"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

My Washington Times 'On Crime' Column On A Look Back At Ray Bradbury's Crime Stories

 The Washington Times ran my On Crime column on Ray Bradbury’s crime stories. 

Ray Bradbury, who was born in 1920 and died in 2012 at the age of 91, wrote 400 short stories and nearly 50 books in his lifetime. He is best known for his novels, such as “Fahrenheit 451,” “The Martian Chronicles” and “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” as well as other science fiction, fantasy and horror stories. 

He is perhaps less known for his crime stories. 

It is fitting then that “Hard Case Crime,” a publisher of hard-boiled crime fiction ranging from lost and out of print masterpieces to novels written by today’s practitioners of the crime genre, has published a collection of his crime fiction during the Ray Bradbury Centennial. 

“Killer, Come Back to Me: The Crime Stories of Ray Bradbury,” features 20 short stories from the master storyteller. 

“I … took all these pages and put them in my talking box. That was the box where my ideas lay and spoke to me early mornings … so my stories got written.” In the early 1980s, Ray Bradbury used his imaginary talking box to compose “Death is a Lonely Business,” an experiment in autobiography that emerged from decades of suspense crime stories told through unexpected plot twists and vividly dark metaphors,” Jonathan R. Eller writes in the introduction. “If you want to know how Ray Bradbury developed the power to write this late-life novel and its sequels, you must read through the tales gathered here in ‘Killer, Come Back to Me.’”  

Mr. Eller noted that selecting the stories for the collection was a challenge that was eagerly embraced. He wrote that an earlier collection, “A Memory of Murder,” selected a number of the stories from Ray Bradbury’s Popular Publications magazine sales of the mid-1940s. 

“ ‘Hard Case Crime’ publisher Charles Ardai, Bradbury’s long-time agent Michael Congdon, and I eventually reached across a far broader span of time to bring together the best early stories with the latter tales that document Bradbury’s best crime suspense efforts written in the 1950s and early 1960s,” Mr. Eller writes. “In the process, we harvested three of Bradbury’s noir-era tales that had evaded the earlier collection entirely: “The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl”; our title story, “Killer, Come Back to Me”; and “Where Everything Ends,” the long-unpublished source text for Bradbury’s milestone 1985 detective novel, “Death Is a Lonely Business.” 

The title story is about how the girlfriend of a deceased gangster finds and grooms a man into a replica of her late killer boyfriend and stands behind him as he takes over a criminal gang. Other clever and well-written stories are about a ventriloquist’s dummy, a child who insists she hears a voice coming from a grave, and a time traveler.   

You can read the rest of the column below or via the below link:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/nov/3/a-look-back-at-ray-bradburys-crime-stories/

Note: The above photo of Ray Bradbury was taken by Alan Light.

Mickey Spillane Turns 100: Max Allan Collins On Sex, Violence, And Mike Hammer

As I noted in my Crime Beat column on the late crime writer, Mickey Spillane's I, the Jury was one of the first crime thrillers I read as a boy. I thought it was terrific.

The novel was tough, violent and sexy. I loved the book's wild ending. I thought it was a cool book.

I went on to read better crime novels and thrillers, like the works of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ian Fleming, Eric Ambler and others, but I remember fondly Spillane's I, the Jury like one remembers his first girlfriend.

I love Spillane's "fuck you" attitude regarding critics. Despite the terrible reviews he received during his life, he sold millions of copies of his books. He wrote unabashedly for money and he said his books were the chewing gum of American literature.

CrimeReads.com offers a piece by Max Allan Collins, himself a crime writer, and a friend to the late Mickey Spillane. He has completed many of Spillane’s unfinished works, included the newly published, The Last Stand.

In July of 2006, at the age of 88, the last major mystery writer of the twentieth century left the building. Only a handful of writers in the genre—Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler among them—achieved such superstar status.

Spillane’s position, however, is unique—reviled by many mainstream critics, despised and envied by a number of his contemporaries in the very field he revitalized, the creator of Mike Hammer had an impact not just on mystery and suspense fiction but popular culture in general.

