Charles Ardai was wrong. Thank God.

When he and his partners launched the modern-day pulp fiction imprint Hard Case Crime in September 2004 with two books -- Lawrence Block's Grifter's Game and Max Phillips' Fade to Blonde -- he expected to put out a half dozen books or so. Instead, E. Howard Hunt's House Dick, which came out this month, was the 54th, and there are another eight in the pipeline that take the imprint through the end of this year.

The list is impressive. The imprint has issued lost classics from the likes of Block, Robert Bloch and Donald Westlake, and the work of hard-hitting newer names to the genre like Allan Guthrie, Christa Faust and Jason Starr. Ardai himself has penned three of the books, two as Richard Aleas (Little Girl Lost and Songs of Innocence), and one under his own name, Fifty-to-One. The latter is a fantastic bit of meta-fiction, telling the story of a guy named Charles who publishes a line of pulpy crime fiction books. Each chapter title takes its name from one of the 50 books in the series up to that point, with the action somehow incorporating that title. It is clever, funny and very well written.

In March, Hard Case Crime issued what will likely be the last book from Westlake, The Cutie. Oddly enough, it was also his first. The book was originally published nearly 50 years ago as The Mercenaries. It shows that Westlake had it from the very beginning, and is further evidence that Hard Case Crime is doing a real public service for fans of this kind of fiction by unearthing things we wouldn't otherwise have the chance to read.

As if that wasn't enough, Ardai is set to introduce a new series, the Adventures of Gabriel Hunt. The books will follow the titular hero through a number of fanciful adventures. "Backed by the resources of the $100 million Hunt Foundation and armed with his trusty Colt revolver, Gabriel Hunt has always been ready for anything—but is he prepared for the adventures that lie in wait for him?" The first, Hunt at the Well of Eternity, was a ripping read penned by James Reasoner that takes Hunt into the wilds of South America. Future titles will come quarterly, written by Ardai, Faust, Nicholas Kaufmann, David J. Schow and Raymond Benson.

TIRBD: Writing Fifty-to-One gave you the opportunity to go back and look at Hard Case Crime's back catalog. Any thoughts about what you've been able to put out, particularly when weighed against your initial expectations?

CA: Well, our initial expectations were that we might only do a half dozen books and then stop; since we're now closing in rapidly on our 60th title, clearly our expectations were too modest. Now, bigger is not always better (I'd rather eat a half-pound tomato than one of those 50-pound monstrosities you see trotted out to promote one weed killer or another), but in this case I'm proud of having delivered not just a handful of good reading experiences but a steady stream over the course of what's now (rather to my astonishment) half a decade. It's not as though there was no hardboiled crime fiction for people to read and enjoy before we came along, but I know that as a reader I felt starved for a good, old-fashioned Gold Medal-style series that reliably delivered something new I'd enjoy reading every month or two. That's what I'm proudest of having brought back.

In terms of the individual books, I'm glad to see cases where we reprinted one book by a largely forgotten author and then other publishers picked up the reins and brought out other work from his catalogue. This happened with Richard Powell, for instance, and Gil Brewer and Wade Miller, and even to some extent Richard Stark -- the reissuing of the Parker books might not have happened, or not the way it did, if it hadn't been for our bringing some of Donald Westlake's other early work back into print.

How did you plan out Fifty-to-One? Was the plot entirely dictated by the chapter titles, which were taken from the 50 books published up to that point?

Yes, the titles really were the key. We had a book called Blackmailer, so I knew there needed to be a blackmailer in the book -- and since that was our 32nd title out of 50, the blackmailer had to show up (or be revealed as such, or something) roughly at the two-thirds mark in the story. We had a book called Home is the Sailor, so boats had to figure into the story somehow. Chapter 30 would be called The Vengeful Virgin, so I'd damn well better have established that some character was a virgin before that, and I'd also have to give her something to be vengeful about. And so on. I tried not to plan too much too early, just to preserve the fun of improvisation -- I like working without a net and thought the feeling of seat-of-the-pants invention would add to the comic tone of the book. But I did try to keep all the titles in mind as I went and did always have a sense of where the story would ultimately end.

You wrote this under your own name rather than your pseudonym, Richard Aleas. Any reason for that? Is there a different approach or mindset between the two?

Richard Aleas wrote two very bleak, very sad, basically tragic stories. It didn't seem right, somehow, for him to turn around and author a frothy comedy, any more than it would have for Richard Stark to write Somebody Owes Me Money or The Hot Rock. Also, Fifty-to-One was about a guy named Charles who edits a line of books called Hard Case Crime, so it seemed appropriate -- in keeping with the hall-of-mirrors spirit of the enterprise -- for the book also to be written by a guy named Charles who edits a line of books called Hard Case Crime.

You have found success bringing out older work from legendary authors. Are others now beating down your door hoping for a chance to do the same? Anyone in particular you're still working to land?

