Thomas Roche's BOILED HARD

Pulp fiction publisher Hard Case Crime recently relaunched in a new partnership with UK publisher Titan Books. For about a year, Hard Case was on a hiatus made necessary by Dorchester Publishing’s demise as the longest-running mass market format only paperback publisher in the country. Dorchester, the HCC line’s publisher, decided to dump the mass market format in favor of an ebook focus with selected titles being brought out in the larger trade paper format (if they’re successful). Publisher Charles Ardai found that untenable, since the Hard Case idea was entirely founded in the mass market concept.

As Hard Case gets up to speed again, Ardai makes an appearance over at Huffington post, where he talks about the birth of Hard Case Crime and how the cover aesthetic of the series sums up the content — probably better than any other line out there. He also takes the opportunity to share the next seven covers from Hard Case Crime, including Robert Silverberg’s Blood on the Mink, Christa Faust’s Choke Hold, Lawrence Block’s Getting Off, Joseph Koenig’s False Negative, the long-awaited unpublished Donald E. Westlake novel The Comedy is Finished, Max Allan Collins’s Quarry’s Ex and The Consummata, which Collins wrote from his friend Mickey Spillane’s unfinished manuscript (a sequel to The Delta Factor.)

Speaking of Spillane, he rather famously blurbed Hard Case when it started and his book Dead Street was posthumously published by them. The story won’t be new to anyone who’s been following Hard Case, but it’s still a good story. Here’s Ardai on how the Mickster’s first novel I, the Jury spawned the postwar noir paperback form and later inspired the Hard Case concept:

Back in the 1940s and 50s, there was an explosion in the popularity of paperback crime novels, triggered mainly by the success of Mickey Spillane’s first Mike Hammer opus, “I, The Jury” (You think Harry Potter’s huge, or “The Da Vinci Code?” Hammer had them both beat. At one point, seven of the 15 best-selling books of all time were Spillane novels). To cash in on Spillane’s success, competing paperback lines sprang up, each trying to outdo the others with lurid, sexy, painted covers and titles like “Say It With Bullets” or “Kiss My Fist!” The pulp fiction style sold millions of books and remained popular for several decades before finally petering out from a glut of material and the changing tastes of readers.

Flash forward half a century: graphic design genius Max Phillips and I are out drinking on a cold winter night and one of us asks the other, “Why doesn’t anyone publish great-looking, fun books like that anymore?” The other hoists his glass and says, “Why don’t we?” And Hard Case Crime is born.

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Oct. 2011 Note: Hoodtown is now available in a Kindle Edition, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Christa Faust’s 2005 novel Hoodtown is a fast-paced down-and-dirty noir set in a mythical world of Lucha, or Mexican wrestling, somewhere in the shadowlands between Mexico and the US — sort of a re-imagined Los Angeles (aka “Angel City”). Most of the action takes place in “Hoodtown,” a ghetto wherein dwell the “hoods” — those who live 24/7 with their hoods on.

The narrator, X, is a female wrestler who’s living on the skids after an unfortunate accident in the ring, and making ends meet by working as a wrestling dominatrix.

Then someone starts murdering hood prostitutes and, much worse, doing to them the worst thing you can do — ripping off their hoods. X goes after the killer, ripping her way through the underbelly of Hoodtown and deep into Angel City corruption.

If I had to come up with a category for Hoodtown, I’d grudgingly call it “near-term science fiction.”, or speculative fiction, or something like that. But it’s really one of those crossover books that plays games with genre, intentionally, and I get the sense that I’m also missing a bit of it by not being more familiar with the genre of Lucha comic books.

Whatever — just go with it, because the sights, scents and sounds of Faust’s world are vivid and wholly imagined, the huge cast of characters is an unparallelled gallery of rogues and tarnished angels and, more importantly, when you get right down to it this ballsy detective story is vicious. Hoodtown doesn’t fuck around with the long-winded detours that bog down most detective novels from every era — it starts right out by kicking you in the balls, and goes right on kicking until you cry, bitch. You know all the usual cliches about how a book “pulls no punches” and is “like high octane gasoline”? Yeah, OK. Well, this one’s like that. It pulls no punches, it’s like high octane gas, it’s a jet fuel enema, fuckers — no joke.

Faust’s writing style is poetic, absurdist, brutal, and careens wildly between being gorgeously esoteric and machine-gun simplistic. In short, I think she’s read about a million vintage detective novels and she echoes the style in a way that makes it plainly clear that most latter-day imitators of noir fiction don’t have even the vaguest hint of the genre’s poetry.

Faust gets it, she’s one of the best stylists around, and it’s her writing style that makes Hoodtown such a pulpy delight.

X, as narrator and protagonist, is as tough as nails but bewitchingly human; X’s tragedy is classic noir, and her story is Hoodtown’s story on its own wicked terms. Faust’s reimagining of a Lucha-based subculture is, to this gringo, mind-bending in the extreme. I loved it.