The success of the paperback reprint editions of his startlingly violent and sexy novels—tens of millions of copies sold—jumpstarted the explosion of so-called “paperback originals,” for the next quarter-century the home of countless Spillane imitators, and his redefinition of the action hero as a tough guy who mercilessly executed villains and slept with beautiful, willing women remains influential (Sin City is Frank Miller’s homage).

When Spillane published I, the Jury in 1947, he introduced in Mike Hammer one of the most famous of all fictional private eyes, and one unlike any P.I. readers had met before. Hammer swears vengeance over the corpse of an army buddy who lost an arm in the Pacific, saving the detective’s life. No matter who the villain turns out to be, Hammer will not just find him, but kill him—even if it’s a her.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://crimereads.com/mickey-spillane-turns-100/

You can also read my Crime Beat column on Mickey Spillane via the below link:

www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2015/03/my-crime-beat-column-look-back-at-crime.html 

'Thieves Fall Out': Gore Vidal's Crime Fiction

Hard Case Crime publishes great hardboiled crime fiction that ranges from lost noir masterpieces to new novels by today’s best crime writers.

A notible feature of Hard Case Crime novels are their book covers that featuring original cover art in the grand old pulp style. They remind me of the crime novels I read as a kid in the early 1960s.

Hard Case Crime has now published a crime novel called Thieves Fall Out, which was written by the late Gore Vidal when he was a young man. Although I don't subscribe to Vidal's world-view and politics, I think he was a good writer and I enjoyed his historical novels Lincoln and Burr.

Geoffrey Wansell at the British newspaper the Daily Mail offers a review of Vidal's Thieves Fall Out.

An unpublished gem of pulp fiction by the late literary master Goral Vidal, aged 28, and unavailable for 60 years, this is an absolute delight from start to finish.

Using the pseudoym of his great-uncle, Vidal elegantly paints a vivid portrait of Egypt in the years of King Farouk in the 1950s, when everything in Cariro was laced with treachery and every person stained indelibly with the taint of corruption.  

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-3023681/CRIME.html

Hard Case Crime To Publish Two Lost Novels By Ed McBain

When I was a teenager I read and enjoyed Ed McBain's 87th Precinct crime novels, as well as his other crime novels, such as A Matter of Conviction. That novel about New York street gangs was made into one of my favorite films from the 1960s, The Young Savages, which starred Burt Lancaster and Telly Salvalas.

I also read his literary novels, such as The Blackboard Jungle, written under his name Evan Hunter, which he legally changed from his name at birth, Salvatore Lombino.

So I was pleased to learn that Hard Case Crime has announced that they are publishing two lost novels by the late great crime writer. (I love Hard Case Crime's book covers).

You can read the Hard Case Crime announcement below:

New York, NY; London, UK (January 21, 2015) – Hard Case Crime, the award-winning line of pulp-styled crime novels from editor Charles Ardai and publisher Titan Books, will publish two lost novels by best-selling crime novelist Ed McBain, creator of the legendary “87^th Precinct” series and recipient of the Mystery Writers of America’s prestigious Grand Master Award. Both books were originally published in the 1950s under other names (neither was ever credited to Ed McBain), and both have been unavailable for more than 50 years.

SO NUDE, SO DEAD was McBain’s first crime novel and tells the story of a piano prodigy turned heroin addict who wakes up in a seedy hotel room to find his companion of the night before – a beautiful singer and fellow addict – murdered in bed beside him. On the run from the police and growing desperate for a fix, he has to find the real killer or face a date with the electric chair. 

CUT ME IN is the story of a New York literary agent who is forced to play private detective when his widely loathed, philandering partner is shot to death in his office. Was the killer one of the women the dead man was sleeping with? Or was the motive for his murder tied up with the contract for a lucrative television deal that’s missing from the office safe…? The book offers a dark and sexy crime story mixed with a pull-no-punches satire of the Manhattan business world in the pre-MAD MEN era, informed by McBain’s own personal experiences working in an ethically dubious literary agency early in his career.

