The Black Bird Is Back!

I had known for a long while that Iowa crime novelist Max Allan Collins wanted to pen a sequel to Dashiell Hammett’s genre-defining 1930 private-eye novel, The Maltese Falcon, so when the official announcement of his effort came last September, I was hardly surprised. However, the subsequent rush to print of Return of the Maltese Falcon, due out from Hard Case Crime in January 2026, seems remarkable.

As Collins writes today in his blog, “My editor at Hard Case Crime, Charles Ardai, is something of a wonder. Normally when you turn a manuscript in, it takes an editor months or at least weeks to get you the line-edited manuscript to go over. Charles gets back to you the next day, or if he takes two or three days, he apologizes for the delay. Then he has the book typeset in another day (he does this himself) and provides galley proofs, and to say this is unusual is an understatement.

“It’s very cool to have the process go this quickly. Writers like the feeling when a book has ‘gone to bed.’”

No less cool is the fact that we now have a front for Return!



Both this novel’s cover painting and design (including title type hearkening back to Falcon’s original edition) are credited to Irvin Rodriguez, “an artist working in painting, drawing, digital media and illustration based in Los Angeles.” You can see more of Rodriguez’s work on his Instagram page.

Meanwhile, Collins has posted his afterword to Return of the Maltese Falcon in CrimeReads, which tells how he was first introduced to Hammett’s best-known yarn and what he asked of himself in order to echo that long-dead author’s writing style. An introductory note to the excerpt cites some resources Collins used in order to re-create the Depression-era San Francisco of Sam Spade’s heyday. (Don Herron’s The Dashiell Hammett Tour receives due applause.) Why post this afterword rather than some portion of the actual story? “Where normally an advance look at the first chapter might have been used as a promotional teaser,” he explains in his blog, “something had to substitute, because the public-domain nature of the original novel won’t kick in until my sequel is published next year. So advance promo couldn’t use any of my novel itself—we’d be in violation of the original copyright.”

I’m normally skeptical of another writer being hired to augment a prominent but deceased author’s oeuvre; Collins himself acknowledges that “following in the footsteps of a genius writer as precise as Dashiell Hammett is a sort of suicide note.” However, the creator of series gumshoe Nathan Heller has already done a fine job over these last 16 years of doubling the number of novels starring Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer (a run that ended recently with Baby, It’s Murder). I am confident Return of the Maltese Falcon will do Hammett proud, too.

* * *

Max Collins’ CrimeReads post today reminds me that a “somewhat different version of [The Maltese Falcon]’s initial pulp serialization” was included in Otto Penzler’s The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories (2010). I never did get around to reading that variant. Perhaps now is the time to take it down off the shelf.

Angel on the Lam

Sorry, everyone, for the long silence on this page. My last post went up at the end of March, and the one before that promised the imminent unrolling of a new series. Since then, I’ve experienced computer issues and the death of one of my closest friends. If you’re a reader of my other blog, The Rap Sheet, you will have noticed a drop-off in activity there as well, though not quite as serious.

My absence became persistent enough, that I received an anonymous comment here earlier this week, asking, “Where have you been?”

With any luck, this post marks my return. Yes, it will likely take some while to resume my normal blogging pace, but a start must be made. Therefore, I am bringing you today the latest Hard Case Crime paperback cover from artist Paul Mann, about whom I have written before. The Get Off—shown above—is due out in March 2025, and is the third hard-boiled novel from Christa Faust to feature her ex-porn star protagonist, Angel Dare. (The previous installments in that series were 2008’s Money Shot and 2011’s Choke Hold).

Hard Case Crime’s synopsis of the book’s plot reads:

Tagged as a cop killer when a mission of vengeance goes wrong, Angel Dare finds herself on the run, with an unexpected burden: she’s pregnant. Her desperate flight takes Angel across the rugged American west, where cattle barons lock horns with rodeo bullfighters and life can end suddenly and brutally. A renegade couple living off the grid near the border might offer a chance of escape—but can Angel reach them in time ...?

It’s hard to believe that almost a decade and a half has passed since Choke Hold reached stores. And that, according to Hard Case, The Get Off will conclude Angel Dare’s story.

You can read a sample chapter of Faust’s latest yarn here.

Mann, Oh Mann!

I’ve had the opportunity over my years as a journalist and book critic to interview a great many people. They’ve ranged from relative unknowns to prominent figures such as actor James Garner, Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau, Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, jazz singer Sarah Vaughn, and architect-futurist Buckminster Fuller, as well as crime novelists on the order of Ross Macdonald, Robert B. Parker, Elmore Leonard, and Philip Kerr.

