From Charles Ardai at Hard Case Crime

Friends,

If you visit the Hard Case Crime web site -- www.HardCaseCrime.com -- and click on the book cover you see there, you'll be taken to a page that shows our forthcoming titles for the next several months. At the very top you'll see a book we just added to the site: HOUSE DICK by E. Howard Hunt. Hunt is a rather interesting figure, both popular (for the more than 70 novels he wrote over the course of his career as a crime writer) and notorious (for his role in the Watergate burglary that brought down President Richard Nixon in the 1970s -- Hunt served almost 3 years in prison as a result). Hunt is not the only author ever to mix real and fictional crime (I think of, among others, Al Nussbaum, who was on the FBI's "Ten Most Wanted" list for bank robbery before beginning a career as a writer of terrific mystery stories), but Hunt is perhaps the highest profile of the lot. HOUSE DICK is my personal favorite of Hunt's novels, a very satisfying hardboiled detective story about skullduggery in (of all settings) a Washington D.C. hotel. It'll be 2009 before that one hits stores -- but you can already enjoy the first chapter on our web site today.

Also coming in 2009: an entirely new series that I'll be editing and the folks at Dorchester will be publishing, called THE ADVENTURES OF GABRIEL HUNT. This series is intended to be to pulp adventure fiction what Hard Case Crime is to crime fiction. It will tell the continuing story of a modern-day adventurer traveling the globe in pursuit of priceless artifacts and lost civilizations. Anyone who grew up reading H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs, or Alexandre Dumas and Sax Rohmer, or Doc Savage and the Avenger...or who grew up watching adventure movies starring Buster Crabbe or Harrison Ford...will find a lot to enjoy in the Hunt novels. You can get a glimpse of the cover art for the first book at www.HuntForAdventure.com -- and if you're interested in hearing more about the series as it gets closer to launching, you'll find instructions for signing up for a dedicated Gabriel Hunt mailing list.

What else is on tap? After years of real-world detective work, we have finally succeeded in tracking down the children of a writer named Robert B. Parker and securing the right to reprint his best book, PASSPORT TO PERIL. This is not the same Robert B. Parker who writes the Spenser mysteries today -- this Robert B. Parker died in 1955, after an impressive career as a war reporter in WWII and working for the United Nations afterward. His work is irresistible (how can you resist a book that opens with a desperate couple jumping off the Orient Express into a snowbank to escape the clutches of a former Nazi?), and we're excited to have the chance to bring it back into print.

But all this is next year's fare. What if you're hungry for a great read today? Go to your local bookstore and ask for a copy of Steve Fisher's NO HOUSE LIMIT -- a gripping and memorable tale of crime in 1950s Las Vegas that has been winning raves from readers and reviewers alike -- or for our August title (which should hit stores any day now), BABY MOLL by best-selling thriller writer John Farris.

After that, we begin a run of four brand new novels, starting with Ken Bruen and Jason Starr's THE MAX (sequel to BUST and SLIDE), then Max Allan Collins' THE FIRST QUARRY (prequel to THE LAST QUARRY), and then David J. Schow's GUN WORK and our big "50th anniversary" book, my own FIFTY-TO-ONE.