Hard Case Crime will publish SO NUDE, SO DEAD July 14, 2015, with a brand new cover painting in the classic pulp style by award-winning illustrator Gregory Manchess. The same month, Hard Case Crime will also re-issue its one previous McBain title, THE GUTTER AND THE GRAVE, for the first time ever in trade paperback format. CUT ME IN is scheduled for a January 12, 2016 publication and will feature a new cover by legendary painter Robert McGinnis.

As a special bonus, each of the three books will also include a long-lost private-eye novelette by McBain starring Matt Cordell, the detective from THE GUTTER AND THE GRAVE. These three novelettes were originally published in pulp magazines of the 1950s and haven’t been seen in more than half a century.

“We were fortunate to get to work with Ed McBain at the very end of his life on THE GUTTER AND THE GRAVE, and we’ve been looking for a way to bring readers more of his work ever since,” said Charles Ardai. “We were thrilled to discover these terrific early works, which essentially no one alive today has ever read. It’s like having two new McBain novels – a huge treat for his millions of fans.”

About Hard Case Crime

Called “the best new American publisher to appear in the last decade” by Neal Pollack in The Stranger, Hard Case Crime has been nominated for and/or won numerous honors since its inception including the Edgar, the Shamus, the Anthony, the Barry, and the Spinetingler Award.  The series’ books have been adapted for television and film, with two features currently in development at Universal Pictures, a TV series based on Max Allan Collins’ Quarry novels in development by Cinemax, and the TV series Haven in its fifth season on SyFy.  Recent Hard Case Crime titles include Stephen King’s #1 New York Times bestseller, Joyland; James M. Cain’s lost final novel, The Cocktail Waitress; a series of eight lost novels written by Michael Crichton under the pseudonym “John Lange”; and Brainquake, the final novel of writer/filmmaker Samuel Fuller. Hard Case Crime is published through a collaboration between Winterfall LLC and Titan Publishing Group. www.hardcasecrime.com

About Titan Publishing Group

Titan Publishing Group is an independently owned publishing company, established in 1981, comprising three divisions: Titan Books, Titan Magazines/Comics and Titan Merchandise.  Titan Books, nominated as Independent Publisher of the Year 2011, has a rapidly growing fiction list encompassing original fiction and reissues, primarily in the areas of science fiction, fantasy, horror, steampunk and crime. Recent crime and thriller acquisitions include Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins’ all-new Mike Hammer novels, the Matt Helm series by Donald Hamilton, and the entire backlist of the Queen of Spy Writers, Helen MacInnes.  Titan Books also has an extensive line of media- and pop culture-related non-fiction, graphic novels, and art and music books. The company is based at offices in London, but operates worldwide, with sales and distribution in the U.S. and Canada being handled by Random House.  www.titanbooks.com  

Mystery Writers Of America Announces 2015 Grand Masters Lois Duncan and James Ellroy Plus 2015 Raven And Ellery Queen Award Winners

The Mystery Writers of America announced their Grand Masters and Edgar Award winners.

 

NEW YORK, Dec. 12, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Lois Duncan and James Ellroy have been chosen as the 2015 Grand Masters by Mystery Writers of America (MWA). MWA's Grand Master Award represents the pinnacle of achievement in mystery writing and was established to acknowledge important contributions to this genre, as well as for a body of work that is both significant and of consistent high quality. Ms. Duncan and Mr. Ellroy will be presented with their awards at the Edgar Awards Banquet, which will be held at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City on Wednesday, April 29, 2015.

 

... The Raven Award recognizes outstanding achievement in the mystery field outside the realm of creative writing. Two Raven Awards will be awarded in 2015: one to the Jon and Ruth Jordan and the other to Kathryn Kennison.

