Author Birthday – 25 October – Charles Ardai

Happy Birthday, Charles Ardai, born on 25 October 1969.

Charles Ardai Quotes

1. As long as I have a good premise and a good ending and some twists along the way, I know I’ll be able to give readers a fun read this time around. Next time will take care of itself next time.
2. I’m kind of a seat-of-the-pantser at heart, I guess. I belong the old school of pulp fiction writers who pounded at their manual typewriters with the landlord at the door demanding the rent – no time for grand plans, or even second drafts. You tore the sheet of paper out of the typewriter, handed it to your editor, he set it in hot lead, and your words were on the newsstand a week later.
3. I’d love to write another novel. Maybe this is the year for it – I definitely have ideas. Just haven’t had the time to sit down and focus on it.
4. Pulp fiction may be written best at a white-hot tempo, but any hardboiled detective also knows the job is sometimes a waiting game. So we sit in our favourite corner, sip from a rocks glass, and watch through the slatted Venetian blinds for a furtive figure to show up with a manuscript in his hands.
5. Always assume you’re in a race. And generally finishing second doesn’t mean getting half the glory, it means getting nothing. There have been other publishers since Hard Case Crime that have brought out pulp-style hard-boiled crime novels, but Hard Case Crime got all the publicity and the attention. Not just because our books were good but because we planted our flag first.
6. Evil is not punished. Hard-boiled mysteries, and in particular, so-called noir mysteries, take place in a world where any little sliver of justice that you can carve out of an unjust world is practically accidental and something to be cherished because the bulk of what goes on in the world is going to be evil being unpunished.
7. I’d written prose fiction, short stories and novels, and I’d written for television a little bit, episodes of Haven on the SyFy Channel, and I think that writing comics was the most difficult of the three. You have so many constraints. I compare it to writing haiku, or a sonnet. With a novel you decide on how many chapters, how many pages, and so on. A comic book has to be exactly twenty-two pages, and each page can only have so many panels on it.

Source for quotes 1-4: Crime Reads and 5: Quartz and 6: NPR and 7: Mystery Tribune

Charles Ardai is an American businessman and writer of crime fiction and mysteries. He co-founded Hard Case Crime, a publishing line known for its pulp-style, hardboiled crime novels, and serves as its editor. His first novel, Little Girl Lost, was nominated for both the Edgar Award and the Shamus Award. His second novel, Songs of Innocence, was praised by The Washington Post as an instant classic, named one of the best books of the year by Publishers Weekly, and won the 2008 Shamus Award. He published both novels under the pen name Richard Aleas, and Universal Pictures optioned both for film adaptations. In 2007, Ardai won the Edgar Award for his short story ‘The Home Front’. In 2021, he began writing comics with Gun Honey, a miniseries about Joanna Tan, a woman who can deliver any weapon to any location for a price. Ardai is married to American speculative fiction author Naomi Novik.

Source for photograph: Quartz

by Amanda Patterson
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