Note: To read an interview with Lawrence Block about his first original book for Hard Case Crime, Getting Off, visit our sister site, GriftMagazine.com.

For those of us who have become rabid fans of Hard Case Crime books, the past year has been a long one. The series left its previous home at Dorchester in 2010, and has not re-emerged until this week, when it returns with three titles under the Titan Books umbrella.

Hard Case Crime is the brainchild of Charles Ardai, a top-notch writer, early Internet business guru and all around nice guy. Undeterred when circumstances led the line to pause publication, he soldiered on and has persevered. Now, the imprint seems stronger than ever, debuting with three great titles, with a fourth on the way next month.

First up is the line’s first hardcover book, Getting Off, “a novel of sex & violence” penned by Lawrence Block writing as Jill Emerson. It is joined by the final two titles announced by Hard Case while it was still with Dorchester, Max Allan Collins’ Quarry’s Ex and Christa Faust’s Choke Hold. They will be followed by Collins’ work on the latest Mickey Spillane novel (he finishes the late poet of pulp’s unfinished manuscripts), Consummata.

Ardai is a frequent guest here at TIRBD, and he consented to answer a few more questions about the re-launch and what is in store.

TIRBD: Supposing that the silver lining of this whole shift for Hard Case Crime was the chance to start over, are you doing anything differently this time around?

CA: Well, we’re publishing in different formats – hardcover and trade paperback – and our first four books are all new titles, rather than a mix of new books and reprints of obscure old stuff. But we will still be doing some reprints (for instance, Robert Silverberg’s Blood on the Mink next year) and our backlist is still in mass market format, so it’s not like we’ve abandoned our old approaches entirely.

The books are trade paper size as opposed to mass market, but you have kept all of the other design elements. Were you sad to see that connection with the pulps of old go?

Well, as I say, the backlist is still in mass market, so it’s not as though we’ve left the format behind entirely. And we might reprint some of the new titles in mass market at some point if there’s demand for it. There’s part of me that does miss the stylistic purity of working exclusively in the classic mass market format, just because doing so would be truest to the look and feel of the pulp-era paperbacks we’re emulating, but on the other hand, it’s not as though we were really pure to begin with. Old paperbacks weren’t 4x7” the way modern paperbacks are; they didn’t have modern glossy covers; the edges of the pages were often tipped in colored ink, which can’t be done anymore; the cover price was 25 cents rather than eight dollars…. Really, our mass markets were a good deal different from the older model, which makes me feel a little less bad about making further changes now.

The line has become more high-profile on this go-round, with a hardback from the resurgent Lawrence Block re-starting things. Do you worry about maintaining the edgy reputation of HCC given this higher profile?

I don’t think any company that publishes a book like Getting Off, with two completely naked women on the front cover and a sex scene in every chapter, needs to worry about not being edgy enough.

Might this help you to land anyone on your wish list? The higher profile certainly couldn’t hurt if you have more well-known authors in your sights.

It certainly never hurts to have a higher profile – though of course we were lucky enough to get Stephen King to write a book for us when our profile was low, so who knows. I think either a high or a low profile can work for you, if your line is exciting enough to the people you want to reach out to. We still don’t have much money in the bank and can’t compete with the big houses by offering big advances, so I’m sure there are many authors we’d love to work with who simply won’t be interested. But hopefully at least some will be.

Given the line’s title, it’s certainly OK that the books have been almost exclusively hard-boiled crime fiction. But you have ventured off that path, such as with Roger Zelazny’s The Dead Man’s Brother. Any thoughts to expanding the definition of a Hard Case Crime book, or is there too much within in that genre that you want to put out to allow straying?

The definition we’ve been working with is actually fairly broad already, encompassing everything from hardboiled comedy to searing drama, from private eye stories to crime stories with no detective in sight, from first-person narration to sprawling multiple-viewpoint novels, from intimate and disturbing psychological terror to popcorn entertainment of the action-adventure sort…in short any type of story where crime is central and the writing is hardboiled. We haven’t branched out into the fantastic or supernatural, and I think we still won’t, but beyond that, basically all other types of crime story are fair game.

Speaking of other genres, what is up these days with Gabriel Hunt?

We originally signed a deal with Dorchester Publishing to do six Hunt novels and we’ve done six. (The sixth, Hunt Through Napoleon’s Web, just came out last month.) There are no plans currently to do more, though if readers wanted more, they should let us know, since that makes it more likely. I don’t think it’s likely that we’ll do another spurt like first batch – six books written in 18 months! – but I could see doing one or two a year as long as people were enjoying them.

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.

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.