 

... The Ellery Queen Award was established in1983 to honor "outstanding writing teams and outstanding people in the mystery-publishing industry. This year the Board chose to honor Charles Ardai, editor of Hard Case Crime. Hard Case Crime debuted in 2004, as an homage to the great pulp fiction paperbacks of the 1950's and 1960's (the 'golden age of paperbacks'); the very books that helped shape and influence many generations of crime writers as well as the genre itself. Launched by Ardai and Max Phillips, Hard Case almost immediately had an impact on the crime fiction world—Domenic Stansberry's The Confession won the Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original and several others were nominated in the years following. The publishing company has also brought back into print forgotten gems by Donald Westlake, Erle Stanley Gardner, Harlan Ellison, Pete Hamill, and Lawrence Block. In the decade since its launch, Hard Case has published over 100 books and has also produced some excellent new titles, making short lists for almost every award in the mystery genre. Their list looks like a who's who in American crime fiction.

 

... The Edgar Awards, or "Edgars," as they are commonly known, are named after MWA's patron saint Edgar Allan Poe and are presented to authors of distinguished work in various categories. MWA is the premier organization for mystery writers, professionals allied to the crime-writing field, aspiring crime writers, and those who are devoted to the genre. The organization encompasses more than 3,000 members including authors of fiction and non-fiction books, screen and television writers, as well as publishers, editors, and literary agents.

 

You can read the rest of the announcement via the below link:

 

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mystery-writers-of-america-announces-2015-grand-masters-lois-duncan-and-james-ellroy-plus-2015-raven-and-ellery-queen-award-winners-300008721.html 

Happy Birthday To Author Michael Crichton

As Biography.com notes, today is the birthday of the late author Michael Crichton.

You can read a piece about his life and watch a video clip via the below link:

http://www.biography.com/people/michael-crichton-381010

In addtion to his sci-fi and medical thrillers, Crichton also wrote crime thrillers, such as Rising Sun and The Great Train Robbery. Crichton also directed Sean Connery and Donald Sutherland in the film The Great Train Robbery.

Hard Case Crime has recently published Crichton's early crime thrillers, written under the name John Lange. I happen to be reading one of the early crime thrillers, Grave Descend.

    

'The Comedy Is Finished,' A Time-Capsule Crime Caper By The Late Donald E. Westlake

I've been reading Donald E. Westlake's crime novels since I was a teenager. I believe I read my first Westlake novel, The Busy Body, in the early 1960s.

So I think it was good of him to leave us with a posthumous crime novel called The Comedy is Finished. I have a copy of the novel and I plan to read it soon.

I also like that Westlake's publisher, Hard Case Crime, uses  old-school crime book covers that feature beautiful, half-naked girls and guns. I recall vividly the thrill of picking up many a paperback crime thriller with these provocative covers when I was a teenager.    

Patrick Anderson's review of Westlake's novel appears in the Washington Post.

“The Comedy Is Finished” is one of the best Westlake novels I’ve read. I think it has one major problem that arises from its appearing three decades after it was written, but that won’t bother everyone. No dates are mentioned, but the story is clearly set in the late 1970s. Five Vietnam-era radicals — think of them as remnants of the Weathermen — kidnap a famous comedian called Koo Davis, who, like Bob Hope, is famous for his film comedies, USO shows and snarky humor. The terrorists announce that they’ll kill the supposedly beloved comedian unless the authorities release 10 other radicals from prison.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/book-review-the-comedy-is-finished-by-donald-e-westlake/2012/02/13/gIQAeAZ1NR_story.html

My Crime Beat Column: Howard Hunt's House Dick

As a teenager in the 1960s I devoured crime fiction and thrillers. I bought hardbacks from the book clubs and I purchased a good number of paperbacks books from local bookstores.

I recall a second-hand bookstore where I picked up scores of vintage pulp paperbacks dating back to the 1940s and 1950s. With their lurid covers depicting guns, gore and girls, the novel’s atmosphere was established well before you turned to page one.

