It was Friday morning at the San Diego Convention Center. The Exhibit Hall had just opened, but things were still relatively quiet. So a guy could spend some time looking over books he didn’t have, particularly those from Titan Publishing. As usual, their booth was short and wide, all the better to lay out a fine array of dead trees. And behind the tables sat my real quarry: Hard Case Crime founder, novelist, and comics writer Charles Ardai.
Some say he used to be a magician until he ran across one too many rabbits he couldn’t pull out of his hat. But that’s all hearsay that I made up just now to give this interview a whiff of intrigue, the kind of whiff that’s vaguely like a well-oiled automatic in the hand of a beautiful but deadly dame, the kind Ardai writes about and which I’d spent many nights reading about. You didn’t come here to read me yammer. Let’s get to the big show, the main attraction at Titan today, and we’re not talking about a certain barbarian. But we could be…
(This interview has been edited for length, clarity, and to make sure there was no more funny business.)
Derek McCaw: I’m with Charles Ardai, not just the creator of Gun Honey and Heat Seeker. You are the mastermind behind the Hard Case Crime line of novels and comics.
Charles Ardai: That’s right.
Derek McCaw: I was just reading one of the latest issues last night. Twenty years. Twenty years this has been going on. I feel like it was just last year that I picked up Stephen King’s Joyland.
Charles Ardai: In 2001, Max Phillips and I came up with the idea for Hard Case Crime, which was to revive the style of publishing that was popular in the 1950s, 40s and 50s. Beautiful painted covers with sexy women and men with guns and high velocity stories. And no one was publishing books like that.
Now, these were prose novels. These weren’t comic books. And we started with Lawrence Block and Donald Westlake, Erle Stanley Gardner, some of these giants of the crime writing world, in prose fiction. We did that for several years with a company called Dorchester Publishing. When they went out of business (unrelated to us) we hooked up with Titan and Titan had both a traditional publishing arm that published novels and a comic book arm. The couple that own and run Titan, Nick Landau and Vivian Chung, who are by the way wonderful, said why don’t we do some crime comics, too? So it’s been 20 years of prose novels but about seven or eight of comic books.
We started with Walter Hill, the film director, doing a comic based on one of his unproduced scripts. And we worked with Christa Faust and Gary Phillips on Peepland. We did a Girl with the Dragon Tattoo adaptation. And those books all did quite nicely, and we were very happy to do them.
But then I promised Nick and Viv that I would do one as well, that I would write a book for the series. And I came up with Gun Honey. And that came out and that just became the best-selling comic in all the history of not just Hard Case Crime, but Titan Comics as well. And so Gun Honey has kind of eclipsed everything else we’ve done, even though they’re all very good books. I think people should go get them.
Derek McCaw: Is that record threatened with this Conan revival?
Charles Ardai: The Conan revival, it’s neck and neck. I think either they sell a little more than Gun Honey or Gun Honey sells a little more than them.
Derek McCaw: Okay, you know what, so buy both and feel better.
Charles Ardai: Buy both, exactly. But I’m thrilled, yeah. So Nick of Titan is a lifelong Conan fan, as am I, by the way, and he wanted to get the Conan license for comics for years, I think maybe even 20 years, and finally got it and has been doing Conan books that have been getting real raves, like critical raves. People think these books are great.
And I’m proud to share a home with Conan. I sometimes wonder, in a showdown between Joanna Tan (aka Gun Honey) and Conan, who would win? Conan is, of course, much bigger and has a giant sword, but she does have guns. So that puts him at a bit of a disadvantage, but he has magic, so there you go
Derek McCaw: I’ve got to give you credit for how you name characters, such as Heat Seeker’s Dahlia Racers. Perfect 60s spy names for everybody.
Charles Ardai: Well, it’s trickier than that because Dahlia Racers is also an anagram of my real name, Charles Ardai. So I not only had to come up with a name that sounded right, but it had to use all the letters in my name. So that was a fun little challenge. I love wordplay. I love games like that.
You mentioned Conan. I’ll also mention there’s a series of books by a wonderful writer and illustrator named Cynthia von Buehler about an historical detective named Minky Woodcock. There were two. There was Minky Woodcock: The Girl Who Handcuffed Houdini about the death of Houdini in 1927 under mysterious circumstances. There was Minky Woodcock: The Girl Who Electrified Tesla about the mysterious death of Nikola Tesla, the inventor.
And the new one coming this fall is Minky Woodcock: The Girl Called Cthulhu, in which she meets H.P. Lovecraft, author of the Cthulhu Mythos, and also Alistair Crowley, the wickedest man in the world, and Ian Fleming, the man who created James Bond. It’s going to be a fun series. That’s coming out, I think, in November, something like November.
Derek McCaw: It’s an exaggeration based on an actual secret World War II event, which I think is perfect for the things we are finding out actually happened.
Charles Adlai: Yes, they were really trying these things. They were trying many peculiar things. I’ll tell you, without getting off topic too much, the word tank. Now, maybe I’m wrong about this. Maybe this is apocryphal, but I believe the word tank used to describe the military transportation and violent device came about because of a Dahlia Racers-type deception mission.