The sad thing about legendary authors who published older work is that most of them are no longer alive to beat down doors, mine or anyone else's. This is one of the problems, actually, and one of the reasons I feel it's so important that there be some publishers out there who are working to keep their names alive. Fifty years ago, everyone knew Richard Prather's name; today, only hardcore aficionados do. Will it be the same in a few decades for giants like McBain and Spillane and Westlake? I hope not. But it's not enough to hope. You have to do something to keep their work in front of people's eyes.

That said, there are certainly living authors who have contacted us, including some fairly well known ones, and we receive such inquiries with great enthusiasm. It's hard to know in advance which ones will bear fruit and which will not -- the more legendary an author is, the more demands there are on his her or her time -- but hopefully we'll have some fun surprises to serve up for readers each year.

What about newer authors -- how many submissions do you receive in a year and how many of those receive serious consideration? Do you commission work from authors or seek out specific writers to contribute to the imprint?

The volume of submissions varies -- some days we get none, but some days we get a dozen. On average it's about two or three submissions per day, which adds up to more than 1,000 per year. Since we only publish four or five original novels each year (at most), we have to say no to well over 99% of the books we see, including some very good ones. But the positive side of all this rejection is that it gives us the opportunity to be exceptionally selective, not just in terms of quality, but in terms of maintaining a consistent tone and flavor for the series. There have been cases where a book has been excellent but just didn't feel like a Hard Case Crime book; if we had to buy two or three every month, we'd have had to buy it, but since we only buy maybe one every other or every third month, we could hold out for a book that was just as good but a better fit.

We do sometimes approach authors to see whether they might be interested in submitting something to us, but with very, very rare exceptions we don't actually commission books, just because if you do that, you're pretty much stuck publishing the result even if you're not crazy about it. Better to just put out an open call and then take the best of the best, rather than asking a specific author to write a specific book for you.

January brought the last book from Donald Westlake, which coincidentally enough was also his first. What was it like to work with him, and what have we lost with his passing?

Don was a pleasure in every way. Really. He was gracious and funny and responsive and game to let us bring his most obscure books back into print, and willing to re-edit the books when something didn't make as much sense to a modern reader as it would have to a reader 40 or 50 years ago. He took genuine pleasure in how our books looked -- he loved the art, and it was so much fun to make him happy. I miss exchanging e-mail with him, and I miss having new Westlake books to read. At his recent memorial service in New York, Peter Straub read the last thing Don ever wrote, two chapters of a new Dortmunder novel, and it was wonderful. A last bit of Don's voice, making us laugh one more time.

What those of us who knew him lost is a friend. What all of us who treasure crime fiction lost is a great, great writer.

In May, you'll introduce a new line of books with the Gabriel Hunt adventure series. How did that come about and what is in store for readers who pick up these new titles?

I'm a passionate fan of crime fiction, obviously, but it's not the only genre I love; another is adventure fiction. I grew up reading Edgar Rice Burroughs and Dumas and H. Rider Haggard and Sax Rohmer (my father's copies) and Edgar Wallace (my mother's), and watching old Buster Crabbe serials whenever they were shown on PBS. Then when I was eleven and a half, my love of the genre was galvanized -- as it was for so many of my generation -- when "Raiders of the Lost Ark" hit theaters. I had no idea what it was when my parents dragged me to see it; I figured it was something about Noah's Ark, maybe in the vein of the cheesy occult TV series of the time, "In Search Of..." But, oh boy. I left that movie theater trembling. Literally: trembling. It took an hour just for my pulse to return to its normal pace. And ever since that day I've been telling myself that one day I'd try my hand at telling an adventure story that would make someone else feel the way I felt when I walked out of that theater. Gabriel Hunt is my chance to do that.

On the flip side, I have to admit I was disappointed in the last Indiana Jones film -- with 19 years to work on the script, it felt like they should have been able to come up with something better. In some sense, each Gabriel Hunt book is my attempt to give readers the experience that the fourth Indiana Jones film should have been, but wasn't. Pure, exhilarating popcorn entertainment, with thrills and chills and spills, men trading blows on the back of a speeding truck, explorers delving into dangerous tunnels lit by flickering torches, beautiful women imperiled and imperiling...all the stuff that makes your heart beat faster and your palms sweat. I want to excite a physical response from readers. I want them genuinely to be short of breath when they put the books down. That's what the Gabriel Hunt series is all about, and I'm having a blast working on it.

With several different writers tackling the same character, does each subsequent author need to be aware of what came before, or are they simply given a character sketch and other details and set loose?

Actually, I wrote a fairly detailed bible for the series before we started, and all the writers worked from that when coming up with their stories. (Much the way you would if you were writing a new TV series.) The writers pitched their stories to me, and I worked with them to tweak them. Then we all sat down to write our own manuscripts in isolation, though some of the writers would occasionally toss a question my way: Does Gabriel know how to fly a plane? Does he smoke? What does he like to drink? And so on. Eventually, the manuscripts started flowing in, and then I went to work editing them, and that editing process smooths out any rough edges and inconsistencies, either of plot or voice. In the end, even though each book is written by a different "ghost," we want Gabriel's voice and personality to come through the same in every book...and that's my job. Not a bad job, either.

Labels: books, crime fiction, Monday Interview