Since 2004, the Hard Case Crime publishing line has been beloved by crime and noir fans the world over. The lineup of talent is undeniably impressive, featuring new novels by Stephen King and Lawrence Block, to reprints of old novels by Harlan Ellison and Gore Vidal, to books that have never been published by James M. Cain and Samuel Fuller. From day one, Hard Case Crime's library has been filled with crime novels, pulp stories, and noir tales, all with great cover art. So when it was announced at Comic-Con International in San Diego that the line will expand into comics with a new imprint published through Titan Comics, it was a pleasant surprise that made complete sense.

RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Titan Comics Launches "Hard Case Crime" Imprint for Noir Enthusiasts

With Hard Case Crime Comics slated to launch this fall at New York Comic Con, CBR spoke with three of the launch's helmers. Charles Ardai, the founder of Hard Case Crime and also an award-winning crime writer, and writers Christa Faust and Gary Phillips spoke with us about the new line and its initial releases, "Triggerman" and "Peepland." In a wide-ranging conversation, the three discussed the line's launch, teased a little about future projects, and offered an exclusive look at what readers can expect.

CBR News: I want to start with you, Charles, because mystery and crime fans know Hard Case. I'm sure there's plenty of overlap with comics fans, but could you talk a little about what Hard Case Crime is?

Charles Ardai: A dozen years ago, Max Phillips and I got together over drinks and cooked up the idea for a line of books that would revive the look and feel and the storytelling style of the old pulp fiction of the 1940s and '50s; short, tight, high-velocity novels with plots that grabbed you by the throat on the first page, no shortage of sex and violence, and beautiful painted covers that made your palms sweat.

We've now published more than a hundred books, won a bunch of awards, and earned praise from fans ranging from Stephen King and Michael Crichton and J.K. Rowling to comics mavens like Ed Brubaker and Brian Azzarello and Max Allan Collins.

What prompted you to start publishing comics?

Ardai: I've been reading comics since I was a kid in the '70s. "The Flash" was my main book, the classic Barry Allen years, but I also loved all sorts of other comics -- a truly eclectic mix. I created one comic back in the '90s, a short-lived science-fiction anthology series called "Orbit." I've been dying to get back into comics ever since.

You're launching the Hard Case Comics imprint with two miniseries.

Ardai: That's right, "Triggerman" and "Peepland." Actually, our first half dozen titles will all be miniseries, typically running four or five issues, which we'll then collect into single-volume graphic novels. The miniseries format works well for crime fiction, since there's no guarantee the main character will survive. If it's a continuing series, Superman and Doomsday notwithstanding, you pretty much know the main character can't die.

What is "Triggerman"?

Ardai: The legendary screenwriter and movie director Walter Hill ("The Warriors," "48 Hrs.," "The Getaway") wrote a script set during Prohibition, about a gunman sprung from prison by the Mob to track down a half million dollars of stolen money and punish the men who stole it. Our hero doesn't actually care about the money -- he's looking for the girl he lost when he went to jail. But as it happens, the girl and the money are being held by the same person. So he's got his own reasons for wanting to see this vendetta through to the end.

Christa, Gary, what's "Peepland"?

Christa Faust: "Peepland" is a story about the people in and around Times Square in New York City in the 1980s, before Giuliani and Disney chased all the sex and drugs out. The main characters are women who work in a Times Square peepshow, and their lives are upended by a particularly ugly crime and the effort to cover it up.

Gary Phillips: To me, "Peepland" is about desperate people in desperate straits. It was an opportunity my friend Christa offered me, to come along on this journey with her to add to our respective takes on what noir means. The story is a collision of what happens when a bottom-feeder inadvertently sees something he shouldn't, and how the pursuit of the evidence of that crime by a certain blowhard real estate developer, a man on a mission to clean up the "filth" of Times Square, lies at the center of a series of decisions our characters make out of greed, guilt or sacrifice.

Faust: I'll add that it's also the most personal and autobiographical project I've ever done. I like to refer to it as a love letter to Times Square and the adjacent neighborhood where I grew up. The setting is like a unique and memorable character in itself, and many of the human characters are based on people I met when I was working in the peep booths in the late '80s.

Gary, you've written plenty of comics over the years in addition to your novels, but Christa, this is your first comic. How have you found writing in the medium? Has been a big adjustment for you?

Faust: For me, it was definitely a big adjustment. Everything needs to be condensed and externalized, and you have to accept that some of what you imagine in your head will be lost or changed in the translation. Dialogue, which is my strongest skill in fiction, needs to be limited to what can fit into word balloons. Also, it was a challenge to learn how to think in these frozen moments, but Gary is such a visual thinker with an instinctive understanding of how to make images flow naturally from panel to panel. Working with him taught me so much.

Phillips: I'll just add that being a lifelong comics fan, and now as a writer, I still get a kick out of seeing the images that the artist derives from the script. How they make the words come alive on the page. Even though superhero comics are the bread and butter of the comics industry, material like the "March" trilogy, "Special Exits" and crime fiction fare like the late Darwyn Cooke's adaptations of the Westlake "Parker" novels shows there's a broader readership out there for comics to tap.

Christa, people will read the description of "Peepland" and likely feel there are some similarities to the two novels of yours which Hard Case published, "Money Shot" and "Choke Hold."

Faust: Maybe on some level, since all three deal with characters in and around the adult entertainment industry, but "Peepland" feels so different to me. It follows a diverse ensemble cast with interlocking storylines, whereas the Angel Dare books are centered around one character and told in the first person. Plus, Angel is very much an L.A. woman, even though she grew up on the south side of Chicago, while "Peepland" is all about New York City. The two series feel as different to me as those two cities.

