Hard Case Crime’s December Surprise Revealed!

 

What's odd is how I originally stumbled onto this piece of news: I was doing my rounds through Amazon's advanced search making sure that I had all the crime fiction to be published in November and December on my radar, when up popped this strange little listing. The cover's there in miniature but all of the metadata is for CRIMSON by Gord Rollo, a mass market paperback horror novel originally published in 2002 by Prime books but reissued by Leisure. Ardai himself was bemused at the switcheroo: "I don't know how Amazon's listing got screwed up,
but I didn't mind that it did, since it actually helped keep the listing
unnoticed for longer than would have been the case in the absence of such a
screw-up.  (If you search for VALLEY OF FEAR, the book doesn't show
up.  Similarly, it doesn't get suggested if you search for other Hard Case
Crime books.  We didn't do this deliberately, but I didn't mind when it
happened.)"

But with the cat out of the bag, so to speak, Ardai went on to explain how Hard Case Crime came to publish THE VALLEY OF FEAR:

From the days when Max [Phillips] and I first launched Hard
Case Crime, one of the things I wanted to do was to repackage a classic novel in
full Hard Case "drag".  This would be a tip of the hat to the shameless
attempts publishers in the 1950s made to present works of literature as though
they were lurid pulp novels.  Signet was particularly good at it — see what they did with FRANKENSTEIN and 1984.  (Has there ever
been a less sexy book than 1984?  I don't think so. And yet Signet
illustrated the cover with a sultry babe wearing an unzipped jumpsuit and
an "Anti-Sex League" button while a leather-clad bullyboy looks on like a
refugee from a Tom of Finland drawing.  And how did FRANKENSTEIN become the
story of a bosomy lipsticked redhead spilling out of an off-the-shoulder yellow
dress?)

So: I thought it would be great fun to do a book
like this.  The question was what classic novel to do.  The key, I
thought, was to pick something that superficially seemed miles apart from a Hard
Case Crime book — as many miles apart as FRANKENSTEIN was from bosomy redheads
— but that deep down, at its core, was legitimate Hard Case Crime material, so
that if our readers actually sat down and read the thing, they'd feel it all
made sense — that the book did, in fact, belong in our line.

And that led me inevitably to THE VALLEY OF
FEAR.  Clearly it's a classic, and you don't get more superficially un-Hard
Case than Arthur Conan Doyle — in some ways, he seems to represent everything
that the sort of writers we normally publish were rebelling against.  But
when you get past the opening sequence with its charming Victoriana and ciphers
and manor houses and such, THE VALLEY OF FEAR actually turns out to be an
honest-to-god hardboiled crime novel, and quite a dark and violent one at
that.  (In fact, Leslie Klinger, author of THE NEW ANNOTATED SHERLOCK
HOLMES, has called THE VALLEY OF FEAR "the first real 'hard-boiled' detective
story.")

For heaven's sake, half the book is set in America,
in a depressed coal mining town run by a corrupt Masonic lodge, and it tells the
story of a man who comes to town pretending to be a criminal out of Chicago on
the run from the police but then turns out to be a Pinkerton P.I. out to
clean up the dirty town.  The Pinkerton agent succeeds in his mission but
emerges a marked man, doomed to spend the rest of his life on the run from the
lodge's followers, who chase him across an ocean and (with the help of Professor
Moriarty) finally manage to corner and kill him.  The ending is noir
through and through — all the mighty intellect of Sherlock Holmes is powerless
to prevent this good man from meeting his bloody fate. 

Having chosen the book, there was nothing left to
do other than to dress it up in the most alluring outfit and makeup we could
supply — to craft a version of THE VALLEY OF FEAR that looked as little like
any version anyone had ever seen before as Signet's FRANKENSTEIN looked like the
Boris Karloff version.  Hence, no deerstalker cap on the cover, no pipe, no
violin; nothing that said Victorian-era London; no reference to Sherlock Holmes
on the front cover and only the most oblique reference on the back.  Hence,
the author's truncated monicker, and the reference to THE LOST WORLD (maybe some
readers will think of the Spielberg movie of the same name), and the presence of
the bosomy dame and the man with the branded forearm (it's an actual scene from
the book, I swear).  It's all an attempt to throw off the normal cues that
would trigger a reader's dismissive "Oh, I know that book" or "I know that
author" reaction and force him or her to take a fresh look at the book, to see
it in a new light.  It's a hell of a good book and deserves to be read as
the gripping, vital, violent, frightening, chilling story it is, not as an
ossified 'classic' only suitable for schoolchildren. 

In a way, the Hard Case Crime reissue of THE VALLEY OF FEAR is akin to what Josh Glenn and Rob Walker have been doing with Significant Objects, a project whose thesis is that an object whose original monetary value was minimal will have its worth driven up with a short work of fiction about it. (Full disclosure: I'm an upcoming contributor to the site that already features folks like Lydia Millet, Luc Sante, Stewart O'Nan and Nicholson Baker.) All of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novels, including THE VALLEY OF FEAR, are available in the public domain, easily downloaded – for free. But Glen Orbik's cover and clever repackaging suddenly re-invests new significance into an old novel, and might also introduce the books to a new audience that may have resisted reading about the Great Detective.

Which leads to one more bit of happy convergence that Ardai notes: Hard Case Crime had "no idea" that the film version of SHERLOCK HOLMES directed by Guy Ritchie – which puts a tougher, more adventure-laden spin on the canonical characters – would be released into theaters just four days after the republication of THE VALLEY OF FEAR. "[It] makes me think maybe there was something in the air, that got the two of us thinking along the same lines," Ardai added. "He is the director of a short film called "The Hard Case," after all…"