thrilled.”

Next: The Long Hard Look (Part II)