I know it's only June and September feels far away -- but it's only 3 months, so I wanted to make sure you knew that's when Hard Case Crime is coming back, after a whole year away.
Our year's hiatus was due to the exit from the book publishing business of the publisher we'd worked with since launching the line, Dorchester Publishing. We're now working with a new publisher, the terrific UK-based Titan Books, who in turn works with Random House in the States, and it feels like our books couldn't be in better hands.
To kick things off we'll be publishing our first ever hardcover title, a brand new novel by Lawrence Block called GETTING OFF. It's the first original novel Block has ever written for us (all our previous Block titles were reprints of his early work), and honest to god, this thing is going to startle people. For it, Block is resurrecting a female pseudonym he last used almost 40 years ago (we're publishing it as by "Lawrence Block writing as Jill Emerson"), under which he wrote six frankly erotic novels in the 60s and 70s. GETTING OFF is a Jill Emerson book all right, in terms of its rather explicit content -- but it's a Lawrence Block book, too, in terms of its compelling crime story plot and its disturbingly appealing main character, who may have the highest body count on her hands of any woman ever to headline a mystery novel, but whom you find yourself quite liking despite that.
It's hard, these days, to call a book shocking and really mean it, but I would bet money on readers genuinely being shocked by some of this book's content.
In a good way, of course.
Also coming in late September is a new story about Max Allan Collins' popular hit man character, Quarry, in QUARRY'S EX, and then in October we have two titles people have been waiting for for a long time: CHOKE HOLD, Christa Faust's follow-up to her Edgar Award-nominated Hard Case Crime novel MONEY SHOT; and THE CONSUMMATA, a novel Mickey Spillane started writing in the 1960s (and that Signet announced in its catalogue at the time), but that he set aside unfinished until shortly before his death, at which time he asked old friend Max Allan Collins to complete it for him. It's taken 44 years, but THE CONSUMMATA is finally finished and we're very excited to be the ones bringing it to readers at last. Set in Miami's Cuban-American community and starring the main character of Spillane's bestselling THE DELTA FACTOR, it's a great read, Spillane at his irrepressible Spillaniest.
If you'd be interested in writing anything about the relaunch of Hard Case Crime or about any of these four books, please drop me a note. In some cases, I know Titan Books has already shipped advance copies to people on our mailing list, so you might have ARCs already -- but if you don't and would like to read these titles, just let me know. (I can get them to you as pdfs immediately if you like reading ARCs that way, and Titan has some printed ARCs left as well. And of course we should have finished books from the printer in a month or so.)
Spillane's not around anymore, alas, but the other three authors are (and I am), so if you wanted to interview any of them, I can set that up, too. And I can supply copies of the cover art, or anything else you need.
For a quick peek at the four books (as well as our first 2012 title, a never-before-published novel by Donald E. Westlake!), visit http://www.hardcasecrime.com/books_bios.cgi.
Many thanks,
Charles
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Charles Ardai
Editor, Hard Case Crime
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