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.

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.

Any time I think about Craig McDonald, two things come to mind. First, if you think you know a lot about crime fiction, at best you’re in second place. McDonald is a like a walking encyclopedia of the genre. Second, knowing all of that information doesn’t guarantee that one’s own efforts at writing crime fiction would succeed, but McDonald’s two novels prove it certainly doesn’t hurt.

I first came to McDonald’s work through the book Art in the Blood. The book gathers 20 long interviews McDonald conducted with crime fiction writers like Ken Bruen, George Pelecanos, Michael Connelly, Ian Rankin and Dennis Lehane. It was a fantastic book that revealed new information about these oft-interviewed subjects. McDonald was able to get them to open up because his preparation was so thorough. He reads everything a subject has written — usually more than once — and prepares fastidiously to take the conversation in new directions.

His crime fiction debut, Head Games, followed. It was a treat, a historical fiction that never let the research get in the way of the ripping yarn McDonald unfolded. It was the beginning of a series featuring pulp fiction writer Hector Lassiter. Another interview book was to follow, but the success of that Edgar-nominated novel forced the non-fiction title to the backburner so the Lassiter follow-up, Toros & Torsos, could be issued.

That brings us to the present, when that second interview collection, Rogue Males is now on shelves. It again gathers interviews with crime fiction writers (and two musician-authors: Tom Russell and Kinky Friedman), offering rich profiles of Bruen, James Sallis, Daniel Woodrell, Lee Child and more. The most interesting section is one featuring extended narratives with Sallis and Bruen drawn from a long weekend spent with each (and later, together) in Arizona. McDonald veers from the Q&A format used for the rest of the book here, and the result allows him to inject more of himself into the proceedings.

It’s another illuminating collection that whets the appetite for more. Though McDonald says he has plenty of content for future volumes, however, he says it’s unlikely. The Lassiter series is his main focus these days. Here’s hoping he finds the time (and a willing publisher) to balance the two. These collections are indispensable for crime fiction fans.

What follows is McDonald’s third Monday Interview (the others are here and here). He’s the first to hit that mark, and I can’t think of a more fitting subject to do so.

TIRBD: You’re back for round two in terms of interview books. Did you learn anything from the first that you applied to the second?

CM: The interview tactics stayed the same. For me, the crucial difference between Art in the Blood and Rogue Males is my role in the two books. As Ken Bruen sharply seized on in his foreword to Art, my private goal in that book was to disappear, so to speak — to not become a distracting presence. In Rogue Males, I was trying for what Hemingway termed remate. In Rogue Males, I aimed to portray myself and my journey toward fiction writing through something like “ricochet.”

You’re also now a twice-published novelist. Did the process of publishing and being interviewed yourself affect your own interview process or the way you put this book together?

Head Games and Rogue Males were sold as a package deal back in ’06, I think. With the exception of the Elmore Leonard interview, Rogue Males was wrapped before I even finished Head Games. But the awards attention for my first novel made it necessary to put out my second novel ahead of Rogue Males.

Frankly, Rogue Males was actually an outgrowth of the fact that I’d recklessly signed away all my foreign rights to Art in the Blood in my pre-agented days. Suddenly, my agent was getting inquiries about Art for foreign publication, but we couldn’t take advantage of those opportunities. So I put together Rogue Males, drawing largely upon a huge reservoir of interviews with writers who struck me as being of a “type.” At this point, I could easily do a third — perhaps even a fourth — interview collection if there was an opportunity to do so, but my gut instinct is these will be the only two I’ll have out there. I have a version on my hard-drive of a female version of Rogue Males, but so far, nobody’s knocking down my door to acquire that book.

You went back to talk with some authors already covered in the first book. Did you try any new methods to get them to reveal more? Did the passage of time affect the way you viewed them as artists? Did anyone contradict themselves?

There were no contradictions that I can recall. I think in the first interview I conducted with James Ellroy I reached a kind of connection with him that carried us through the subsequent two interviews contained in Rogue Males. I’ve interviewed Lee Child several times and he’s very candid. The author I think I’ve interviewed the most is Michael Connelly. At this point, I could probably do a smallish book just collecting those interviews. I think Michael has spoken on the record with me at least five times, maybe six. A lot of the material from those discussions is still not out there.

