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BOOKSHELF

A Hardboiled Passion

Charles Ardai '91 PHOTO: TIBOR ARDAI

As a teenager living in New York City, Charles Ardai ’91 became immersed in the world of pulp mystery fiction, hardboiled crime novels popularized in the 1950s with their provocative covers and mass entertainment appeal. His love for this genre hasn’t waned: In September, Ardai and his longtime friend, Max Phillips, launched Hard Case Crime (www.hardcasecrime.com), a publishing line that reintroduces the pulp mystery style to nostalgic fans and hopes to hook a new generation of readers.

For Ardai and Phillips, coming up with the concept of Hard Case Crime was simple. Finding the right publisher, however, was a difficult process that took more than two years. “Some publishers wanted to do the books in a winking, campy style; others would have done them straight, but would have insisted on publishing them in trade paperback or hardcover editions at high prices,” says Ardai, whose goal was to stay loyal to the roots of pulp mystery publishing with a pocket-sized, mass-market format, relatively low cover price and beautiful painted covers. Hard Case Crime finally found its match in Dorchester Publishing, the oldest independent mass-market publisher in the United States, and they began pulling the line together.

The series, which will include reissues of the best of the genre as well as new works, debuted in September with Grifter’s Game by Lawrence Block and Fade to Blonde by Max Phillips (Hard Case Crime, $6.99 each). Ardai’s choice to reprint the 1961 classic by Block, originally titled Mona, is an homage to the author who got him hooked on pulp mystery novels. “Block has a gift for creating deeply memorable characters and situations, and for writing about them with grace and humor. His prose is really irresistible,” Ardai says.

As an English major at the College who specialized in British romantic poetry, Ardai felt, in some ways, that his favorite hardboiled writers were not too different from the Romantics he was studying. Both groups, he says, tried to “recast a venerable but stale form of literary expression in the modern vernacular.” Unlike the refined tea room mysteries of Agatha Christie, hardboiled crime writers such as James M. Cain and Mickey Spillane breathed fresh air into the mystery field with “stories filled with realistic violence and told in language that sounded the way actual people speak.” It is no coincidence that the main character of Hard Case Crime’s October release, Little Girl Lost — written by Ardai under his anagrammatic pseudonym, Richard Aleas — is named John Blake, stealing a name apiece from Romantic poets John Keats and William Blake. The title of the novel, Ardai said, is lifted from a Blake poem.

Little Girl Lost by Richard Aleas

Ardai’s latest venture is another item added to an already impressive career that began long before he graduated from Columbia. A commuter student, Ardai was quick to wet his feet in the working world, showing an ability to multitask that foreshadowed his later accomplishments. He worked part-time as an editor and marketing associate for a midtown publishing company and wrote for a number of magazines, all while maintaining a GPA of more than 4.0. Shortly after graduation, he joined the New York office of the D.E. Shaw group, a worldwide investment and technology development firm, and has been with the company for 13 years. In only his third year there, Ardai was entrusted with the leadership of Juno, an Internet service provider that was conceptualized, organized and initially financed by the D.E. Shaw group. Ardai served as CEO of Juno until its merger with NetZero in 2001 and returned to the D.E. Shaw group as managing director, his current position.

In 2002, Ardai created a media company, Winterfall LLC, to undertake various publishing projects. Winterfall’s first project was The Return of the Black Widowers (Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2003, $24), a tribute to Ardai’s friend, Isaac Asimov ’39 GS, ’39 GSAS, ’41 GSAS, which included six of Asimov’s Black Widowers stories that had never appeared in book form, Ardai’s choice of 10 of the best previously collected stories and “The Last Story,” a new Black Widowers story written by Ardai with the blessing of the Asimov Estate. Hard Case Crime is Winterfall’s second project.

In 1993, while a full-time employee at the D.E. Shaw group, Ardai was nominated for the Shamus Award, which honors excellence in the private eye genre, for his short story “Nobody Wins.” Ardai was able to continue producing fiction while working full-time by writing during off-hours and occasionally scratching notes on pads between meetings. The “sense of velocity” that pervades pulp novels has complemented Ardai’s fast-paced lifestyle, allowing him to finish writing Little Girl Lost in just 90 days (albeit after writing the first chapter 10 years ago).

“If you have stories you want to tell, you find a way to tell them,” Ardai said, “and you do what the old penny-a-word pulp writers did: You write fast.”

Peter Kang ’05

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