Hard Case Crime is an American imprint of hardboiled crime novels founded in 2004 by Charles Ardai, also known as the founder of the Internet service Juno Online Services, and Max Phillips. The series recreates, in editorial form and content, the style of the paperback crime novels of the 1940s and '50s. The covers feature original art done in the pulp style by artists such as Robert McGinnis and Glen Orbik.
The collection includes both reprints of books from the pulp era (typically labeled Complete and unabridged on the cover), and new novels written for the collection (typically labeled First publication anywhere). The most widely reviewed entry in the series to date is a novel by Stephen King, The Colorado Kid, which later became the basis for the SyFy television series Haven.
Five novels published by Hard Case have been nominated for the Edgar Award: In 2005, Little Girl Lost, by Richard Aleas (a pseudonym for Hard Case Crime co-founder Charles Ardai that is both an anagram of Ardai's name and a play on "alias"), was nominated as Best First Novel by an American Author and Domenic Stansberry's The Confession won the award for Best Paperback Original; in 2006, 2008, and 2009, respectively, Allan Guthrie's Kiss Her Goodbye, Russell Hill's Robbie's Wife, and Christa Faust's Money Shot were nominated for Best Paperback Original.
Max Phillips' Fade to Blonde won the 2005 Shamus Award for Best Paperback Novel of the Year, and Charles Ardai's pseudonymous "Richard Aleas" novel Songs of Innocence won the same award in 2008. Ardai also received the Edgar Award in 2007, for his short story "The Home Front."
Between 2004 and 2010, Hard Case Crime was published through a collaboration between Ardai's company, Winterfall LLC, and Dorchester Publishing. Starting in 2011, Titan Books took Dorchester's place as publisher of the series. Additionally, it has been announced that one volume in the series, reprinting a pair of early Lawrence Block novels, 69 Barrow Street and Strange Embrace, will be published by Subterranean Press.
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