Literary Noir in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

Hard Case Crime, launched in 2004, was created by Charles Ardai and Max Phillips with the aim of recapturing some of the energy and excitement of the mid-century paperback revolution, in mass-market editions complete with vivid cover art in the style of the great days of pulp publishing. The contemporary paperback marketing of noir as noir first took firm hold in the mid-1980s. In the UK, Maxim Jakubowski, who started reissuing vintage American noir in his Black Box Thrillers of the 1970s, launched Blue Murder (a trade paperback series for Simon and Schuster), aiming to bring out the best of noir and hard-boiled; Barry Gifford and Donald S. Ellis created the Black Lizard imprint, which republished (as Blue Murder did) the work of writers like Jim Thompson, David Goodis and Charles Williams. Random House bought Black Lizard in 1990, forming the Vintage/Black Lizard label, which combined publication of earlier crime fiction with the work of such writers as Andrew Vachss and Jason Starr. If a major company like Random House was taking noir seriously as a literary label, others were likely to see it as a respectable precedent, and both long-established publishers and new imprints have followed their example. Hard Case Crime itself, like Vintage/Black Lizard, combines reissues of vintage noir titles with the publication of the work of new authors — Ken Bruen, Christa Faust, Jason Starr, Allan Guthrie, as well as Ardai himself.