Musty But Marvelous

I’m just in the midst of reading Songs of Innocence, the second novel by Richard Aleas (alias Charles Ardai, the big cheese at Hard Case Crime), so my reticular activating system was alerted by a new interview with Ardai in Pulp Pusher. Over the course of that exchange, the author talks about working with book-cover artists, fielding fan mail from such leading lights as Mickey Spillane, and his Edgar Award-winning short story, “The Home Front.” He also tells how he became an ardent fan of pulp crime fiction:

I remember coming across a big pile of Argosy magazines at an estate sale in Pennsylvania when I was a little kid and my mother bought them for me. My God, they stank--they’d been sitting in a mildew-infested cellar for decades. But I couldn’t stop reading them. Then I moved on to great short stories that had been collected in anthologies, and then on to the paperbacks of the 1940s and ’50s and ’60s. I was a voracious reader back then and read everything--even klassik litrachoor--but pulp writing (and, later, noir crime fiction) grabbed me hardest.

And while we’re talking about interviews, there’s another one worth reading, the subject this time being British thriller writer Sam Bourne (The Righteous Men, The Last Testament). You’ll find that one in Crime Squad.