Worth Singin' About
THE PUSHER tracked down Hard Case Crime's head honcho Charles Ardai to get the cover story on all those great books a'his we been seein' so much of everywhere. Along the way he also revealed the real deal on the mysterious Richard Aleas and his new book Songs of Innocence...
The Pusher: Now whaddya want I should call ya, Chuck?
Charles Ardai: They call me Mister Aleas. Actually, they don’t. All my life I’ve been a “Charles,” though Isaac Asimov and Harlan Ellison for some reason called (and, in Harlan’s case, still calls) me “Charley”. That works too. I’ll answer to anything, including “Hey, you”.
TP: First off, congratulations on your recent Edgar Award for y'short story...The Home Front.
CA: Thanks. That was a kick and a half. I’d been working on that story on and off for years. It had been rejected by both ELLERY QUEEN and ALFRED HITCHCOCK, albeit in earlier, weaker versions. Which just goes to show something, I’m not sure what.
TP: Oh, I been a fan a'your work f'some time, buddy...but before I get to tawkin' about Songs of Innocence lets speak some about Hard Case Crime. Gotta be my favourite imprint...you wanna judge a book on those covers!
CA: Getting to work with our artists on the covers is maybe my single greatest pleasure in doing Hard Case Crime. I mean, I love the stories our authors tell, I love writing some of the books myself, I love all the raves we’ve received, I love bringing back the work of authors who have unfairly been forgotten – but getting to work with artists like Robert McGinnis, Glen Orbik, Greg Manchess, Chuck Pyle, Rick Farrell, Mike Koelsch, Arthur Suydam, and more...getting to describe a scene to them and then see them turn it into a gorgeous, sexy painting worthy of the old days...it’s just a pinch-me-this-is-too-good-to-be-true caliber pleasure.
TP: So how does a guy like you get into the publishing racket...you was respectable once, right?
CA: Nah, never was what you’d really call respectable. I started writing for videogame magazines when I was thirteen, and worked all through high school and college. Wangled my way into an unpaid internship at ISAAC ASIMOV’S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE, which was published by the same folks who did QUEEN and HITCHCOCK. Turned myself into a businessperson more or less by accident. And then, a few years later, I created an Internet company called Juno – which was a great experience and gave something to millions of people, but I’m not sure you could call being involved with the dot-com boom “respectable,” exactly.
TP: So, you was always a fan of the old pulps, I'm right?
CA: Yeah. I remember coming across a big pile of ARGOSY magazines at an estate sale in Pennsylvania when I was a little kid and my mother bought them for me. My God, they stank – they’d been sitting in a mildew-infested cellar for decades. But I couldn’t stop reading them. Then I moved on to great short stories that had been collected in anthologies, and then on to the paperbacks of the 1940s and 50s and 60s. I was a voracious reader back then and read everything – even klassik litrachoor – but pulp writing (and, later, noir crime fiction) grabbed me hardest.
TP: The late Mickey Spillane – God rest his wrought-iron soul – was a big fan of Hard Case Crime, that musta been quite a kick for ya.
CA: It was. You know, we set out to recreate something that was gone, a style of publishing no-one had seen in decades, and it meant a lot to have a sort of benediction from guys who were there the first time around. I mean, imagine if you started composing and staging operettas and got a fan letter for your work from Gilbert or Sullivan. That’s what it was like to get Robert McGinnis involved with Hard Case Crime, or to get a letter from Mickey.
I remember he wrote, “At my age of 86 (in four years I’ll be 90!!!), but still don’t wear glasses and have a full head of hair, I’m kind of winding up a career, but I’ll sure be looking forward to seeing how your approach works out. Just don’t take too long!
Alas, we did take too long: We’re going to be publishing Mickey’s last stand-alone crime novel, DEAD STREET, in November, but he didn’t live to see it. I wish he could have.
TP: But Hard Case Crime has landed some pretty big hitters from the nowadays! That surprise you, I mean right off you got all the big guns firing for ya?