Not all encounters of this sort have gone smoothly, and scheduling difficulties have sometimes arisen. However, I don’t recall ever being so challenged in seeking to arrange an interview as I was when I tried to connect with Salt Lake City-area artist-illustrator Paul Mann (shown at right).

You may recognize Mann’s moniker from an article I posted last week about his work on the front of Too Many Bullets, the new, 19th Nate Heller private-eye novel by Max Allan Collins. Over the last half-dozen years, Mann has become a regular contributor to publisher Hard Case Crime’s cracking line of hard-boiled yarns. His mastery of retro-style imagery has made him a go-to HCC cover artist, along with Robert McGinnis, Ron Lesser, Claudia Caranfa, Mark Eastbrook, Laurel Blechman, and others. Having long been interested in book illustration, I wished to ask him about his four decades spent perfecting his craft, his creative techniques, his favorite book covers, his Hard Case assignments, and his extensive portfolio of cinema-related spec pieces.

When repeated efforts to make contact via e-mail failed, I asked Hard Case editor Charles Ardai for help in reaching Mann. Ardai said he was happy to pass along my message “with a note encouraging him to reply to you. He still might not—he’s a very nice fellow, but may not like doing interviews or might just be dealing with a lot of other commitments. But I’m glad to give it a try.”

In the end, I never heard so much as a whisper from Mann.

So I moved on. There were other people to speak with, other artists to showcase in Killer Covers, other book reviews to write. But recently Ardai mentioned on the social networking service formerly known as Twitter (sorry, I’m never going to call it “X”—that’s just too moronic a name) that Hard Case is planning next year to issue a trade paperback version of Lemons Never Lie, a 1971 novel that Donald E. Westlake released under his pseudonym Richard Stark. In 2006 HCC had published Lemons in mass-market size (with cover art by Richard B. Farrell), but copies of that ran out long ago, and as Ardai explained, Westlake’s widow “agreed we should reprint in the larger format to match all our recent editions of Don’s books.” Said forthcoming reprint will boast a new and captivating cover—exhibited atop this post—by none other than Paul Mann.

That finally kicked it over the edge. I was going to have to go ahead and exhibit Mann’s remarkable talents on this page without interviewing the man himself. Below you’ll find what I believe is his entire Hard Case oeuvre—so far. Among the titles are several by Westlake, including Forever and a Death (2017), which is said to have started out as a James Bond film treatment; Collins’ 18th Nate Heller historical tale, The Big Bundle (2022); Ardai’s Death Comes Too Late, a short-story collection due out in March of next year; and a 2019 illustrated edition of Stephen King’s The Colorado Kid (originally published in 2005 with a cover by Glen Orbik).

I look forward to seeing many more of Mann’s sexy, traditionally fashioned Hard Case Crime fronts in the near future.

To the Nines

Robert McGinnis’ name has come up one or two times in this blog, I know (OK, maybe one or two thousand times), but that’s because even now—approaching his 92nd birthday on February 3—he continues to turn out excellent work. This coming October, for instance, a new painting by McGinnis will be featured on Hard Case Crime’s reissue of Erle Stanley Gardner’s The Count of Nine, shown above.

That book, you might remember, is the 18th original entry in Gardner’s series starring clever but oft-comical Los Angeles private investigators Bertha Cool and Donald Lam. The author saw it reach print initially back in 1958, under his by-then-familiar pseudonym, A.A. Fair. This is how Hard Case describes the plot: “Hired to protect the treasures of a globe-trotting adventurer, Bertha and Donald confront an impossible crime: how could anything be smuggled out of a dinner party when the guests were X-rayed coming and going—least of all a 6-foot-long blowgun? But that’s nothing compared to the crime they face next: an impossible murder …” The publisher goes on to promote its reissue of The Count of Nine as the novel’s “first appearance in bookstores in half a century!”

Hard Case has already brought out paperback editions of three other Cool and Lam yarns over the years: Top of the Heap, The Knife Slipped (apparently intended as the series’ second installment, but not released until 2016), and Turn on the Heat. McGinnis provided the cover image for The Knife Slipped; and now an even more beautiful example of his art will introduce this year’s trade-size edition of The Count of Nine. But that’s nine months away yet! In the meantime, let’s revisit four earlier fronts for Gardner’s tale.

Click on any of the images below to open an enlargement.




Clockwise from upper left: Pocket Books edition from 1962, artist unknown; Pocket edition from 1969, with cover art by Mitchell Hooks; Heinemann UK edition, 1959, with art by Stein; and Pocket edition from 1966, with an illustration by Harry Bennett.

Incidentally, you can read a Count of Nine excerpt here.