The equipment was being shipped in wooden crates, and they were marked tank. Because the word tank didn’t mean anything other than like an aquarium tank. And they wanted to hide what was in the boxes. And they called it tank because that was considered an innocent word that no one would think meant a weapon. Is that true or not? I don’t know. Somebody should look that up. I’m going to research that. (It’s sort of true.)
Derek McCaw: Now we’re talking magic because that definitely runs through your work. and you yourself.
Charles Ardai: I was a failed magician. I was a teenage magician, like a teenage werewolf.
Derek McCaw: Oh, I was an elementary school magician.
Charles Ardai: Excellent. Me too. I did such embarrassing tricks. I would get up in the school talent show every year, and I would put on a magic show, and I would sit in front of 400 kids on a stage that could hold 100 people, and I would do a coin trick. And of course, nobody in the back row of the auditorium could see a coin trick. I was crazy. I was dumb, but I did it, and I had fun.
My storytelling is all an extension of my wanting to entertain and also mystify. You know, when you’re a magician you want people to be surprised and when you’re a storyteller you want people to be surprised so I’m always trying to pull the rug out from under people and give them twists they weren’t expecting.
Derek McCaw: Let’s focus on the books themselves. Heat Seeker: Combustion in the fall. Your artists do incredible work, but did you create the spin-offs because it takes them so much time?
Charles Ardai: Yep, that’s right. That’s right. Ang Hor Kheng, who does the art for all the Gun Honey books, is brilliant. His art is beautiful, but it takes him more than a year to produce four issues. and if we want to publish something every year and it takes more than a year to produce four issues we have to publish something in between. That was the origin of the spin-off idea, but boy, it’s taken a life of its own.
Ace Continuado who does the art for the Heat Seeker books is absolutely terrific, very different style and I love it. We’re thinking of doing a spin-off based on a character who will appear in the second Heat Seeker because I just sort of fell in love with her. It’s a mercenary, a beautiful woman who has been genetically altered so she can’t feel anything. She can’t feel pain, heat, cold, hunger, fatigue. But she also can’t feel pleasure. She can’t feel anything. And she also happens randomly to be a huge comic book fan.
So it’s fun to write about her. I love her voice. And I think we may need to bring her back for a series of her own. I don’t have a title yet.
Derek McCaw: What’s interesting is that I feel you write in spy-fi. But still these two books have been somewhat rooted in what you can kind of believe.
Charles Ardai: Yes, that’s right. It’s not people who can fly.
Derek McCaw: But once you get to genetically altering someone, why take that tack?
Charles Ardai: Right, so that’s an interesting question. This comes the closest we’ve come to introducing someone with powers, right? Somebody who has some unnatural, unbelievable ability. The thing is, it only tiptoes up to that line because you do find… drugs that are given to the troops on battlefronts to keep them awake longer, for example. That’s a real thing. That’s not invented.
And there are other attempts to make what you might think of as super soldiers. They’re not Captain America, and they’re never going to be Captain America, but someone who is more resistant to pain could keep fighting even after an injury. So I thought this was close enough to the real world that I could tolerate it. We’ll see if readers say, oh, come on, that’s too much like, you know, it’s too much like Wolverine. That’s too much like Deadpool. We won’t do it.
Derek McCaw: Every time I read something like this, I think, oh my God, the world is so much worse than I think.
Charles Ardai: It’s true. I wrote the new Gun Honey, called Gun Honey: Collision Course, which the current four-issue run is ending in a couple of weeks. I think mid-August, the last issue comes out. And because it was mid-August and the Olympics are going on now, I thought I’d be timely. And I have the assassination attempt that is mentioned at the end of issue three, which is taking place at the Paris Olympics. So as the Paris Olympics are going on in the real world, you can read issue four of Gun Honey: Collision Course, which takes place at the Paris Olympics.
But I never thought that there was any real chance of any violence at the Paris Olympics. That never occurred to me when I wrote my script. Now we’re in the middle of it, and there’s a real risk that there could be violence. So I’m just praying that my book doesn’t prove prophetic.
Derek McCaw: Well, isn’t that the challenge when you’re writing somewhat reality-based things?
Charles Ardai: Absolutely. That’s right. Look, if I had been halfway through writing the script about the Paris Olympics when things happened, I probably would have scrapped it. But I’m happy to have done it. It’s exciting to do something at, you know, Paris and Versailles. It’s a good setting for a Gun Honey adventure. I just hope there’s no actual blood spilled. I hope it remains ink on the comic book page.
Derek McCaw: Gun Honey, Heat Seeker. We’ve got so much great stuff from Hard Case Crime. And as I was telling you before we started recording, I got back into reading crime fiction because of you, because of liking Max Allan Collins.
Charles Ardai: Oh, that’s so great. Max Allan Collins, we published probably 20 of his novels. He’s working on two new novels for us now. He’s the author of Road to Perdition. That is his most famous comic book, although he also wrote the Dick Tracy newspaper comic script for many years, and he wrote some Batman and other things.
But in the prose world, his most famous series are probably Quarry, about a hitman, which became a series on Cinemax for a season, and the Nathan Heller books, which are historical detective novels, which have been going for probably 40 years now, something like that.
And we have a new Nathan Heller novel in the works now, which will explore the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa. We’ll finally find out what happened to Jimmy Hoffa.
Derek McCaw: I’ll believe Max. Thank you so much.