So far as changing attitudes go, with the Rogue Males repeats, the authors are there because I think well of them and respect their work. I can’t think of any particular author I’d duck based on past experience. That said, there are several authors I’ve passed on interviewing, mostly based on their reputation for showing themselves. Life’s too short. And in most cases, their work doesn’t speak to me, anyway. And before you ask, sorry, but they’ll remain nameless, and deservedly.

nblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.craigmcdonaldbooks.com/images/toros.jpg">Your backgrounding is so thorough that I wonder if you have time to read anything other than these authors. You mention reading some of their books several times, and seem to read every word they’ve ever written before doing these interviews. How is it possible to fit it all in?

Back in the interviewing days, I could do a ton more reading than I can now. The bulk of my reading now is tied to my own work. I’m mostly writing historical fiction, so that requires a certain investment of reading time directed toward what I write. For various reasons, this year marks the first time in several years I’m reading deeply and widely again in genre. Candidly, I’m finding it a pretty headshaking experience. It would be great to find a new writer who would grab me as Woodrell, Sallis, Bruen, Ellroy or Megan Abbott did, but so far…

I particularly enjoyed the narrative presentation of the Bruen/Sallis section. What led you to take that tack after using the Q&A format up to that point? And while you clearly appreciate the work of the other authors in the book, I know you have a special fondness for these two. What was it like on a personal level to spend time with them?

I think my own reaction to those two comes through pretty strongly and accurately in Rogue Males. Arizona marked the first time I’d actually met Ken, face-to-face. He was frank and funny and although he was exhausted by his book tour at that point when we met up in the desert, he was wonderful and wry. James Sallis I’d been reading and re-reading for some time. James is truly a delight to spend time with and he’s an excellent interview subject and a natural and powerful teacher. I’d learned a lot from him, on the page and in person.

I originally set the Ken and Jim interviews in Q&A format, then decided that format didn’t serve the material well. So I recast it in prose form. I was deep into writing Head Games at the same time, and the voices and terrain and even some of the subtext of those two pieces of writing blended and infiltrated one another. If I ever should find myself interviewing another author, I think I’ll probably go the narrative route.

Where do things stand with the announced graphic novel of Head Games? Any film interest in the books thus far?

Head Games, the graphic novel, is still in the pipeline. It’s with First Second, and now that I’ve moved the Hector Lassiter series to Minotaur Books, Hector is now pretty much contained in the Flat Iron Building in all his various English-language forms.

So far as film interest in Head Games, I’m adapting it to script format now. There was intense and pretty heady Hollywood interest in the novel when the publishing deal was first announced. But as is so often the case with this stuff, it never quite came together. There’s nearly always someone nibbling, but getting a bite…

From the way things sound on your web site, the third book in the series already is in the can and the fourth is under way if not already written. Do you have the entire series mapped out?

Actually, the entire series is finished. By the time Head Games was announced as an Edgar Award finalist, I was writing the last pages of what I then considered the seventh and last novel in the series.

Of course the “finished” books undergo an editing process, but I’ve had the extremely rare opportunity to live with the series for some time and to tweak and polish and tie together the various installments into what I hope functions as a fully-integrated series on a level other crime series can never aspire to attain. Essentially, it’s one big book. I also added an eighth entry that I completed a few weeks ago. That pretty much closes out that enterprise. Now it’s a matter of reader support justifying the publication of the remaining four novels.

If I recall correctly, you also have a few other unpublished novels sitting around. Is it time to bust out a pseudonym?

Funny you should say… I’ve had some inquiries. Unlike some other recent crime novelists who’ve gone down that road, if I did it, I wouldn’t hide in plain sight. In other words, if I should ever do it, I’ll go out there under a cloak of anonymity as the fellas like Cornell Woolrich and others did in the old days. It wouldn’t be a winking, “Craig McDonald writing as” kind of gambit.

But for the moment, my focus is squarely on novel number three, Print the Legend, that Minotaur will publish early next year. I literally just finished going over page proofs and we have the cover, which is very striking. In a few days, we begin edits for number four, Gnashville, Mon Amour, which will likely appear next fall.

Hearing that the author of a 600-page National Book Award-winning novel about the Vietnam War is going to write a short, pulpy crime novel might make your head turn. Hearing that Denis Johnson is going to do so is no surprise. Fans know, of course, that these two authors are one and the same, and it is testament to Johnson’s breadth that he can tackle each and make it feel like the perfectly organic manifestation of his talents.

Writing about people on the wrong side of the law — and the wrong side of everything else, for that matter — isn’t new for Johnson, so on the surface his new novel, Nobody Move, doesn’t feel like a stretch. But Johnson goes all the way here, adhering to the tenets of crime fiction. He has a classic noir protagonist in Jimmy Luntz, a barbershop chorus member and inveterate gambler who runs afoul of his creditors. The oh so cleverly named enforcer/collection agent, Ernest Gambol, seems at first to be from central casting, and the femme fatale is beautiful, troubled and easy.

