Hard Case Crime (via Derek Raymond)

I remember when I first discovered Hard Case Crime. In 2000, when I U-turned from writing speculative (or slipstream) fiction, I turned to crime. Not literally, you understand; just crime fiction.
I'd grown up surrounded by my dad's voracious love of crime novels, but hadn't myself caught the bug until a fellow writer, Joel Lane introduced me to the novels of Derek Raymond.

Raymond was the nom de plume of UK novelist Robin Cook, who in the 80's started the Factory series, his sequence of pitch black police procedurals, a kind of metaphysical noir journey into the heart of darkness of an unnamed police detective.

The book Joel introduced me to, I Was Dora Suarez is the most highly regarded and grimmest book of the bunch. Its manuscript caused Raymond's publisher Dan Franklin to vomit over his desk, such was the intensity of the work.

And It's fair to say that after that book, Raymond changed everything about my writing direction and style. Before Suarez, I was writing pretty dark stuff, but like most fledgling writers, was still finding my voice. I was hugely influenced by Joel Lane's work, and by his friendship and guidance, but by 2000, I felt I was chasing my tail. Then I sat down and began writing something entirely different: Leaving Seven Sisters was about two floundering men in middle age, broken marriages and the beautiful dead daughter of a corrupt MP. It was a dark, bizarrely romantic piece of British noir, and got me nominated for the Crime Writers' Association Short story Dagger. After that,I didn't look back. Finding your voice is one of the hardest things to do in writing, but when you do, it's immensely liberating. I've returned now and then to horror and SF, but the sense of noir lingers in those stories too. It's what I do now. My novel, Secret Skin is a hard-boiled foray into the private eye genre. I love playing with the cliches and tropes of noir, updating them to apply to our current ways of life. In a previous post, I reprinted an excerpt from The Remains of the Richest Man in The World, which contains an ex-con ex boxer, another failed marriage, a young prostitute and a grand old double-cross. All noir cliches, refracted through an English modern-day sensibility.

After Raymond, I began to devour crime fiction: Ian Rankin was recommended by one of my oldest friends, Chris Monk. I loved Rebus: he's one of the great British cops; an angry cop, operating from the fringes of the law. Then there was Mark Billingham's Thorne books, Mo Hayder's staggeringly bleak Birdman and The Treatment. And James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux, one of crime fiction and indeed literatures' great creations.

But of course, noir to me (and to most) is epitomised by the paperback crime novels from the 30's to the 60's. James M. Cain (Double Indemnity), Jim Thompson (The Grifters, The Getaway), Cornell Woolrich (Rear Window). There's nothing finer than finding a shabby paperback in a second-hand bookstore by Mickey Spillaine or Lawrence Block or Carter Brown. Not just for the raw hard-boiled thrills contained within, but often just for the jaw-droppingly beautiful covers by artists like Robert McGinnis (featured in one of my earlier posts (Let The Pictures Do The Talking).

And this of course brings us to Hard Case Crime. Charles Ardai and Max Phillips' love for the form of those dime-store thrills just leaps from these books. As well as publishing new fiction by up and comers as well as established pros like Stephen King and Lawrence Block, they bring back into print some lost classics of the pulp era.

It's all about noir: determined detectives and dangerous dames, fortune hunters and vengeance seekers, criminals on the lamb, jewel smugglers and hired psycopaths...

I'd recommed you go and just buy a handful of them. Pick any; they all have their own charms to offer. But I'd particularly recommend Ardai's pseudononymously-penned Little Girl Lost and its sequel Song of Innocence; George Axelrod's (screenwriter of Breakfast At Tiffany's and The Manchurian Candidate) Blackmailer; King's Colorado Kid; and the recent Money Shot, by the outrageously talented Christa Faust.

And even if you don't like the books, then you could just buy them for the covers. All new original art that perfectly captures the era of pulp noir by Robert McGinnis and Glenn Orbik.

Just recently Ardai published Fifty-To-One, the fifty book anniversary of Hard Case Crime. Told in fifty chapters, each named after the fifty books published. Of particular interest to me is the upcoming Honey In His Mouth, by Doc Savage creator Lester Dent, a book that has never seen print until now.

So go visit Hard Case here, and grab yourself some hard-boiled thrills. It's good to know that in fifty years time, some young writer will track these paperbacks down in a second-hand bookstore and keep the noir flame alive.