Charles Ardai and Max Phillips weren’t thinking about what reluctant readers might like when they dreamed up the idea for Hard Case Crime. They were thinking about a genre of fiction they liked, a genre that seemed to have disappeared: pulp fiction, the kind that featured tough-guy detectives and plots full of action. They thought someone ought to start publishing those sorts of books again. Their next thought was that they ought to publish them.
In 2004, they launched the publishing company, and in the months since, the venture’s burgeoning sales, growing list of books both republished and new, and the major awards they have received have all shown that Ardai and Phillips weren’t alone in liking short, tightly written, action-filled books. Lots of other people did, too, and many of them hadn’t been avid fiction readers until Hard Case Crime came along.
They didn’t set out with a pedagogic goal, Ardai says, but certainly they discovered that many of their fans are finding it a pleasant surprise that books can be enjoyable. These surprised fans, he says, are the kind of people who enjoyed films like Ocean’s Eleven or television shows like 24. But the more typical crime and action novels were too long for them. “There’s a fetish for length in the publishing industry,” Ardai says, because of how much books cost. For people used to a one-hour show or a two-hour film, a Robert Ludlum book is too long—The Bourne Supremacy, for instance, runs 646 pages in its mass-market paperback form. The pulp genre is usually about a third as long. “Our books can be read in a couple of train rides,” Ardai says.
Length is one reason for the appeal of the pulp novel, Ardai says, and the author’s intent is another. Pulp novelists wrote for money—they had to grab the readers’ attention on the first page and not let it go for another 250. Ardai says they did that by using an engaging voice, ingenious plot hooks, and the promise of a satisfying resolution.
The genre has appeal for boys in particular, and Ardai says parents have told him that their sons, usually not avid readers, enjoyed Hard Case Crime books. Ardai said he was “just thrilled” to hear that educators at the secondary and tertiary levels have used his books. The covers may seem lurid, but Ardai says the books are generally appropriate for younger readers—a large portion are republished classics of the genre that first appeared in the late 1940s and 1950s, and are relatively tame by modern standards in terms of sex and violence.
And that’s part of the challenge—the intense appeal of television and films, of video games and all the other entertainments available that books have to compete with to gain the interest of the many reluctant readers in the world. Hard Case Crime may have been a labor of love for its creators, but a side effect has been to help people join and understand the benefits of what the famous reading expert Frank Smith called “the reading club.” And Ardai is happy about that. “We’re glad,” he says, “to bring people into the fold.”
Popularity of pulp creates new readers. (April 2006). Reading Today, 23(5), 27.
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