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.”
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