– By Steve Pipe
Hardboiled detectives, neon-soaked streets and a shot or two of the strong stuff. Charles Ardai is on a mission to revive a once-flourishing literary format, the paperback crime novel, and he’s doing it with a little help from Seagate.
Ardai is the co-founder of Hard Case Crime, a New York-based company that publishes out-of-print works from legendary crime novelists like Lawrence Block, Ed McBain, Donald Westlake and Mickey Spillane, as well as new books from contemporary writers, including Stephen King.
In June, Hard Case Crime published King’s “Joyland,” a New York Times bestseller. And in August, Ardai and his team signed a deal to reprint eight early novels by the late Michael Crichton, who used the pseudonym John Lange decades before writing “Jurassic Park” and other blockbusters.
Ardai, 44, launched Hard Case Crime in 2003 with business partner Max Phillips. The two had worked together at an Internet company Ardai had started in 1996, Juno Online Services. Shortly after Juno merged with a competitor, Ardai and Phillips got together for drinks to plot their next venture.
“We were both great fans of the pulp paperback crime novels of the 1940s and ’50s,” Ardai recalled in an interview from his Manhattan office. “We said, ‘Nobody’s publishing books like that anymore. Why don’t we do it?’ We put together a proposal and met with a lot of publishers, and got a lot of doors slammed in our faces. But we finally hooked up with a publisher (Dorchester Publishing) who was willing to give it a shot.”
A decade later, Hard Case Crime has churned out nearly 100 titles—including four written by Ardai. His debut novel, “Little Girl Lost,” was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award by the Mystery Writers of America. A sequel featuring private investigator John Blake, “Songs of Innocence,” won a Shamus Award as Best Paperback Original and was hailed by Washington Post critic Patrick Anderson as “an instant classic.”
As if he’s not busy enough, Ardai also serves as a consulting producer and occasional writer on the Syfy TV series, “Haven,” which is based on King’s 2005 novel for Hard Case Crime, “The Colorado Kid.”
Whether he’s working on a new book or a TV script, Ardai uses a 1TB Seagate® Backup Plus portable hard drive and a 500GB Seagate Slim drive to backup his writing—and to store and share the striking cover art used for Hard Case Crime’s many titles.
“Hard Case Crime might publish old-fashioned books,” Ardai said, “but we do it in a very modern way. All of our graphic design and artwork is handled digitally. There’s an awful lot of storage (involved). If we don’t keep an archive of every piece of art we use, often in multiple forms, we’re going to lose our entire legacy of great cover art and design. Seagate’s drives work smoothly and well. It’s astonishing how much storage can be had in such a small and portable package.”
Leave A Comment