Unearthed Westlake title anchors Hard Case in '10

After two titles in December — one of which thus far is a surprise — the folks at Hard Case Crime are making us wait until April for the next one. But that April book is a doozy, the last book from Donald E. Westlake.

Memory is a manuscript that Westlake’s friend and peer (and fellow HCC author), Lawrence Block, brought to the attention of HCC’s head Charles Ardai. After Westlake’s death last New Year’s Eve, it seemed as if HCC’s Cutie, would be his last book (it was also his first, though long out of print) . According to Ardai, Westlake wrote Memory in the early 1960s “but set it aside when his literary agent advised him that it was too literary and encouraged him to concentrate on more commercial sorts of crime fiction.”

Sounds like it will be worth the wait. It will be Westlake’s fifth book with HCC (including Lemons Never Lie under his Richard Stark pseudonym), and the first to be previously unpublished. Speaking of the wait, don’t all of us loyal HCC readers have a book or two still on the shelf to pick up to help pass the time? I know I do. That makes the news about the imprint’s slowing publishing schedule easier to stomach. After four years of publishing a book each month (after half a year of publishing two a month at the start), HCC is shifting to an every-other-month schedule.

Ardai writes that the move is “largely to give us a bit more time to work on and drum up attention for each novel, and to give readers more time to digest them all.” I’ve been hopping around in my series reading the past few months, having somehow moved from Jason Starr’s predictably solid reprint Fake I.D. to the forthcoming Losers Live Longer from Russell Atwood. The latter is a complicated but gripping tale that unfolds over the course of just a few days in New York’s East Village. At times I felt like I should have been keeping notes, but Atwood pulls it all together and makes everything work.

Ardai won’t lack for things to do with the slowing publication schedule. His Gabriel Hunt adventure novels seem scheduled to fill the gaps, meaning he’ll still have the same number of books to edit as always. The Hunt novels tell of adventurer Gabriel Hunt, and while they’re all published under that name, various thriller and crime fiction writers hold the pens. To show how busy Ardai is, he wrote the second Hunt novel, Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear, out now. It’s a rip snorting read, full of action and twists and turns as Hunt heads all over the globe.