But this is still a Denis Johnson book, so while he is reverent when it comes to the genre, he uses it as a starting point for a typically twisted tale. It begins with Jimmy coming out of a barbershop chorus competition to find Gambol waiting for him. Luntz owes money, Gambol wants to collect, Luntz doesn’t have it and Gambol prepares to extract a pound of flesh as collateral. But things go awry, and much of the rest of the book involves the cat and mouse game between Luntz and Gambol that results.

The book is slim, just 196 pages, and is split into four bite-size sections. That format derives from the story’s former life as a serialization in Playboy magazine (for a look at Jeffrey Smith’s great illustrations for each of the four installments, click here). Johnson seems a perfect fit for such a presentation, though one wonders at the reaction to his lurid, visceral prose from the folks who, um, happen to gaze at the articles.

It’s certainly not Johnson’s best work, nor will it have any established crime fiction writers quaking in the boots. But Johnson’s unhinged prose style works well with the genre, even enlivening it at times as he pushes at and plays with the bounds of traditional crime fiction.

The flaws come, as they do with many undercooked crime fiction novels, in the form of unrealized characters and plot threads. Luntz meets up with Anita Desilvera, a woman who has embezzled $2.3 million and is a fugitive of sorts herself. Problem is, the circumstances of her crime are sketchy at best, and it’s never clear what happened or what might, meaning her motivations are confused and lack much tension. Luntz’s situation is a bit more fully formed, but it, too, lacks definition. Johnson was rightly more interested in characterization and action than in plot, but he leaves things so bare boned as to cause more stuttering consternation than full-throttle celebration.

Still, it’s an entertaining ride. Any time spent with Johnson’s writing is time well spent, and something this bracing and breezy is all the more so. I’d love to see Johnson crank out a few more like this than wait five years for another serious tome.

I didn’t know what psycho noir was until a couple of years ago when I read a review of a book I’d already finished and realized I had been a fan of the genre all along. Essentially, you take a guy facing extreme circumstances and let him loose to do whatever it takes to succeed. But, of course, he rarely does. Instead, he leaves a trail of mutilated bodies in his wake and ends up little better than his victims by the time the tale is told. There is a lot of over-the-top violence and plenty of humor for those who get the fantastic, exaggerated nature of what transpires.

Allan Guthrie is a modern king of psycho noir. His books Savage Night and Hard Man, particularly, elevated the genre with their tight, visceral prose, deft plotting and twisted but intact sense of morality. So, when Guthrie recommended the debut of novelist Nate Flexer, The Disassembled Man, I was primed and ready to read.

Let me start by saying that Flexer is no Guthrie. Not yet. But he’s good, and the things that are at the heart of a good psycho noir — great characters, lurid action and a propellant plot — are all here in abundance. His writing will get tighter with time, and he’ll hopefully find an editor who knows the right homonym at the right time. But those are nitpicky points to make. Sure, that’s the difference between an upstart publisher like New Pulp Press and something like Harcourt, the imprint that puts out Guthrie’s work. The story is there, and it’s a doozy.

The story opens as Frankie Avicious, a slaughterhouse worker, is beaten by the pimp of a whore he’s fallen for. He realizes that to successfully woo this woman, he needs money. It just so happens that he’s married to the daughter of the rich slaughterhouse owner — though the owner doesn’t even acknowledge such when he visits the plant — and he decides to take what is rightfully his. In a traditional novel, the rest would be angst-filled intrafamily squabbling and recriminations. In a psycho noir, you know that blood will be spilled in pursuit of normally unreachable goals. Here, Frankie takes up arms against his kin, mowing down anyone else who gets in his way. The characters in this tale are particularly colorful (and that’s saying something for this genre). Yes, there are the standard hookers, police officers, seedy bar dwellers and toughs, but there’s also someone who may or may not be the devil, a malformed creature of woe and a disturbingly amorous parent in the mix.

According to Bill Crider, Flexer is actually Jon Bassoff, publisher of New Pulp Press. He’s to be applauded for not only getting his book out to the world, but doing so for other like-minded authors as well. It’s quite an undertaking to start a publishing imprint these days, and any one willing to take the financial risk to meet the needs of a niche market like this deserves support. I hope to read the rest of what New Pulp Press has to offer very soon.

