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!