Have either of you co-written a book together before this?

Phillips: We've known each other for some time, but this was the first time we worked together. We've yet to throw plates or shoes at each other, arguing over scenes or a given direction of a character or storyline, so possibly, crazily, we're feeling out a couple of other projects we might undertake together.

Faust: The idea to bring Gary in on this particular project was mine. When I first starting fleshing out the rough concept for "Peepland," I was looking to explore issues of gentrification and corruption. I knew that those themes are prominent in Gary's work, so he seemed like a natural choice. Add in his experience with writing comics, and I knew he'd be the perfect tag team partner. We make a kick ass team, and as a result, this story came out stronger and better than anything either one of us could have created alone. So yeah, you may be seeing more from Team PhilFau in the future.

Christa, I know that you grew up in New York and worked in Times Square, but Gary, you'rea West Coast guy as far as I know. What has your education been like as far as this setting? You sure can't visit Times Square today to understand what it was like in the '80s.

Phillips: Yeah, I'm from South Central in Los Angeles, but I did have cousins in Harlem and Jackson Heights once upon a time. When I was a kid, many moons ago, I visited them in New York a few different times with my pops. This included at least twice as a teenager, and I recall vividly the starkness of Times Square back then as we walked around the city. And, of course, there are those iconic '80s New York films like "Fort Apache the Bronx," "Wild Style," a doc about the early days of hip-hop, and Abel Ferrara's "Bad Lieutenant," which is early '90s, but the muck and mire of that flick comes out of the '80s.

But, really, when you're telling a crime story, it's a story about what people want and what they're willing to do to achieve that. How far will they step out of line to get rich or get even? That's what's inside them, while the setting, the geography, the physicality of a place, affects how they move, how they react. We sought to capture that in our miniseries, and artist Andrea Camerini does a great job of capturing it in his sequentials.

I'll admit that I initially felt pairing the two of you on a comic was odd, but the more I thought about the books you've written, it doesn't. Gary you had a line in an article you wrote for the L.A. Review of Books earlier this year, "The breadth of crime fiction gives all of us entry to any venue we desire -- to retroactively acknowledge the unacknowledged." How have you found working together? I think you both would agree that this idea is in your work.

Phillips: I hope so. I mean, I embrace being a genre write,r but that doesn't mean -- and I know this is true of Christa, as I've read and enjoyed her prose work -- that it's all plot and action. Now, it does mean there's a lot less "navel gazing" than in a so-called literary work, but we pay attention to what motivates our characters, the big and small things that matter to them, that what they don't say can have as much significance as what they do say.

Faust: Absolutely. In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that at its heart, noir is all about the characters and their motivations. That the crime/action element is the crucible in which those characters are transformed, but it's the transformation that really matters. Also, Gary and I are both interested in giving voices to the kinds of characters who are too often sidelined in the genre, relegated to token sidekicks, cartoonish villains or lust objects for the classic tarnished white knight.

The covers of Hard Case Crime novels really stand out. How did you decide on the cover artists and what the covers of the comics should look like?

Phillips: Heh -- we had some mighty interesting emails back and forth among us and our editor Tom Williams on what constitutes a compelling comics cover. I think the results were worth the, shall we say, pressurized crucible from whence they sprang.

Faust: The craziest thing for me as a comics virgin was realizing just how many variant covers are needed for each issue. So every time I'd think we had to finally be done with picking artists and brainstorming ideas, it would turn out that we needed one more. Or five more! But even though I had certain things I was really picky about, like realistic period clothing and no stretched earlobes, the final say on all 8 zillion covers went to Charles. After all, Hard Case Crime is his baby, and he has his own widely recognized visual style and sensibility that has served him -- and Hard Case Crime authors like me -- so well over the years.

Ardai: Final say or no, the truth is, I got persuaded to try lots of new and different things for this new and different medium. We wound up taking a shot on some artists I wasn't sure would fit, and they came through brilliantly. Publishing comics gives us a chance to experiment and take risks in a way you just can't when you've got one, and only one, cover for a prose novel. By the time the smoke clears, we'll have something like 20 covers for "Peepland" and another 20 for "Triggerman." That's a huge amount of art, and I love that it means we get to work with more artists and art styles than we ever could before.

Now one thing that's distinguished Hard Case books is how you've published new books and reprinted old, forgotten and lost works. Looking down the line, do you see yourself reprinting older comics, or are you focused on new ones?

Ardai: Funny you should ask. Someone wrote to me recently, recommending that we reissue an old book Jim Steranko did a few decades back. Jim and I have been emailing for years about finding something to do together, so maybe this is finally the right opportunity. That's just one example. While we're focused primarily on new work, we're definitely open to bringing back some forgotten older work too.

Now as far as the future of Hard Case Crime comics goes, Max Allan Collins has said that he's writing a "Quarry" series. Do you have any other plans you'd like to mention?

Ardai: Yeah, "Quarry" is going to be great. We've published all the "Quarry" novels over the years, and with the Cinemax TV series debuting this fall, it's a natural time to take the character into a more visual medium.

As for other plans, we like to keep our best surprises under wraps until we've got something to show -- but I can tell you I'm writing a series for the line myself, about a female weapons expert, a smuggler of sorts, who has to deal with the unintended consequences of her actions. We've got some amazing stuff coming from people like Duane Swierczynski and Alison Gaylin and Megan Abbott. But exactly what they're up to -- you're just gonna have to wait and see.