From World War II through the 1960s, paperback crime novels were one of the fastest-selling categories in book publishing. Millions of readers snapped up hundreds of millions of books by well-known authors like Erle Stanley Gardner and Mickey Spillane, as...
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From World War II through the 1960s, paperback crime novels were one of the fastest-selling categories in book publishing. Millions of readers snapped up hundreds of millions of books by well-known authors like Erle Stanley Gardner and Mickey Spillane, as well as by promising young writers like Lawrence Block, Elmore Leonard, and Donald Westlake. Today, Block, Leonard, and Westlake still make the bestseller lists with each new hardcover — but the pulp novels that first captured the public's imagination weren't hardcovers. They were paperbacks you could fit in your back pocket, with jaw-dropping cover paintings and bare-knuckled prose that grabbed you by the collar with the first sentence and held you until the last page. No one's published books like that in years.
Until now.
"The art perfectly captures the era — if I didn’t know better, I would have sworn it was from one of the old publishing houses. I am very impressed."
—Donald Hamilton, creator of Matt Helm Hard Case Crime is dedicated to reviving the vigor and excitement, the suspense and thrills — the sheer entertainment — of the golden age of paperback crime novels, both by bringing back into print the best work of the pulp era and by introducing readers to new work by some of today's most powerful writers and artists. Determined detectives and dangerous women...fortune hunters and vengeance seekers...ingenious criminals and men on the run for their lives...Hard Case Crime novels offer everything you want from a great story, all in handsome and affordable mass-market editions.
"They do write 'em like they used to."
—Publishers Weekly on Fade to Blonde
Hard Case Crime was created by Charles Ardai and Max Phillips; the line is published as a collaboration between Winterfall LLC and Dorchester Publishing. Cover design after December 2006 is by Steve Cooley of Cooley Design Lab.