CA: Any writer who’s in his 50s or older today grew up reading and influenced by the sort of books we love – and some of them enjoy having a chance to play a bit in this sandbox. It was a great privilege to work with Stephen King, for instance, whose passion for old pulp fiction is second to none. It was great to work with guys like Madison Smartt Bell and Pete Hamill, and of course my long-time crime-writing heroes, Lawrence Block, Donald Westlake, and the late Ed McBain. There are some folks we haven’t managed to work with yet but who have told us they like our books – people like Dean Koontz and Jonathan Lethem and George Pelecanos. It’s always a surprise when someone you admire tells you they like what you’re doing, and it’s been gratifying that so many have.
TP: We can expect more the same? Who else ya got lined up?
CA: Well, over the next year we’re going to be publishing long-lost books by Cornell Woolrich (author of REAR WINDOW), Robert Bloch (author of PSYCHO), and of course Mickey Spillane. Also, some of the big guns we’ve published before are coming back for more: Lawrence Block, Donald Westlake, Max Allan Collins, Ken Bruen and Jason Starr, John Lange...
TP: Whoa...The Pusher's impressed, and I dunt impress easy...Down to business now...I read y'book, Songs of Innocence, quite a tale.
CA: Thanks. It’s a sequel to my first novel, LITTLE GIRL LOST, and the question I had after finishing that one was “Just how damaged would my main character be after going through what he did in that book?” I mean, I love classic pulp, in which the main character can get dragged through hell in Book One, and then when the start of Book Two rolls around, nothing has changed, he’s the same tough bastard he always was and is raring to go. But it’s not very realistic. And I thought, what if I told a story about someone who was really, really fragile after going through hell in Book One, and it’ll just take a little push now to smash him into a million splinters?
So we’ve got John Blake, former private eye, who quit his job at the end of LITTLE GIRL LOST, and he’s working a nothing job at a university, taking classes, trying to put together a new life for himself, something quiet and calm and safe, and he walks into his girlfriend’s apartment one morning and she’s lying dead in her bathtub. And it looks like suicide. But he knows better – not because she wouldn’t kill herself, she and John had talked about suicide plenty, but because they had a pact between them that if either of them ever seriously considered it, they’d call the other first. And she didn’t call. Plus there are a few odd things about the way her apartment was left. So he knows it’s not what it looks like. And he doesn’t want to get dragged back into the life, but damn it, it’s his girlfriend, and she’s dead, and someone has to pay for that.
And someone does.
TP: I'm not gonna give nuthin' away but it had me in mind of the old pulps right off...that first chapter, you fish with big hooks, brudda.
CA: My goal was to hook people right off, with something that surprises them and makes them want to find out what’s going on. So we open with the dead woman’s mother asking John to investigate her murder, and he’s putting her off, saying “It looks like suicide, it probably was suicide, you just have to accept that,” anything to make the woman go away and leave him alone – and then when she does go away, we find out that he doesn’t think it was suicide at all and is about to launch himself into hell to prove it. Plus, he’s nursing a day-old broken rib and we don’t know why. The first half of the book is a flashback that explains what was really going on in the opening scene.
TP: One way it differs from the old pulps though, I'm thinking' is the female characters...they're more rounded, and I dunt mean on the hips.
CA: What can I say, I love women. Much more interesting than men.
Though I have to say that SONGS OF INNOCENCE is, deliberately, a very solipsistic novel – you’re trapped very tightly inside poor John Blake’s head, and only glimpse the women in his life through his skewed perspective. Dorrie Burke is dead before the book starts and only gets to speak a few lines in flashback; Susan, John’s ex, keeps trying to break through to him but he keeps her at a distance; conversations with Dorrie’s mother bookend the story, but she’s kept at a remove otherwise. And then there are all the sex workers John meets when investigating Dorrie’s secret life as a rub-and-tug girl – like Julie, who offers her mother’s nugget of wisdom, “A girl with nice tits need never starve” – but while I tried to animate them a bit, give them a bit of emotional life rather than just commenting on the milky-white firmness of their bosom, etc., they make only modest incursions into the story. The book’s told from John’s first-person perspective and there’s a sense in which he’s really the only character in it. Which is not to say he’s an egomaniac – quite the opposite, actually. But the boy lives inside his head a bit more than is healthy.
