Created by Richard Aleas
Pseudonym of Charles Ardai
Hard Case Crime founding editor and author Charles Ardai ought to be slapped around at least a little bit for using Richard Aleas as a pen name (even if it is a cockeyed anagram of his own name). But we’ll cut him some slack since he’s offered us up a primo slice of pulp heaven as atonement. Little Girl Lost (2004), the first book Hard Case ever published, chucks the easy nostalgic lure of the past, and plunks his story smack dab in the present, although it’s no less retro in spirit than Ardai’s partner-in-crime Max Phillips‘ deliberately retro Fade to Blonde.
JOHN BLAKE is a young New York City private eye, 10 years out of high school, who’s not quite as jaded and world-weary as he thinks he is. In fact, innocence–and its inevitable demise–form the backbone of this story. It seems Blake’s high-school sweetie, Miranda Sugarman (another great moniker), took a powder a decade or so ago, but has suddenly reappeared in the Big Apple… and in John’s life. Unfortunately, their reunion isn’t a happy one. Blake learns about her return in a Daily News article, under the headline “Stripper Murdered.” Against his older partner’s wishes, Blake decides to look into Miranda’s death on his own dime, and find out how it all went wrong for his dream girl.
Naturally, reality turns out to be a bitch. Little Girl Lost is classic pulp, with a hearty dash of voyeuristic sleaze tossed into the mix: love-struck lesbians, well-endowed strippers and assorted treacherous (but friendly) babes all get their close-ups in these pages. Plus, there’s at least one plot device so hoary you can’t believe Aleas would dare use it. Yet he does — to great effect.
But that’s part of the charm of what Hard Case is trying to do. In sticking to the tried-and-true, the Hard Case boys may not be breaking much new ground, but in a publishing world where puffy, bloated and padded “character studies” are passed off as high-brow crime “literature,” plodding 400-page mysteries are becoming the norm, and pretentious post-modern homages to the genre lose wind after a few chapters, it’s a pleasant jolt to read something lean and mean that gets in and gets out in 250 pages or less, and still manages to rock the house.
And just to prove Little Girl Lost was no fluke, Ardai (sorry, I mean “Aleas”) brought back his detective in Songs of Innocence (2007), where Blake, disillusioned with the the whole Shamus Game, heads back to college and a gig as a teaching assistant in a writing program. Until he gets drawn into the investigation of a friend’s apparent suicide. A friend who, it turns out, has a side gig as a sex worker.
Things happen in these novels, and they happen fast. Phillips and Aleas have put the fun back into crime fiction, not just as publishers but as writers, and from where I sit, that’s no crime at all.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Novelist and short story writer Charles Ardai is the co-founder, along with Max Phillips, of the Hard Case Crime imprint, an upstart publishing imprint launched in 2004 that promised to bring you “the best in hard-boiled crime fiction, ranging from lost noir masterpieces to new novels by today’s most powerful writers, featuring stunning original cover art in the grand pulp style.” They’ve succeeded.
NOVELS
- Little Girl Lost (2004) | Buy this book | Buy the audio | Kindle it!
- Songs of Innocence (2007) | Buy this book | Buy the audio | Kindle it!
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith. Partially adapted from the January Magazine Rap Sheet review. Used with permission.
