"Death Comes Too Late': My Washington Times On Crime Column on Charles Ardai's Short Crime Story Collection

The Washington Times published my On Crime column on Charles Ardai’s collection of short crime stories, Death Comes Too Late.

You can read the column via the link below or the below text:

'Death Comes Too Late,' A collection of 20 crime short stories - Washington Times

I love short stories. Ernest Hemingway was a great novelist, but I believe his short stories, especially “The Killers,” “Fifty Grand” and “The Battler,” are more powerful than his novels. To use a simile I believed he would have liked, his short stories are like a short right knockout punch.

I love F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” and his other fine novels, but I truly love his short stories about Pat Hobby, a hack Hollywood screenwriter. I love Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep” and his other classic crime novels, but I am truly fond of his short stories that appeared in The Black Mask magazine before he became a novelist. 

And of course, I’m fond of the great short stories of Edgar Allan Poe, O. Henry and W. Somerset Maugham, to name a few. Influenced by all these writers, my own crime short stories have appeared in online crime magazines over the years. (You can read my short crime stories at Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction Stories )

 

Another short story writer I’ve come to enjoy is Charles Ardai (seen in the above photo), the author of “Death Comes Too Late.” Mr. Ardai, the founder and publisher of Hard Case Crime, offers 20 crime stories in the collection, including “The Home Front,” which won him an Edgar Award.

 

I like his short story “Nobody Wins,” a Shamus Award finalist, about a mob enforcer who hires a private detective to find his lost love. I also like “The Shadow Line,” another private detective story.

I reached out to Mr. Ardai and asked him whether he had a favorite story in his collection.

 

“I’ll tell you what my answer should be, and then I’ll tell what my favorite is,” Mr. Ardai replied. “My answer should be ‘The Home Front’ because I won the Edgar Award for best short story. However, my secret favorite is ‘The Shadow Line’ because I love Raymond Chandler so much. I set out to write like Chandler, and I was praying that I could come up with one or two good lines.”

 

Have you always wanted to be a writer?

 

“Yes. When I was 10, there was a kids’ page in the New York Daily News, and they provided you with $10, but they only bought one from me. That was my first published piece. I wanted to be a writer desperately, but no magazine would publish a teenage writer, except that this was in the early ’80s when Atari came out with games, and suddenly magazines were reviewing video games, and no self-respecting adult writer wanted to write about Atari. So, I went to these magazines and said I’m 13 years old and can I write about these things. Some of them let me do it, so that’s how I got started as a writer. They gave me a free game and 50 bucks. I wrote my first short story for Ellery Queen magazine, and I wrote a few stories for Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock magazines, and I actually got a job working for the publisher of Ellery Queen and Hitchcock when I was 16 or 17 years old. That’s how I started writing short stories and editing collections of short stories, which is why “Death Comes Too Late” is such a throwback for me. I love short stories, and I love returning to those early days of my career.”

 

How did you begin publishing Hard Case Crime?

 

“I quit writing for a while, and I worked for companies, and I also started a couple of companies. But then in 2001, after I’ve been out of publishing for a while, the company I started was sold to a competitor. Afterwards, I was sitting with my friend Max Phillips, and we were talking about what we wanted to do. We said we missed those old pulpy, sexy and lurid paperback covers, and we asked why no one did that anymore. Then we said, hey, you know what? Why don’t we do it? We didn’t think it was going to work, yet about 20 years later, it’s still going. Believe me, we didn’t get rich doing it. But I love doing it. I love having all these books on my shelf that I created and gave to readers. Readers came back to me and said, hey, I remember books like this growing up. I loved those books, and I’m so glad you’re doing books like this again.”

I’m certain those readers will also find the short stories in “Death Comes Too Late” entertaining. And like me, they will love the book’s pulpy cover.

 

• Paul Davis’ “On Crime” column covers true crime, crime fiction and thrillers.

 

Death Comes Too Late

Charles Ardai

Hard Case Crime, $18.99, 400 pages