Hard Case Crime to return in 2011 through Titan partnership

Hard Case Crime will return in 2011 through a deal with UK-based Titan Books. That means fans will endure a layoff of about one year for the imprint. Hard Case founder Charles Ardai announced in August that Dorchester Publishing, Hard Case’s publisher since its 2004 launch, would cease publishing mass market paperbacks, thus ending its association with the imprint.

Ardai reports that he received offers from five publishers to move the line, and he selected Titan as Hard Case’s new home.

“Titan has an extraordinary record of creating beautiful, exciting books with exactly the pop culture sensibility that Hard Case Crime exists to celebrate,” he said. “Titan is one of the few publishers that loves pulp fiction as much as we do.”

The first new Hard Case Crime titles to be published by Titan will be out in September and October of 2011. They will include Quarry’s Ex, the latest a installment in Max Allan Collins’ series about the hitman Quarry; and Choke Hold, Christa Faust’s sequel to her Edgar Award-nominated Hard Case Crime novel Money Shot. In addition, Hard Case plans to bring out “two never-before-published novels by major authors in the crime genre (both recipients of the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America).”

Titan also plans to acquire all existing stock of Hard Case Crime’s backlist titles from Dorchester Publishing and resume shipping those titles to stores immediately.

Ardai answered a few questions this morning about the news:

TIRBD: Does having a UK-based publisher create any logistical challenges for you?

CA: In this day and age of e-mail, FTP, and Skype calls, not really.  We’ve already been working with typesetters, graphic designers and artists in different states; a different country isn’t that big a leap.  And Titan does have a (small) team in New York, so it’s not as though they’re all across the pond.  Plus their U.S. distribution is done by Random House, which is just a few blocks from my office.

When you talk about existing stock, does Titan plan to keep titles in print once that stock is exhausted, and if so, will they look and/or feel the same?

Titan will need to decide that on a title-by-title basis as the existing stock gets depleted. I would guess that they’ll keep many but not all titles in print, with the decision being made based on demand from the market.  As for format, they do publish mass market books, so it would be easy for them to stick with the mass market format for any reprints, but we’ve also talked with them about possibly doing some in trade paperback. The books will definitely look and feel the same in the sense of having the same cover art and aesthetic style.  (In fact, my co-founder, Max Phillips, has come back to the fold to work on the project again and will personally be responsible for any revisions to the graphic design necessitated by new formats such as trade pb.  So the soul of Hard Case Crime will be preserved intact, I promise.)

You mention MWA Grandmasters. Lawrence Block (and I believe you as well) have previously mentioned a partnership with Subterranean Press to put out a twofer from him in hardback. Is that still on the schedule?

Yes, that’s a special one-off project we’re doing with Bill Shafer, and that’s separate from the Titan deal. It’s still on the schedule, though we don’t have an exact pub date for it yet. Need to coordinate everything to avoid schedule clashes, etc.

You mention hardbacks in the future. Is this an evolution of the Hard Case Crime aesthetic, or was that always a wish that was simply not practical under your agreement with Dorchester?

Well, Dorchester was a paperback publisher, so doing hardcovers with them was not possible.  Whether or not we’ll do any with Titan depends on the particular books we wind up acquiring. We like to think all our books are special and exciting – but if we find ourselves with one that’s particularly special and exciting, we might do that one in hardcover. It’s a format I’ve always been open to exploring, but it never was an option before.