Looks like it’s Hard Case Crime week here at The Violent World of Parker.
I’ve read dozens of interviews with Hard Case Crime publisher Charles Ardai since the line began a few years back. The interview featured this week over at Killer Covers may be the best. The jumping-off point is this great horizontal cover by Robert McGinnis, known to many of you as the artist behind the wonderful “Here’s Parker!” Fawcett Gold Medal editions, but the conversation ranges much wider than that. Do check it out.
Losers Live Longer by Russell Atwood is September’s release from Hard Case Crime. It hits stores this week.
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I’m fairly new to hardboiled, I’ve gotta say that Hard Case Crime’s covers really nail that pulpy mood. I’m thinking of starting with their publication schedule and working my way through chronologically.
My comments about corcert sentences were provoked by my recent reading of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. It is a widely praised book, and it has much to commend it, but McCarthy’s love affair with sentence fragments (all in the name of stylistic cleverness) leaves me cold. Perhaps I am a narrow-minded Luddite who is forever locked into 19th styles–pre-Joyce–when writers actually understood and used orthodox grammar and syntax. Crime fiction writers also too often opt for stylistic flourish at the expense of coherence (with the latter most obtained through proper grammar and syntax). Well, enough of this rant from a raving Luddite.