It’s our usual practice here at Brandywine Books to post cover art for the books we review, but I’m going to skip that in making a reading report on a selection of mystery novels from Hard Case Crime. Their publishing strategy, which I applaud in the abstract, is to try to recreate the substance and spirit of the old hard-boiled paperback detective novels of the 1950s (many of which were published by Fawcett Gold Medal, a publisher born in the town where I live). In order to do this, they put out reasonably priced reprints of out-of-print classics (including, bizarrely, The Valley of Fear by “A. C. Doyle”), and also publish new works in the pulp tradition. This extends to racy cover art with lots of blazing handguns, fistfights, and half-naked women. Which explains why I’m not posting any covers.
Having some Amazon gift card money to spend, I bought five of Hard Case’s titles. Alas, I must report that I probably won’t be patronizing them again soon. I encountered some very good writing here, but I don’t think the stories will appeal much to our audience.
The first one I read, and one I rather liked, was 361, a classic by the great Donald E. Westlake. This is a story of a man who comes back from World War II service to unlooked-for peacetime carnage. Maimed in an assassination attempt, he learns that his family is not the family he thought it was, and sets out on a vendetta.
Baby Moll, by John Farris, is also well-written. It’s about a Florida man who used to be an enforcer for a crime boss, but has given up that life and gotten engaged to a “nice” girl. But, as you’d expect, they “drag him in again,” and he goes back into a world of murder, seduction, and betrayal, and gets a taste of it all. There is some heart in this book, but the body count is awfully high.
Songs of Innocence, by Richard Aleas, left me very cold. Excellently written, it’s the story of a young private detective investigating the apparent suicide of a female friend. This is a book that should be confiscated – by force if necessary – from any person prone to depression.
Fifty-To-One, by Charles Ardai, is a very bizarre book, a novelty piece. It was written to celebrate the fiftieth book release by Hard Case, and to mark the occasion Ardai produced a novel of fifty chapters, each using one of the Hard Case book titles, in sequence of publication, as its chapter title. The story of a young girl from South Dakota in big, bad New York City, this book has sort of a lighthearted, Perils of Pauline quality, but is more interesting as an exercise than as a compelling narrative. Fifty chapters of this were too many.
And finally, The First Quarry, by our old friend Max Allan Collins. This is the first in a series of novels which constitute a kind of departure for Collins. In place of his usually more sympathetic heroes, Quarry (an alias) is a professional assassin based in the Quad Cities of Iowa and Illinois. Collins does an expert job massaging the plot so as to make us root for a fairly repellant man in an even more repellant situation. Lots of violence, lots of quite explicit sex. Very well done, but not the sort of thing we generally boost around here.
So there you are. My advice is to be cautious with Hard Case Crime novels. Aside from the subject matter, there’s a very noir sensibility here, a consistent attitude of nihilism – or so it seemed to me. Pretty much all the elements (except for bad writing) that I generally warn readers about can be found in these books.
How did you happen to choose these titles? Did the cover copy sell them?
Kind of at random. I am partial to Robert McGinnis’ cover paintings though.
Thanks for this write-up. THE FIRST QUARRY isn’t the first novel in the series…and yet it is. I wrote four Quarry novels in the mid-’70s and they built a cult following. They were brought back out in the ’80s with one new entry. Hard Case asked me to do another maybe six years ago, and I did the final entry, THE LAST QUARRY. But readers and critics liked it, and I wound up writing more but in the original ’70s and ’80s period. So FIRST QUARRY is a relatively new book, but first chronologically.
These are black comedies and the points they make (the moral core, if you will) takes some digging. When I began the original Quarry novel around 1971, it was very much a response to Vietnam, and Quarry is both the first hitman character to helm a series and the first series protagonist who was a post-traumatic stressed Vietnam vet. I can understand that you might not care for these nasty little yarns, and I appreciate your measured response.
I love the Hard Case Crime books — but I’m scared to have them around the house lest my wife and kids find them! The covers are really well done, but they amp up that old pulp sensibility especially where sex is concerned.
I can understand how Hard Case isn’t for everyone. I’ve got almost all of them, but I haven’t read all of them yet. Of the ones you read, I’ve read all but Fifty-to-One. I wasn’t crazy about Baby Moll. I hated Songs of Innocence. Too nihilistic. Richard Aleas is a pen name of Charles Ardai, BTW. On the other hand, some of the ones you didn’t read are quite good. The reprints of the early Lawrence Block hold up well, as do the volumes by David Dodge and John Lange. Jack Clark’s Nobody’s Angel is well done. My favorite, though, is A Touch of Death by Charles Williams. I don’t care for some of the explicit content in some of the books, but not all of them are that way. There’s quite a variety.
Still, I understand they’re something of a niche product.
High “body counts” leave me cold too.
It trivializes the individual life.
The comment on “high body” count stories deserves a comment.
Fiction takes many forms, and not every one of them is realistic — in fact, few are. The kind of mystery fiction I specialize in falls into the area of melodrama, and the characters are often larger than life. I attempt to give them a surface reality, but we are in the realm of myth and fable and, frankly, fun.
When fictional characters die or make love or do anything, keep in mind that nobody is really dying, having sex or doing anything at all. It’s fiction. The notion of “trivializing the individual life” is so far out of the realm of the fiction being discussed here that it manages to be both unfair and irrelevant.
Quarry is black comedy. The series was designed by me, in college, in the early ’70s, when I saw how numb Americans were getting to violence and death — that we were watching bodies in body bags loaded onto helicopters on the news while we ate our TV dinners. So I decided to shake it up a little bit with Quarry. On some level he is us — how numb we’ve become. We should be feeling the pain of poverty of the homeless, we should be abhorring and mourning the deaths of soldiers fighting our largely meaningless wars. But often we don’t. And those lives and deaths are reality and worth feeling, worth worrying that we might be trivializing them.
Not the death of somebody in a pulp novel.
And now I will get off my pulpy pulpit.