A Bond by Any Other Name …

Here’s a story that’s almost too good to be true, coming from a blog I had never heard of until today, Birth. Movies. Death. It seems that in the 1990s, Donald E. Westlake—the prolific author perhaps best known from his series about a professional thief known as Parker (The Hunter), who had also scripted the 1999 film The Grifters (based on Jim Thompson’s 1963 novel of the same name)—sought to make a contribution to the film series based on Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. According to Birth. Movies. Death.,

In 1995, before [the 17th Bond film] GoldenEye was even released, Westlake turned in to Eon [Productions] two treatments for “Bond 18.” Both his treatments apparently used as their backdrop Hong Kong’s transfer of sovereignty to China. In one of the treatments, Westlake had 007 facing off against Gideon Goodbread, an American businessman who planned to level Hong Kong after robbing its banks—a revenge scheme for the death of his missionary parents at the hands of the Red Chinese. Westlake described his Bond villain as “John Goodman with a Southern accent,” and likened him to the lead character in Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me. Goodbread commanded an army of Amerasian orphans he called “the Children.” (For more details about Westlake's take on the Bond franchise, pick up Issue 32 of MI6 Confidential.)

Westlake floated the following titles for his Bond adventure: Dragonsteeth; Nobody Dies; Forever and a Death; Never Look Back; On Borrowed Time. That last title was prophetic; the time-sensitive nature of the Hong Kong changeover backdrop was deemed unsuitable, we got Tomorrow Never Dies [1997] instead, and Westlake’s script was shelved.

Now Hard Case Crime has resurrected this lost story, which at some point Westlake rewrote as a novel—Forever and a Death. It’s no longer a James Bond story of course, and we’re not sure how many (or indeed, if any) of the details described above will be included, but the vestigial elements of the story seem to be in place, and at any rate a new novel by the late Donald Westlake is nothing to sneeze at. As a bonus, the novel will contain an afterword by one of the Bond producers, describing the history of the project.

This book is due out next June, with stunning cover art by Paul Mann. Click here to read an excerpt from Forever and a Death.

(Hat tip to Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine.)

READ MORE: “Donald E. Westlake’s Sort-of James Bond Book Coming Out Next Year,” by Matthew Bradford, aka Tanner (Double O Section).

“Glen Was a Shooting Star, a Miracle”

I was shocked to read this morning that Glen Orbik, an artist now best known for the exceptional, pulpish fronts he created for the Hard Case Crime line of paperback mysteries and thrillers, died yesterday from cancer. He was in his early 50s.

Although biographical information about Orbik runs rather thin on the Web, it seems he was born in 1963. He moved with his mother to western Nevada in the early 1970s, and graduated in 1981 from Douglas High School in the town of Minden. Orbik went on to study art at the California Art Institute (then located in the Los Angeles County community of Encino), receiving at least part of his instruction from Fred Fixler, an advertising illustrator, movie-poster painter, and book-cover artist who had founded the school. On his Web site, Orbik explained that his original intention had been to draw superheroes for a living, but his horizons were soon expanded. “After a few years,” he writes,” I took over many of Fred’s classes at the school … when he retired from teaching and have continued off and on for over 20 years.”

Orbik eventually did win the opportunity to paint superheroes, working for DC Comics on its Aquaman series in particular, but also contributing to its Detective Comics, Batman, Flash, and American Century lines. In addition, he took on assignments for Marvel Comics. Although Orbik listed among his influences Gil Elvgren and Norman Rockwell, he had a particular interest in vintage crime-fiction paperback covers of the 1950s and ‘60s, especially those created by Robert McGinnis, Robert Maguire, and Robert E. Schulz. Not long after the 20th century became the 21st, he got the chance to follow boldly in their footsteps by signing on to paint covers for Hard Case Crime. Founder-editor Charles Ardai sent me a note today, recalling his experience with Orbik:

I met Glen almost exactly when we started Hard Case Crime [in 2004], but I’d known his work before that--his gorgeous, lush, realistic paintings from the covers of comic books had made me salivate many times. I was thrilled when he agreed to paint the cover for Branded Woman, by Wade Miller [2005], which instantly became and still remains perhaps my single favorite cover we’ve ever published.

But that one’s got a lot of competition, even just within the two dozen covers he painted for us. Look at the roster--Joyland, by Stephen King [2013], Thieves Fall Out, by Gore Vidal [2015], Money Shot, by Christa Faust [2008], the cheeky Arthur Conan Doyle Valley of Fear we did [in 2009] … not to mention my own novels, Fifty-to-One [2008] and Songs of Innocence [2007]. I have the original painting for Fifty-to-One hanging in my home, and I look at it a hundred times every day. Never get tired of it. It’s just gorgeous. Everything Glen did was.

Glen had a unique ability to paint completely realistically--his people are living, breathing, fleshy figures with idiosyncratic features, like someone you might meet on the sidewalk or on a subway--while still bringing in a larger-than-life element through dramatic angles and shadows and colors and other tools of his trade. It was jaw-dropping. Every time I got a new painting from him, it was like Christmas morning.