So I was pleased to discover that entrepreneur and author Charles Ardai, along with fellow author Max Philips, established Hard Case Crime, which publishes a line of affordable paperback crime novels that hearken back to that golden age of tough guy heroes, femme fatales and brutal bad guys.

Hard Case Crime offers the old classics of crime, from Philadelphia’s own David Goodis to Ed McBain, to modern crime writers like Lawrence Block and the recently deceased Donald E. Westlake. I love the book covers, which feature pulp art from the post-WWII era.

Crime novels were enormously popular from WWII to the 1960s, “but the pulp novels that first captured the public’s imagination weren’t hardcovers,” Hard Case Crime states on its web site www.HardCaseCrime.com. “They were paperbacks you could fit in your back pocket, with jaw-dropping cover paintings and bare-knuckled prose that grabbed you by the collar with the first sentence and held you until the last page. No one’s published books like that in years — until now.”

One of the Hard Case Crime novels I read was E. Howard Hunt’s House Dick. Although today Hunt is known primarily as one of the Nixon White House “plumbers” who engineered the botched Watergate Hotel burglary, he was also a prolific writer of crime stories and spy thrillers.

Hunt served in the U.S. Navy and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in WWII, and he later joined the CIA when it was created to replace the wartime OSS. He served in a variety of outposts around the world and he was involved in many of the CIA’s history-making actions.

After he retired from the CIA Hunt went to work for Nixon’s special investigation unit. The unit was tasked with “plugging” the many leaks to the press — hence the name “the White House plumbers.”

Along with G. Gordon Liddy, a former FBI agent, Hunt hired a handful of Cuban-Americans to break into the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington D. C. and plant listening devices. They were caught in the act and the rest is history. (I recall a Red Foxx joke from the 1970s — “I call my wife Watergate because she bugs me.”)

Hunt served 33 months in federal prison and he died in 2007. His last book was a memoir called American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond.

There has been much speculation about Hunt’s involvement in President Kennedy’s assassination and that conspiracy theory was fueled by none other than Hunt’s old adversary, the KGB.

According to The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archives, the KGB fabricated a letter from Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald (yes, Virginia, Oswald did indeed killed Kennedy), to Hunt.

The New York Times authenticated the letter (ha!) and even Oswald’s widow believed it was his handwrtting. But we now know the KGB wrote the letter, as they wanted to foster the conspiracy theory that the CIA was behind the murder of the president, rather than a nitwit who admired Castro and had defected to the Soviet Union for two years.

The Mitrokhin Archives, written by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, is the official history of the Soviet Union’s intelligence agency and secret police, the KGB. Mitrokhin was the KGB’s chief archivist and he smuggled copies of the files out, several sheets at a time wrapped in his socks and other hiding places. He eventually defected to the British, bringing his mother load of KGB files with him.

Hunt didn’t have anything to do with President Kennedy’s murder, as he was too busy writing about murder and high crimes. While serving in the U.S. government Hunt wrote some 50 novels, including his crime novel House Dick in 1961.

Originally published under the name Gordon Davis (like a good spy), Hunt wrote a novel about a Washington D. C. hotel detective named Pete Novak. In the course of his duties in the hotel (no, not the Watergate), Novak encounters a small time hood, his beautiful and tough ex-wife, a rich couple from out of state, and a sham-doctor who pushes herbal tea laced with mind-altering drugs.

When the rich wife reports her jewels stolen from her hotel room, Novak becomes involved in mystery, romance, robbery and murder. He comes to the aid of the hood’s ex-wife when he believes she has been framed for murder.

When she questions whether his actions bend his professional ethics, Novak replies “After what I did for you last night, my ethics show more curves than a pretzel.”

Novak works with, and sometimes ducks, a tough, world-weary homicide detective, who calls the hotel “a mattress factory.”

Hunt is a good crime writer, but he falls short of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. No crime in that, I suppose.

So if you want to read a good, vintage crime novel, along with some soft jazz and hard liquor, check out Howard Hunt’s House Dick, as well as some of the other Hard Case Crime books.