Fifty-to-One

“And if we agree to this, you won’t tell anyone about...?”

“About anything. Hell,” Tricia said, “I’d rather see the money in your hands than the bad guys’.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Larry said.

“So,” Tricia said, “do we have a deal?”

The two men nodded and they shook hands three ways.

With that behind them, Don said, “But Trixie, tell me honestly—it’s great that you’re going to be working there, but what do you think the odds are that Hard Case Crime will be around in fifty years? Seriously. A hundred to one?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Tricia said, and she reached over, picked up Don’s glass and downed the rest of his beer. Then she did the same with Larry’s, wiped her mouth on the back of her hand and spread a companionable arm over each man’s shoulders. “I bet it’s no worse than half that.”

Author’s Note

When we set out to celebrate the publication of Hard Case Crime’s 50th book—quite a milestone for a series Max Phillips and I originally thought might never make it past its fifth—a variety of ideas got bandied about. Maybe we’d do a collection of short stories, with each of our living authors contributing a yarn. Maybe we’d uncover some important lost novel from a true giant of the field, something along the lines of a never-before-published Sam Spade novel by Hammett, or perhaps the long-rumored “black McGee” novel by John D. MacDonald. (Alas, neither exists.) Maybe this, maybe that. None of the ideas seemed quite right.

Then I hit on the notion for Fifty-to-One.

Not the title, that came later—and my thanks to author Amy Vincent for suggesting it. Just the concept. But the concept was enough to get my blood pumping.

Of course, in retrospect the concept was insane: to write a 50th book that would commemorate the (fictitious) 50th anniversary of the founding of Hard Case Crime, set 50 years ago, and to tell the story in 50 chapters, with each chapter bearing the title of one of our 50 books, in their order of publication. Our books’ titles hadn’t been chosen along the way with this sort of project in mind—if they had, I’d never have agreed to let Lawrence Block re-title his fourth book for us A Diet of Treacle, or published both The Last Quarry and The First Quarry (especially not in that order), or published books with titles as unyielding to the repurposer’s art as Zero Cool or Lemons Never Lie or The Murderer Vine.

But these things take on a life of their own, and as soon as I’d had the idea I couldn’t resist the challenge. In fact, the trickier the challenge appeared, the keener I became. (Keep in mind that I’m someone who loves books like Nabokov’s Pale Fire and Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler and Perec’s A Void. If you have a taste for trickery on a grand scale and haven’t read those books, you must. Stop reading now, put this book down, go to your local bookseller, buy all three, and read them. When you’re done, come back and we’ll continue.

[Taps fingers. Whistles a bit. Checks his watch.]

Done? Very good. Onward.)

The project began taking shape in the second half of 2007 and I began writing seriously at the start of 2008, with a mid-year deadline to hit a year-end publication date. The time pressure was part of the fun, of course: No better way to write a pulp novel than to have a deadline hanging over your head. (I kept picturing myself hammering out pages on a manual typewriter, then yanking them out and passing them to a copy boy to get them set in hot lead. Sort of like Stephen J. Cannell at the end of all those old TV shows he wrote.)

Along the way, several things occurred that heightened my excitement even further. First, Glen Orbik painted his gorgeous cover painting. All of Glen’s covers for us have been spectacular, but he really outdid himself with this one. The original is now hanging in my living room at home, and it fills me with delight every time I see it.

Then Max Phillips, who not only founded Hard Case Crime with me but also wrote one of the series’ most celebrated titles, the Shamus Award-winning Fade to Blonde, agreed to pen one of the book’s 50 chapters. (I’ll leave it to you to figure out which chapter was the one Max wrote.)

Then Dorchester Publishing, the publisher that has done such an extraordinary job of producing and distributing our books and getting them into the hands of hundreds of thousands of readers, agreed to let us include in the book a full-color insert section showcasing our first 50 covers, something I knew long-time readers would relish.

And finally I had the idea for putting Don and Larry (or at least heavily fictionalized versions of them) in the book, and when I ran it by them, they didn’t put the kibosh on it. Far from it, actually. Larry riffed on it a bit, suggesting one of my favorite jokes in the whole novel. (Again, I’ll leave it to you to guess which one. You can just pick your favorite and assume that one’s Larry’s. He’s much funnier than I am.)

Plotting the book out was, as you can imagine, a bear, and I want to thank my wonderful wife, novelist Naomi Novik, for putting up with many a dinner conversation in which I bent her ear about one knotty plot problem or other. Like Max and Larry (the other people whose ears I bent), she made a number of suggestions that wound up in the finished book and improved it greatly.

A few other thanks:

Tim DeYoung of Dorchester was the person who originally decided to take a chance on Hard Case Crime back when it was no more than an idea; without him, the series might never have launched, much less lasted as long as it has. I can’t thank him enough—and if you like our books, you can’t either.

I also want to thank our very talented art director, Steve Cooley, and typesetter, Leigh Grossman, for work above and beyond the call, not just on this book but on all the books in our line. There wouldn’t be any Hard Case Crime books without the work they do, month in and month out.

I want to thank Sarah Nicolazzo for supplying a surname for my gangster. (I hope she doesn’t mind.)

I want to thank our forthcoming 51st book, Killing Castro, for not being one of our first 50, since (Agent Brooks’ desperate final sally notwithstanding) that title would just have been the straw that broke the camel’s back.

And I want to thank all of you, our readers, especially those who’ve been with us from the start, for supporting this crazy labor of love. Hard Case Crime has always struck me as close kin to the coyote in those old cartoons, who could only keep running on air as long as he didn’t look down and spot that he was doing something impossible. You’ve kept us looking up, and airborne, all this time, and with our feet pedaling madly in space we’ve somehow managed to make it this far.

Fifty books. Dear god.

It was the winter of 2001 when, over drinks on a blustery day (at a Japanese restaurant called Azusa, no matter how many times I’ve told the story wrong and said it was the Algonquin), I said these fateful words to Max: “Why doesn’t anyone publish books like that anymore?”

Thank you, all of you, for making it possible for us to publish books like that again.

—Charles Ardai

New York City, July 2008

Nominated for the Edgar® Award and the Shamus Award!