This publishing venture has been going on for awhile now, and having recieved a couple of the novels in the mail from Amazon today inspired this post.
http://www.hardcasecrime.com/The covers are evocative of the lurid art on crime fiction paperback originals (PBOs) from the 50's and 60's and this is very intentional, yes. They've printed new books by current authors and reprinted books by some of the greats of crime fiction, some of which had been out of print for decades. Like Ed McBain, Lawrence Block, Earl Stanley Gardner, Donald Westlake (and a book by Westlake's psuedonym Richard Stark) Donald Hamilton, David Dodge, Cornell Woolrich, etc. There's been more recent works too like HCC co-founder Charles Aradai's well regarded Little Girl Lost and a couple of favorites of mine like the collaborative novels of Ken Breun and Jason Starr, BUST and sequel SLIDE, gotta love the backcover blurbs on some of these --
5 IMPORTANT LESSONS YOU CAN LEARN BY READING BUST:
1. When you hire someone to kill your wife, don’t hire a psychopath.
2. Drano is not the best tool for getting rid of a dead body.
3. Those locks on hotel room doors? Not very secure.
4. A curly blond wig isn’t much of a disguise.
5. Secrets can kill.
The books I recieved recently were real doozies, two by Max Allan Collins, another by the first female author to be published by HCC and an original 1952 novel by the late Richard S. Prather, creator of the wildly popular hard-boiled but tongue in cheek PI Shell Scott.
First, the Collins books TWO FOR THE MONEY and DEADLY BELOVED.
Two for the Money collects the first couple of novels about Collins' professional thief character Nolan. Indeed, his first two professionally published novels ever. Much of the Nolan series (which were packaged as men's adventure novels so popular during the 70's and early 80's) is hard to find at a reasonable price, especially the middle ones and the first two, so this was a service from HCC.
Nolan originally started out as a sort of pastiche of crook characters like Westlake/Stark's Parker but has a more humanized aspect to him. He's a pro, but he's not entirely stone cold. Plus he can handle himself in the ways of violence but prefers not to.
We start off with Bait Money, where Nolan, 48 and wanting to retire from the heist business, maybe run a nightclub like he used to years ago get the chance to make a truce with the Chicago "Family", to pull off a final heist to make good with them. He's teamed up with the heist planner's nephew Jon, for that young blood/old blood flavor and they go to work. Then it's time for Blood Money, which deals with the aftermath of that last heist. Plus, there's the relationship between Nolan and Jon, which becomes a mentor/protege deal. No mushy stuff, but they do form a bond of sorts. Another interesting wrinkle is that Jon is a comics buff and sometimes rock musician. It's a shame the middle part of the series is mostly out of print.
DEADLY BELOVED is the return of Collins' hardboiled comic-book PI Ms. Tree in novel form, having appeared in a couple of short stories in the 90s.
http://www.thrillingdetective.com/tree.html Greater detail on the comic's history here.
This is a sort of Casino Royale-style reboot, updated to the present day since the original comic came out in the 80s. The inspiration was basically "what if Mike Hammer and his tough assisstant Velda got married, then Velda was widowed and took over the business?"
The very professional and very hardboiled Ms. Michael Tree, now head of Michael Tree Investigations is hired by a defense attorney to prove his client innocent. Or rather, not guilty by reason of insanity. A woman with a history of mental problems has gunned down her big-shot account husband and an HIV-positive prostitute in a no-tell motel room. Yet it all seems a little too pat, and details come up that suggest the whole thing was a set-up. The theory of one of Ms. Tree's pals on the Chicago PD is that a sinister "Event Planner" has been arranging hits on Mob targets via patsies and pawns so that there are no strong ties to organized crime. And of course, her husband's murder on their honeymoon night a year previous may have been one of these...PS great cover art on this one by Ms. Tree artist Terry Beatty.
Rising crime-fiction author Christa Faust's MONEY SHOT is a pretty grim and gritty tale set in LA with a rough, tough but likeable anti-heroine. Former porn actress Angel Dare is pushing 40 and the head of an adult modeling agency. She however finds the offer of a quick $2,500 from one of her old directors to do a porno shoot with a hot new stud in the field enticing and a bit of an ego boost. Things did not go well, as the first line shows:
"I'm sure you're wondering what a nice girl like me was doing left for dead in the trunk of a piece of shit Honda Civic out in the industrial wasteland of downtown Los Angeles. Or maybe we've met before and you're wondering why it hadn't happened sooner."
Richard Prather wrote many breezy, best-selling novels with a humorous touch about PI Shell Scott (see here for more info:
http://www.thrillingdetective.com/scott.html) but had written other novels as well. He wrote 1952's THE PEDDLER, under a psuedonym. Reprinted by HCC, with appropriately lurid cover art by Robert McGinnis who had done many of the Scott book covers during the 50's and 60's, it's a dark little story about the rise of one Tony Romano, peddler of flesh. An ambitious, ruthless pimp who steps on anyone to climb to the top of a San Francisco prostitution ring, he's a fount of snappy patter, Prather style:
"Don't give me this crap about I don't deserve nothin' because I only been working a year or so...You might as well try to tell me the guy that's been in the Army longest oughta be Chief of Staff, or the guy's been in politics longest oughta be President, or the guy's been goin' to church longest oughta be Pope. Jesus Christ, I seen guys could make doughnuts all their life and never learn where the holes go."
