Introduction: Crime in the City — The Five Star Edition

The Summer 2007 issue marked the zine's fifth anniversary by doing something unusual: dedicating an entire issue to a single publisher's stable of writers. Guest editor John Helfers, who oversaw the Five Star Mystery line, framed the issue with an introduction that doubled as a short history of one of crime publishing's quiet success stories. This page preserves that history and the issue it produced.

The Whole Thing Started With a Simple Idea

About a decade earlier, Ed Gorman and anthologist Martin H. Greenberg had seen where mystery publishing was headed — a long, slow, spiraling decline, in Helfers's frank assessment — and decided to do something about it. They teamed up with Thorndike Press, then known mostly for excellent large-print editions, and added a mystery imprint to a line that had previously published only Westerns. A decade on, Five Star Mystery had grown into the largest line in the imprint, publishing dozens of mystery, crime, suspense, and thriller novels a year — work by Lawrence Block, Donald E. Westlake, Ed McBain, Max Allan Collins, Carolyn G. Hart, Nancy Pickard, Jeremiah Healy, and more, alongside fresh discoveries like Julie Hyzy and Michael A. Black. Its specialty was the worthy book that the crowded New York marketplace would otherwise have let fall through the cracks.

Why Crime in the City

For the theme, Helfers chose the city itself. His introduction told the story of a wrong-feeling turn down a certain 10th Street in an unnamed heartland city — a few miles of the wrong side of the tracks that set his writer's pulse racing. His point was sharper than local color: crime doesn't live only in economically depressed neighborhoods. There are plenty of transgressions perpetrated in the skyscrapers and gated communities too, because what a city does, intentionally or not, is bring every kind of person together — rich, poor, old, young, good, bad — and when that happens, there are bound to be disagreements over certain rights, like liberty, safety, and the pursuit of happiness. Sometimes the argument escalates into a matter of life or death. That is where the stories start.

The Issue

Eight Five Star authors answered the theme: Trey Barker (Payment Due), Denise Dietz (Dead Aid), Molly MacRae (A Walk in the Park), Kelli Stanley (Convivium), Kit Daniels (Doing the Deed), Jim Ingraham (A Night on the Town), Gail Lukasik (A Better Way to Die), and Charles Ardai (The Leap). The stories brought their cities to life in all their beauty, seediness, grit, and glitter — just like the people who live there. Ardai's presence bookends the era neatly: as founder of the retro-pulp paperback line Hard Case Crime, he was running a parallel rescue mission for exactly the kind of fiction Hardluck published in short form.

The Anniversary Subtext

The issue carried a second meaning the introduction only gestured at: it marked five years of Hardluck Stories itself. Pairing the anniversary with a celebration of Five Star was deliberate — so many of the zine's guest editors were Five Star authors that the two enterprises had grown intertwined, and the editor's column that quarter made the connection explicit. A web-zine toasting a library-hardcover line looks odd until you see what they had in common: both existed to publish good crime fiction the big houses wouldn't, and both did it on stubbornness rather than capital.

A Snapshot of an Industry

Read today, the introduction is a primary source on 2000s crime publishing: a moment when library-focused hardcover lines, web-zines, and revival paperback imprints were all improvising ways to keep midlist crime fiction alive. Industry retrospectives in trade outlets like Publishers Weekly confirm how prescient the diagnosis was. The complete table of contents is preserved in the Archives, and the anniversary edition of the editor's column that accompanied this issue is summarized at Hardluck Thoughts.