TP: The book got a fuller quality all round – over the old pulps that is – there's no sense of rush to The End...it's a tale with class, something to be savoured.
CA: I’m glad. I do relish the velocity of the old pulps and it’s something I tried to capture in my own writing, but I think it’s good to balance that headlong rush into the next scene with some measured consideration of what’s going on. I mean, John does quite a lot of running in this book, but he also has some moments when he sits and thinks, and those tend to be the more painful moments. Booklist wrote, “Some readers might want a bit more action and a bit less soul-searching, but with a sleuth named after a mystical, romantic poet, should we expect anything less?” Fair enough.
TP: I ain't blowin' smoke, this book's crafted proper, there's sumthin' flawless about it like you been at work real hard...you a big student of the craft?
CA: Ah, you’re a charmer, but flawless it ain’t. I can’t look at the thing without seeing its flaws. But hopefully there’s enough there that’s good that it outweighs the bits I tried and tried and tried to make right and just couldn’t. I did work hard at it – that’s why it took three years to get it out the door – but time and effort don’t guarantee a good book, nor do their lack guarantee a bad one. Voltaire wrote CANDIDE in a couple of weeks; to bring it back to our genre, Larry Block wrote his insanely brilliant SUCH MEN ARE DANGEROUS in, I think, sixteen days. Mickey Spillane wrote I, THE JURY in nineteen. Sometimes the words just flow. And sometimes they don’t. But putting a lot of care and work into something sometimes just makes it worse.
TP: You got a writing class going on in the book – now I heard some wacky stuff 'bout them classes, you got anything to say 'bout 'em?
CA: When I was a student at Columbia, I took a lot of writing classes, mostly to round out my schedule and give me time to write, which I wouldn’t otherwise have had. Looking back on it, it’s interesting to see the people that emerged from that crucible: I was workshopping my crime fiction side by side with Edwidge Danticat, who is now an acclaimed literary writer; Jenji Kohan, who wrote for Tracey Ullman and then created the TV series “Weeds”; and Alex Kuczynzki, now a columnist for the New York Times and author of BEAUTY JUNKIES.
There are probably some other notable classmates I’m forgetting. But then there were plenty of bad writers in those classes, too, and even the good ones...it was a pleasure to read their work, but just how coherent a classroom experience are you going to have when one day you’re critiquing one of Edwidge’s lovely, important stories about suffering in Haiti and the next day it’s an Ardai pulp yarn about some poor sucker who accidentally takes a terrorist bomb off an airplane because it happens to be packed in a suitcase that looks just like his, and then spends the rest of the day unknowingly carrying it around town? I’m glad to have been exposed to other types of writing, but I can’t say that the workshop experience is really all that effective a mechanism for improving a writer’s work.
TP: Now back to those short stories a'yours...we got fans reading this gonna be wonderin' when you gonna be making a delivery for The Pusher?
CA: Hell of a good question. I haven’t written a new story in some time, but if and when I do...
TP: Hey, we covered some good stuff, Mr Ardai...I like yer style, thanks for dropping by.
CA: Thanks, man. You do good work, and I’m proud to be a part of it.
PUSH-UPS: Charles Ardai gives The Pusher three of the best . . .
1) SUCH MEN ARE DANGEROUS by Lawrence Block (originally published as by “Paul Kavanagh,” the name of the book’s sociopathic narrator).
2) QUEENPIN by Megan Abbott (an honorary Hard Case Crime novel, though by a twist of fate we didn’t wind up publishing it).
3) BLAZE by Richard Bachman, introduction by Stephen King (another honorary Hard Case Crime novel, as you’ll read in the introduction; it’s an amazing story and hardboiled crime fiction as pure as you could want).