Check out the first two chapters of The Disassembled Man at Guthrie’s Noir Originals site.

I really felt like I was keeping up in 2008. Alas, when it came to crime and mystery fiction, that really wasn’t the case. The 2008 Edgar Awards were announced Thursday night at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City, and I’m sorry to say I’ve read none of the winners. The good news, of course, is that I now have a lot of award-winning books to add to my ever-expanding “to-be-read” list.

It’s not as if I simply didn’t read the winner in a given category. I’ve read few of the nominees . It seems as if this year’s nominees were not of the marquee variety this year, which is a good thing for a genre looking to broaden its horizons. You can only give so many awards to the Connellys of the world before people start to see things through a very narrow scope.

This year’s winners are:

Best Novel: Blue Heaven, C.J. Box (St. Martin’s Minotaur)
Best First Novel by an American author: The Foreigner, Francie Lin (Picador)
Best Paperback Original: China Lake, Meg Gardiner (New American Library – Obsidian Mysteries)
Best Critical/Biographical: Edgar Allan Poe: An Illustrated Companion to His Tell-Tale Stories, Harry Lee Poe (Sterling Publishing – Metro Books)
Best Fact Crime: American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century, Howard Blum (Crown Publishers)
Best Short Story: “Skinhead Central” – The Blue Religion, T. Jefferson Parker (Hachette Book Group – Little, Brown and Company)
Best Young Adult: Paper Towns, John Green (Penguin Young Readers Group – Dutton Children’s Books)
Best Juvenile: The Postcard, Tony Abbott (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers)
Best Play: “The Ballad of Emmett Till,” Ifa Bayeza (Goodman Theatre, Chicago)
Best Television Episode Teleplay: “Prayer of the Bone” – “Wire in the Blood,” Teleplay by Patrick Harbinson (BBC America)
Best Motion Picture Screenplay: “In Bruges,” Screenplay by Martin McDonagh (Focus Features)
Robert L. Fish Memorial Award:
“Buckner’s Error” – Queens Noir by Joseph Guglielmelli (Akashic Books)
The Simon & Schuster – Mary Higgins Clark Award: The Killer’s Wife, Bill Floyd (St. Martin’s Minotaur)

Having just finished Lawrence Block’s great new memoir, Step by Step, (much more about this later), I’m finally able to crack the spine of Harlan Coben‘s new thriller, Long Lost. Now comes word that there is more Coben to come, this time on the silver screen.

Much as American Jimi Hendrix had to make it big in Europe before U.S. audiences finally embraced him, Coben will finally make it to U.S. movie theaters thanks to the success of a European adaptation of one of his novels. Miramax and Focus Features announced this week that they have secured English language remake rights to “Ne Le Dis A Personne (Tell No One),” the award-winning adaptation of Coben’s wildly successful first stand-alone novel.

According to Variety.com, “no director or cast have been attached although a start date of spring 2010 has been tentatively set for principal photography.”

The French version did very well in the U.S. as measured by the foreign film yardstick, grossing $6 million. Variety reports that the film grossed $22 million in France and $2.3 million in the U.K.

The original version of the film hit DVD here in March. See the trailer here.

I didn’t even know that George Pelecanos had a new novel coming out, so I was pleasantly surprised to get a notice in my inbox today from Hatchette Books that Pelecanos would be the subject of an online interview today. Never mind the fact that the notice came 17 minutes into a live 30 minute interview. Luckily, it already has been archived, and I’m listening right now.

The book, The Way Home, is out May 12. According to Pelecanos’ web site, the book deals with father and son pair Thomas and Christopher Flynn. Chris works for his father’s remodeling business. “Thomas is just getting comfortable with the idea that his son is grown, working, and on the right path at last. Then one day Chris doesn’t show up for work-and his father knows deep in his bones that danger has found him. Although he wishes it weren’t so, he also knows that no parent can protect a child from all the world’s evils.”

“I don’t want to misrepresent it as some sort of relationship novel. It’s still a crime novel, I’m staying in the vein I’ve always stayed in,” he says in the interview. “The crime novel has the supreme conflict of life and death which is the stuff of drama. But also, I can take the crime novel and talk about a lot of these social issues that I want to, which includes, here, the incarceration of kids, which is something I feel really strongly about.”

I enjoyed, but didn’t love Pelecanos’ last, The Turnaround. But that’s only because it came after his masterpiece, The Night Gardener. Having read most of his work over the past decade, I’ll say I’m tremendously excited about the new book, which sounds like a return to form.