Even before Stephen King decided to publish his latest novel, “The Colorado Kid,” with HardCase Crime, Charles Ardai and Max Phillips were attracting well-known authors, such as Lawrence Block, to their brand-new publishing company. Normally, that wouldn’t be a newsworthy story. But the publishing company begun by Ardai and Phillips produces only paperback books, so authors like Block and King bring their manuscripts to the table knowing that their latest work won’t be published as a hardcover.
And because publishing, like every other industry, is all about profit, skipping hardcover publication not only cuts into the bottom line, it smacks of low-rent writing. In the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, paperback originals were the territory of hard-boiled stories that avoided adjectives and artiness like the plague.
Those pocket-sized novels were all about story, story and more story. But with two of their novels winning awards this year (“The Confession,” by Domenic Stansberry, won an Edgar Award and “Fade to Blonde,” by HardCase co-
founder Phillips, won a Shamus Award), the men of HardCase Crime Fiction can point to their novels when talking about the quality of writing, as well as good old-fashioned storytelling.
“Some of the best writing today,” says Ardai, “is being done in paperback originals, not just our books, but books from publishers such as Akashic and some of the big houses, too. We’re proud to be able to contribute to it in our way. Our goal is not to publish ‘literature’; it’s to entertain, plain and simple, but sometimes along the way, while you’re telling an entertaining story, you end up producing something of real literary merit.”
Writers such as Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald, Elmore Leonard, Donald Westlake and Block got their starts writing paperback novels. Featuring cover paintings now celebrated for their unique style, the stories in those paperback potboilers usually involved some sort of crime or mystery and sported prose that was usually terse.
Ardai, a managing director for an investment group, and Phillips, who runs a marketing communications group, set out to, in the words of Ardai, “revive the style of the great old (paperback) imprints we loved, such as Gold Medal and Graphic and Popular Library and PermaBooks.” Their enthusiasm and professionalism – in addition to business and marketing skills, both men are established writers – drew the attention of a lot of big names in publishing.
Accomplished writers, such as Edgar Award-winning Grandmaster Block; Max Allan Collins, who wrote “Road to Perdition,” which was made into a recent movie starring Tom Hanks; and Donald Westlake, another Grandmaster and an Oscar nominee for the screenplay of his own novel, “The Grifters,” have granted republication rights to some of their well-known but out-of-print noir classics.
Asked how HardCase was able to swing such a sweet reprint deal, Ardai responds, “The authors we’ve contacted have been thrilled to participate. They recognize that we have real affection and respect for the material we publish, and we produce editions they’re proud to have on their shelves.”
And the original fiction HardCase has published so far has been every bit as good – if not better than – as its reprints.
“The Confession,” by Domenic Stansberry (219 pages, $6.99), features Jake Danser, a shifty narrator who spends his days as a forensic psychologist and his nights as a Lothario, sleeping with as many women as possible (as long as his wife doesn’t find out). When one of those women turns up dead, Danser becomes a suspect – rightly so as his necktie is found around her throat.
Set in Scotland, Allan Guthrie’s “Kiss Her Goodbye” (223 pages, $6.99) offers up even more characters of questionable morals: Joe Hope, an enforcer, and Cooper the Edinburgh loan shark who employs him. When Joe’s teenage daughter is found dead, an apparent suicide, he joins forces with the man he first blamed for her death to solve a mystery that is more complicated than it first appears.
“Dutch Uncle,” by Peter Pavia (256 pages, $6.99) offers a bit of humor (think Carl Hiaasen) in telling the story of a likable, small-time crook named Harry Healy who has just been sprung from jail and must deal with a young beachnik who can’t keep her clothes on, a gun-wielding sociopath and a body.
“Fade to Blonde,” by Phillips (220 pages, $6.99), begins with a line that oozes classic noir sensibility: “Well, maybe she wasn’t all that blonde, but it’d be a crime to call hair like that light brown.” Having come to L.A. to be a screenwriter, Ray Corson makes the now-classic mistake of falling for a femme fatale. This one takes the form of Rebecca LaFontaine, who claims she needs protection. Corson soon learns she may be deadlier than her enemies.
Even Ardai got in on the game, with “Little Girl Lost” (221 pages, $6.99), written under the pseudonym, Richard Aleas, featuring a victim who wasn’t all she seemed to be and a private investigator who is her ex-boyfriend.
But for HardCase, the biggest publishing coup yet came when they asked Stephen King – whose love for pulp-era fiction is legendary – to blurb some of their books for publicity. King did them one better and wrote his own paperback original, “The Colorado Kid,” a noirish novel that is more about mysteries left unsolved than men with baseball bats and bodies left in unmarked graves.
Filled with lots of Maine atmosphere – the sort that only King can provide – readers soon learn, along with intern reporter Stephanie McCann (via her bosses at “The Weekly Islander”), that the solutions to the mystery behind such stories aren’t as important as the sense of wonder they inspire.
Written in the vein of many of King’s recent, shorter works – “Lisey’s Story” or “The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon” – “The Colorado Kid” is less about murder and mayhem and more about the human heart in conflict with itself. It’s a good, solid piece of writing that shows off King’s skills with character and dialogue.
“It’s not a conventional mystery,” Ardai says. “But it’s quintessential noir: the story of ordinary people grappling with dark forces beyond their control and comprehension. It’s about how investigators are born out of an encounter with the naggingly unanswerable.”
Speaking to the windfall of landing a book by King, Ardai says, “Elated doesn’t begin to describe our reaction. Steve is an author I’ve admired for years. He’s one the most beloved authors in the world, and for him to decide to play on our team, as it were, was an act of enormous generosity and a great vote of confidence.”
