Hard Case Crime to issue Sherlock Holmes novel

The cat is out of the bag. Or perhaps it’s more fitting to say the hound of the Baskervilles. Hard Case Crime head Charles Ardai had been trying to keep secret the identity of the imprint’s second December book, but Amazon.com’s aggressive advance ordering policies have unveiled the title before its time, so Ardai has fessed up: It’s Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Valley of Fear.

It’s an ingenious move, the country’s best crime fiction imprint bringing out what has been called the first hard-boiled detective story. The book was Doyle’s fourth and final to feature Sherlock Holmes. Doyle penned 56 short stories featuring the detective, but only four novels. This one according to Wikipedia, is a standalone of sorts, making it both a good introduction for a generation of crime fiction fans who have relegated Holmes to the dusty shelves of history, and a perfect entry for a series that invites impulse buys. It follows The House of the Baskervilles, Doyle’s most famous work, coming 13 years after that book.

Ardai and Co. aren’t playing up the Holmes connection. As you can see, the cover is as lurid as any other HCC title, and the author is listed as “A.C. Doyle.”

“It’s the very hard-boiled story of a man murdered by a blast from a sawed-off shotgun to the face at point-blank range; of a criminal on the run from Chicago who comes to a dirty Pennsylvania coal-mining town and winds up locking horns with the corrupt Masonic lodge that runs the town; of a Pinkerton detective who sets out to clean up the town; and of the doom that pursues a man across an ocean and leaves him at the mercy of the world’s most ruthless criminal mastermind,” Ardai writes. “It’s a story narrated by a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, whose partner in investigating the twisted plot is a drug addicted private investigator with a brain like a steel trap.”

I’m in. Reading the sample chapter HCC provides, it’s clear that Doyle’s 1915 text will take some getting used to, but once you catch the rhythm of his prose, it’s easy to sink right in. To sample more, you can check out online repositories like this one that offer the text in full. Me, I’ll wait for the bound copy, thanks.