Here at BOOKGASM, it’s no secret that we love the Hard Case Crime series. Seeing that cool yellow-ribbon logo is like paperback crack. In between issuing monthly editions, series editor Charles Ardai talked to us about the line’s genesis and its future.

BOOKGASM: As the sole editor for Hard Case Crime, what is the selection process like when choosing novels for publication? Have there been any older titles you wanted to acquire for reprint, but were unable to?

ARDAI: It’s very simple: I buy novels I love. Nothing could be easier. For the reprint side of the line, I go to my bookshelves and the thousands of paperback crime novels I have there, and I pick out the ones I remember being blown away by when I read them. I also get recommendations over the transom from our readers, and have a pile of several dozen books on my to-be-read pile at any given time.

For original novels, the process is different, but the criteria are the same: We’ll only buy a book if we love it, if it tells a remarkable story in a remarkable way. We get about 1,000 submissions per year, mostly by e-mail, and I read as much of each as I need to in order to tell whether it’s good enough and interesting enough for us to publish. The simplest way to describe my selection process is this: If I can stop reading, I do; if I can’t, we buy it.

Since we only publish between four and six original titles each year, we have to say “no” to more than 99 percent of the books we receive; the positive way of looking at that is that we have the opportunity to hold out for those rare few that are really irresistible.

BOOKGASM: Is it your intent to continue publishing a mix of the new and the old? What is it that attracts you to each?

ARDAI: Yes. Part of our goal when we set out was to bring back lost masterpieces from the pulp era, but another part was to give the next generation of Elmore Leonards and Donald Westlakes and Lawrence Blocks and Ed McBains a chance to get their books into print and into the hands of a wide readership. This mix of old and new is part of what gives our line its freshness. We’re not all one thing; when you pick up a Hard Case Crime book, you never know what you’re going to get, other than a great story.

BOOKGASM: The inevitable Stephen King questions: How’d that deal come about? How important was THE COLORADO KID to Hard Case Crime? And have you been able to see that its publication attracted readers to the overall line?

ARDAI: The story of how we ended up publishing THE COLORADO KID has more or less passed into myth by now, but unlike most myths, this one is true. I contacted Steve to see whether he’d be willing to write a blurb for our line, to help us reach readers who might not otherwise pick up a title by Wade Miller or Day Keene or David Dodge or some other author they didn’t know. He thought about the request for a while and then got in touch with us to say that he didn’t want to write us a blurb – he wanted to write us a book.

A few months later, THE COLORADO KID showed up in my mailbox, and I devoured in one sitting. It’s a terrific book – and what’s more, a brave one. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for Steve to write an ending that resolved the mystery to everyone’s satisfaction, but what he set out to do was write a story about unresolved mysteries, about frustration and how people face life in a world where you sometimes just don’t get the answers you want. Obviously he knew some readers wouldn’t appreciate a story that ended in a frustrating way, but he did it anyway, and I couldn’t have been happier. It’s not the job of a noir story to make readers comfortable. Noir is all about discomfort and frustration and pain and unresolved longing, and Steve captured all of those feelings beautifully in THE COLORADO KID.

Now, as for your second question, this book has been very important to us. While we got plenty of media coverage before publishing THE COLORADO KID, we got a lot more afterwards. And with a print run in excess of one million copies, the book was simply seen by a lot more people than our books normally are. Far more people know about Hard Case Crime today than would have if Steve had never written that book for us. How many of them will become regular readers of our other books? That’s hard to say. But I imagine some will, and we’re very grateful for that.

BOOKGASM: A lot of your older authors whose work you’ve reprinted also excelled in the short story market for pulp magazines. Are there any plans for a Hard Case Crime anthology that would collect some of these?

ARDAI: I started out as a short story writer myself – for ELLERY QUEEN and ALFRED HITCHCOCK – and then spent several years editing short-story anthologies, so you’d think the answer would be “yes.” Alas, it’s not. We teamed up with Dorchester Publishing for distribution, and they’re absolute geniuses when it comes to the art and science of getting mass-market paperbacks into stores and into readers’ hands. And they’ve found that anthologies of short stories just don’t sell nearly as well as novels. I wish it were otherwise, but it’s not.

If we were a small press publishing $15 trade paperbacks or $30 hardcovers, we might be able to do a limited-run collection, sell a few thousand copies and be content. But we’re not. We publish mass-market books and sell them at mass-market prices, and there’s a minimum volume you have to sell in order to make the economics work. So, tempting as it is, no anthologies are in the cards, at least for the forseeable future.

BOOKGASM: Do you have any plans to write another Hard Case book yourself, following LITTLE GIRL LOST?

ARDAI: I do, indeed: I am working on the sequel to LITTLE GIRL LOST, currently titled SONG OF INNOCENCE, another title drawn from the work of William Blake. It picks up two years after the end of the first book and follows poor John Blake’s investigation of the suspicious death of another woman in his life. With luck, I’ll have a draft done by mid-year. I already have a painter working on the cover art.

BOOKGASM: What’s next for Hard Case Crime? And are there any plans to extend the brand?

ARDAI: We’ve gotten a lot of inquiries, ranging from publishers eager to put out calendars or art books based on our cover art to movie and television producers eager to bring our stories to the big or small screen. It’s very exciting, but as you’d expect, only a small fraction of these discussions will ever turn into anything real. Would we like to see the Hard Case Crime logo up in lights? Sure. Will it happen? Well … we’ll see. No promises. But it’s been encouraging to see how many people have expressed interest, including some folks whose names you’d know from the posters at your local multiplex.