Plus, he was a pleasure to work with. The ultimate nice guy, easy-going, thoughtful, funny, smart, collaborative, willing to go out on a limb and try something crazy to see if it would work. I loved, loved, loved working with him. And the prospect of not getting to do that anymore hurts maybe even more than the prospect of never seeing another new Glen Orbik painting.

I miss him. Just a couple of months ago, he raced to the rescue and painted a girl for us for the cover of Lawrence Block’s new novel, The Girl with the Deep Blue Eyes, when we needed to replace the one we’d gotten earlier from another artist. He did it in record time, despite being in pain, despite having only one functioning eye. And it came out gorgeous.

Glen was a shooting star, a miracle. Losing him is like losing Jim Henson, like losing Robin Williams. Such talent. Such a cruel fate.

Facebook has been active all day long with Orbik’s former students and his other admirers expressing their regrets at his too-early passing. One of the best characterizations of this artist’s talents, though, comes from a blog called Noir Whale. Chad de Lisle wrote there a few years ago about having discovered Orbik’s artistry “while perusing books on Amazon. I noticed that his soft-edged style was perfectly suited to the foggy morality of noir and pulp capers. Since then, I’ve taken great interest in his work and consider myself a dedicated fan. His femme fatales hover on the dangerous brink of passion, the beautiful bait concealing the deadly hook. The difference between a good noir artist and a great noir artist is narrative. Those artists that can weave a story with acrylic are the masters; Glen Orbik is a master.”

So let’s take a precious moment or two to appreciate his work--his men with their tough-guy façades, his young women with their gravity-defying breasts, his general noirish style. Displayed below are not only some of Orbik’s finest Hard Case book fronts (two of which--Brainquake and Joyland--have been contenders in The Rap Sheet’s annual Best Crime Fiction Covers rivalry), but also an Aquaman cover and a handful of his efforts for American Century.







































ADDITIONAL DELIGHTS: The Spanish-language Web site ImagEnArte offers an even more extensive collection of Glen Orbik’s artwork, featuring Batman, Superman, Spiderman, various science-fiction pieces, and so many of his curvilinear young women!

Three’s a Charm?

Although the book certainly had a few noticeable faults, I was genuinely fond of Ariel S. Winter’s three-part, 2012 crime novel, The Twenty-Year Death, going so far as to conduct a lengthy interview with the author (click here for Part I, here for Part II). I wasn’t at all put off by its story’s 700-page hardcover length. But I suspect others might have been, which could explain why publisher Hard Case Crime has decided to release its three constituent stories as separate paperbacks, each with its own vintage-style cover.

As Hard Case editor Charles Ardai writes today:

... in the summer of 2014, Hard Case Crime will publish the book in a different style, one we feel is a particularly good match both for the novel’s unique structure and for Hard Case Crime’s mission of reviving the style of the classic pulp paperback crime novels of decades past: a single pocket-sized mass-market paperback edition for each of the constituent novels-within-a-novel, each featuring painted cover art in a different art style suited to the decade depicted and the writing style employed.

The Simenon-inspired European procedural novel, Malniveau Prison, features Hard Case Crime’s first cover ever by Joe Avery, a UK-based gallery artist who works as a painter for the internationally renowned Damien Hirst. The Chandler-inspired hard-boiled private eye novel, The Falling Star, features a painting by former Golden Gloves boxer Ricky Mujica, who previously painted the covers for Hard Case Crime’s The Corpse Wore Pasties and Casino Moon. And the dark, depraved, and doomed Jim Thompson-inspired final novel, Police at the Funeral, features Charles Pyle’s original cover painting, for which actress Rose MacGowan (Charmed, Grindhouse) posed.

You can read all of Ardai’s post, and see the other two paperback fronts for Winter’s tale, by clicking here.

Scream and Scream Again

It’s still only September 2012, but I am already looking forward to a couple of Hard Case Crime releases for 2013--in large measure because of their exceptional cover illustrations.

Seduction of the Innocent, the third entry in Max Allan Collins’ series of Jack Starr historical thrillers, is set to reach bookstores next February, with artwork by the prolific Glen Orbik. Orbik is responsible as well for the painting that fronts Stephen King’s forthcoming Joyland, displayed above. However, Hard Case editor Charles Ardai tells me that artist “Robert McGinnis is also doing one [for Joyland], which will be revealed--along with how we will use two covers--in due course.” King’s novel should be out in June 2013.

These will both be beautiful additions to my bookshelves!

READ MORE: “Cover for Stephen King’s Joyland,” by Jeremy Lynch (Crimespree Magazine).