Hard Case Crime Releases Out-of-Print Joyce Carol Oates Thrillers
Charles Ardai, editor of Hard Case Crime,spoke with us over email about the three volumes of Joyce Carol Oates (writing as Rosamund Smith) thrillers the pulp mystery imprint is re-publishing this year:
Please introduce us to the three Joyce Carol Oates / Rosamond Smith titles upcoming from Hard Case Crime:
Forty years ago, the celebrated literary author Joyce Carol Oates set off on a clandestine adventure. Without telling her agent or publisher about it, she wrote a crime novel under a second identity she’d dreamed up, “Rosamond Smith,” and sold it to a different publisher as this unknown new author’s first novel.
Of course the truth came out, and after apologies were made to one and all, Joyce’s publishers agreed to tolerate her moonlighting under a different name, writing these disturbing and cinematic psychological suspense stories, all of them about twins or doubles or second identities, surely a tip of the hat to their being the work of her own alter ego. There have been eight Rosamond Smith books in all, and when the rights to six of them became available Joyce and I started talking about how we might bring them back for the delectation of a new generation of readers who might never have seen them before. They haven’t been in bookstores for decades.
What makes these special?
We didn’t want to just put out new editions of the six novels and call it a day – we wanted to do something more interesting. And the idea we came up with, for these books about twins and doubles, was to curate them in double volumes, each volume pairing two of the novels based on similarities in theme (for instance, the first volume, DOUBLE TROUBLE, pairs two novels about serial killers, one female and one male, each killing out of a conviction that they are doing good). Then, to make each volume a pair of pairs – double double – we decided we would also include two of Joyce’s short stories that had never been collected before, and which echoed in some way the themes of the novels.
The result is something like a hall of mirrors, full of sinister reflections; I think reading each set of four works together offers a singular pleasure different from reading any of the individual pieces alone. Add in a beautiful retro-noir cover by the Italian painter Claudia Caranfa and you’ve got a handsomely curated package that we’re very proud of.
What are the other two volumes?
The second is called SECOND NATURE and pairs two novels that are each about an ostensibly upstanding member of their communities – a respected father in white-picket-fence suburbia, an acclaimed composer and professor – whose apparent probity conceals secret lives that one might politely describe as not overly characterized by impulse control. The third will be called MIRROR, MIRROR and pairs two novels about how appearances can deceive – even deceiving the person looking in the mirror, sometimes. Each volume will also contain the two uncollected short stories as well, of course. SECOND NATURE comes out in September, MIRROR, MIRROR next June, meaning that all three volumes will be out in time for Rosamond Smith’s 40th anniversary.
Do you have a favorite volume?
How can I pick among my children? Each one has something wonderful about it. DOUBLE TROUBLE has the most “Hard Case Crime” novel in it, with a stunning and deadly femme fatale laying waste to the male population of several states; SECOND NATURE has probably the most erotically charged novel of the six, about a man who, while serving on jury duty, becomes obsessed with a beautiful woman testifying in the case; and MIRROR, MIRROR has the wildest and most surreal of all the novels, with layers of identity as puzzling as any I’ve ever seen. My suggestion? Read them all, of course.
How was it working with Joyce? Was she excited to see the books be republished in the Hard Case format?
Joyce has been an absolute joy to work with. We collaborate very well, and she’s been open to all sorts of ideas and approaches I wasn’t at all sure she would entertain. She even loves our cover art? I was nervous at first, before we’d ever done a book together, to show her what our books look like, since they’re intentionally lurid, a knowing revival of the painted book cover style of the paperbacks of the 1940s and 50s. I pulled up some examples of our covers and said “You know, if you do a book with us, the cover is going to look like these” and she smiled with relish and said “That would be the whole point!”
What's next for Hard Case?
The three volumes with Joyce are our biggest undertaking at the moment, but at the start of this year we also published a sequel to Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, to commemorate the original novel’s entering the public domain on January 1. Our novel was written by the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Max Allan Collins, who previously continued Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer novels (at Mickey’s request) and earlier continued the Dick Tracy comic strip after Chester Gould. Max has a particular talent for entering into the voice and style and worldview of another author, and he’s been a passionate fan of Hammett’s and the Falcon for decades.
Return of the Maltese Falcon, which takes place just weeks after the original and features return appearances from nearly all the characters you know and love, was a labor of love for him and the love shows. We’ve been thrilled with the very positive reviews the book has gotten, even from skeptics who went in to reading it certain it couldn’t possibly do the original justice. Any hardboiled private eye could tell you that justice isn’t something anyone can count on, but I’m really glad to be able to say the verdict is in on our new tale of the Falcon, and the consensus is that justice has been done.
