Editor Interview: Hard Case Crime

Hardboiled crime fiction

There a number of other small publishers who have a similar goal to ours, namely celebrating and reviving the old-fashioned paperback crime fiction of the 1940s and 1950s. For instance, Stark House has done some terrific books, and Centipede Press. In the magazine world, I'm thrilled that ELLERY QUEEN'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE is still publishing (non-stop since 1941!).

It wouldn't be fair for me to single out some of our writers or artists as personal favorites. But in the world of authors outside the Hard Case Crime family, three favorites are Raymond Chandler, Graham Greene and (a very different style) Kurt Vonnegut. Some artists I love but that we came around too late to publish include James Avati, James Bama, and Robert Maguire (though Maguire's daughter did kindly give us access to some of his unpublished work after his death).

We like to think we do a particularly fine job of curating our line -- selecting the very best material to publish -- and that our books look uniquely handsome, with their hand-painted cover art. But show me a parent who doesn't think their baby is the cutest.

Please understand that we only publish a tiny number of books each year, and most of those are by established authors such as Lawrence Block or Donald Westlake or Erle Stanley Gardner or Max Allan Collins (to name just a few of our more prolific contributors), which means we usually only have one slot available each year for a new or newish author -- and more than 1,000 submissions competing for that one slot. That means we have to say no well over 99% of the time, so a no from us is far, far, FAR more likely than a yes. As long as you know that going in, there's no harm in trying, but please do understand that we're a nearly impossible market to crack.

Simple: send a brief cover letter describing the book and anything interesting or relevant about the author, and attach the manuscript. That's it.
Don't send short stories or novellas -- we only publish full-length novels (generally 60,000-80,000 words, though sometimes we've gone a bit lower or higher). You're wasting your time sending us a 20,000-word story or a 200,000-word one.
No works in progress or pitches of things you haven't written yet but could -- we have our hands full just dealing with the 1,000+ completed manuscripts we get each year.
We're not looking for series -- just individual standalone novels that knock our socks off. Nothing wrong with series, they can be wonderful, I've loved many myself, but...we only publish a few books each year and just don't have room in our teeny-tiny line for another series.
We aren't looking for serial killers, fantasy, cozies, legal thrillers, spy thrillers, thrillers of any other sort really (if it feels like Dan Brown or Jason Bourne it might be terrific but it's not for us), anything conspicuously 21st-century (hacking, social media, Covid, Ozempic) -- just good old-fashioned hardboiled or 'noir' crime fiction.
Don't send a sample chapter from the middle of the book. If your opening chapter isn't good enough to hook a reader, you need to write a new opening chapter.
And if our answer is no, as sadly it will be in 99.9% of cases, please don't respond with, "Why? I thought my book was exactly the sort you publish. What's wrong with it? Can you give me a better idea of what you ARE looking for?" We just have to say no the vast, vast majority of the time, which means we'll probably have to say it to you. Apologies in advance. If it happens, don't be discouraged. Another editor might fall in love with your book and do amazingly with it. But we can only go for 1 in 1,000+, and that means saying no to 999+. It's nothing personal.

Most people do it just fine. Sometimes someone will query without describing the book at all and without attaching the manuscript: "I've written a mystery novel, would you like to read it?" I don't know, maybe? Probably not (just statistically, the odds are that any given submission will be one of our 999+ nos in a given year, not our one and only yes), but maybe? Don't email asking if you can send a submission -- just send the submission. And describe the book briefly in the cover letter so that I can quickly let you know if what you're submitting has any chance of being right for our line. (No reason you should have to wait weeks or months for a response you could have gotten in minutes if you'd just described the book up front. It's painful to get a no, but if you're going to, better to get it right away than have to wait weeks before getting it.)

We don't need much information about the author -- I don't care what pets you have or how many kids or that you lived in Texas before moving to Arizona. If you have publication credits, it's worth mentioning, since it means other editors have judged your work worthy of publication before, which makes it more likely that I'll feel the same way. (A lack of credits doesn't mean your work isn't publication-worthy, but the existence of credits, especially from impressive publishers, might suggest it is.) If other authors whose work I know and admire have had positive things to say about your writing, that can be good to know -- they might have said those things as a personal favor or out of kindheartedness, but they might legitimately have thought your work was outstanding, so it can't hurt to share if they said that. If you have personal expertise that's relevant to the subject matter of your book, that can sometimes be interesting to know -- "I wrote a novel about a jewel heist and I've spent 20 years working in Interpol to foil exactly this sort of heist" or "...and I'm the world's leading expert on gems and minerals" or whatever. But mostly a book needs to speak for itself, so no need to spend too much time crafting a biography for the cover letter.

Sometimes the first page is enough for us to say no, if the writing just isn't good at all -- a surprisingly large fraction of the submissions we get fall into this category. If the writing is at least decent on a sentence-by-sentence level, the first few pages are usually enough for me to decide whether I'm finding a book compelling or not. If were in a bookstore and picked this book up and read the first few pages, would I want to take it home with me and read the rest? Or would I put it down and keep looking for something else? It's the same test for the unpublished books that come in to us. On a typical day we might have 2 or 3 or 5 or 7 novels arrive in our inbox, and there is no way for us to read them all, so we briefly dip into each and see which one (if any) makes us want to keep reading. A few pages is almost always enough.

There's only one editor here. If I fall in love with a book, it might get published (sadly, we can only take a fraction even of the books I love!). If I don't, it won't. That's pretty much it. We do share our choices with the folks at Titan Books, with whom we've worked for more than a decade now to publish our books and get them into stores around the world, and they might sometimes have opinions about how a given book is likely to do or how it might best be presented. But it's not really "additional evaluations." It's counsel from some very smart people whose judgment is really excellent.

Since Hard Case Crime is a one-man labor of love, I do a bit of everything and every day is a grab-bag of whatever needs to get done. Everything from reading submissions and sending contracts for those rare few we do select to commissioning cover art and working with the artists on what it should look like to typesetting and proofreading and writing marketing copy and trying to get reviewers to pay attention when a book is coming out. Soup to nuts.

It depends entirely on how much editing a piece requires. We've bought some books that were basically perfect the way they were -- a few typos to fix and that's it. We've also had books where I had to revise literally every sentence -- a little or a lot, but every sentence needed something. It happens. Nothing wrong or right about either situation. If a book is good enough to publish, it has something precious about it. But some gems need polishing and setting. Of course in the end the amount of editing an author is willing to accept is up to him or her. But if I feel a book requires editing and the author isn't receptive, we're not the right publisher for that author. That said, most authors are glad to get the editing help if their book can be made stronger by it.

Yes. If we know of an award our books might be appropriate for (most commonly the Edgar Allan Poe Award or the Shamus Award, but sometimes others like the Hammett Prize or the Nero Wolfe Award), we're happy to submit copies to the judges.