So Much for Retirement

Stephen King's just one of the many people who've come to admire the "good, clean, bare-knuckled storytelling" packed into every release from Hard Case Crime. So much so that he wants in on the action, which means The Colorado Kid, a mass-market paperback scheduled for October 2005, will be King's first fiction since the conclusion of the Dark Tower saga. Maybe they can reprint some of those old George Stark classics like Steel Machine next...

It just so happens that the most recent Hard Case titles showed up on my desk last week, including a reprint of Day Keene's Home Is the Sailor and Allan Guthrie's Kiss Her Goodbye. If they're as good as the first batch of Hard Case books that came out last year, they're going to be some of the best crime fiction of 2005.