“Not a crazy plot,” Larry said. “A brilliant plot. You remember I asked you at the time, why should we come up with a perfectly good plot and hand it over to you, when we could use it ourselves?”
“For a book! Not in real life!”
“And why not? After you left that day, when we finally put the last pieces in place, Don and I sat here a while longer, talking, and it dawned on us that this was much too good a premise to waste on mere fiction.”
“But the combination to the safe—that was just a guess on my part! Didn’t you realize that? It could’ve been completely wrong!”
Larry shrugged. “But it wasn’t. And I had a feeling it wasn’t going to be. It just made too much sense.”
“You climbed up the side of a building, broke in through a window, sawed and chiseled through a door, and braved angry mobsters on the way out, all on the basis of a guess, just because you thought it made sense?”
“Well, when you put it that way, it sounds foolish,” Larry admitted. “But here we are, owners of a bar.”
“And a bookstore,” Don said.
“Aren’t you afraid the man you robbed will figure it out?”
“Why? He hasn’t yet.”
“Well, for one thing, directly or indirectly, he’s the man you bought the bar from. Royal Barrone works for Salvatore Nicolazzo. He used to until today, anyway.”
“You’re kidding,” Don said.
Tricia shook her head.
“You mean I used the man’s own money to buy his bar from him?”
“That’s what it looks like.”
The smile that broke out on Don’s face was a thing of beauty. “That’s just perfect. You couldn’t make something like that up. You put that in a book, no one would believe it.”
“Not in a million years,” Larry agreed.
“Just be glad that Nicolazzo got arrested today,” Tricia said, “and that the people under him are going to be too busy fighting for control of his empire to bother paying attention to the two of you.”
“That does sound good,” Larry said.
“I’m sure it does,” Tricia said. “But remember, there’s one person who does know what you did.”
“Oh?” Don said. “Who’s that?”
“Me.”
They all took another swallow. It was the last one for Tricia. She pushed her empty glass aside.
The two men eyed her balefully.
“You wouldn’t turn us in, would you?” Larry said.
“You mean to the cops? Or to the gangsters?”
“Either.”
“Of course I wouldn’t,” Tricia said, and instantly the atmosphere around the table lightened noticeably. “But,” she continued, “there’s something I want in return.”
“What’s that?” Don said.
“I’m going to be working for Charley now,” she said. “I’ll be working with him on his books.”
“Presumably not the pornography,” Larry said.
“No, Hard Case Crime,” Tricia said. “And it occurs to me that the day may come when Hard Case Crime might need to ask one of you for a favor. Maybe it’ll happen tomorrow, maybe it won’t be for a year. Maybe ten years. Maybe fifty years. But when that time comes, and we ask for your help in some way—maybe we’ll want to publish one of your books, or maybe we’ll ask you to make a personal appearance somewhere to help us out—I want you to do it, no questions asked.”
“No questions?” Larry said.
“No questions.”
“And if we agree to this, you won’t tell anyone about...?”
“About anything. Hell,” Tricia said, “I’d rather see the money in your hands than the bad guys’.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Larry said.
“So,” Tricia said, “do we have a deal?”
The two men nodded and they shook hands three ways.
With that behind them, Don said, “But Trixie, tell me honestly—it’s great that you’re going to be working there, but what do you think the odds are that Hard Case Crime will be around in fifty years? Seriously. A hundred to one?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Tricia said, and she reached over, picked up Don’s glass and downed the rest of his beer. Then she did the same with Larry’s, wiped her mouth on the back of her hand and spread a companionable arm over each man’s shoulders. “I bet it’s no worse than half that.”
Author’s Note
When we set out to celebrate the publication of Hard Case Crime’s 50th book—quite a milestone for a series Max Phillips and I originally thought might never make it past its fifth—a variety of ideas got bandied about. Maybe we’d do a collection of short stories, with each of our living authors contributing a yarn. Maybe we’d uncover some important lost novel from a true giant of the field, something along the lines of a never-before-published Sam Spade novel by Hammett, or perhaps the long-rumored “black McGee” novel by John D. MacDonald. (Alas, neither exists.) Maybe this, maybe that. None of the ideas seemed quite right.
Then I hit on the notion for Fifty-to-One.
Not the title, that came later—and my thanks to author Amy Vincent for suggesting it. Just the concept. But the concept was enough to get my blood pumping.
Of course, in retrospect the concept was insane: to write a 50th book that would commemorate the (fictitious) 50th anniversary of the founding of Hard Case Crime, set 50 years ago, and to tell the story in 50 chapters, with each chapter bearing the title of one of our 50 books, in their order of publication. Our books’ titles hadn’t been chosen along the way with this sort of project in mind—if they had, I’d never have agreed to let Lawrence Block re-title his fourth book for us A Diet of Treacle, or published both The Last Quarry and The First Quarry (especially not in that order), or published books with titles as unyielding to the repurposer’s art as Zero Cool or Lemons Never Lie or The Murderer Vine.
But these things take on a life of their own, and as soon as I’d had the idea I couldn’t resist the challenge. In fact, the trickier the challenge appeared, the keener I became. (Keep in mind that I’m someone who loves books like Nabokov’s Pale Fire and Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler and Perec’s A Void. If you have a taste for trickery on a grand scale and haven’t read those books, you must. Stop reading now, put this book down, go to your local bookseller, buy all three, and read them. When you’re done, come back and we’ll continue.
[Taps fingers. Whistles a bit. Checks his watch.]
Done? Very good. Onward.)
The project began taking shape in the second half of 2007 and I began writing seriously at the start of 2008, with a mid-year deadline to hit a year-end publication date. The time pressure was part of the fun, of course: No better way to write a pulp novel than to have a deadline hanging over your head. (I kept picturing myself hammering out pages on a manual typewriter, then yanking them out and passing them to a copy boy to get them set in hot lead. Sort of like Stephen J. Cannell at the end of all those old TV shows he wrote.)
Along the way, several things occurred that heightened my excitement even further. First, Glen Orbik painted his gorgeous cover painting. All of Glen’s covers for us have been spectacular, but he really outdid himself with this one. The original is now hanging in my living room at home, and it fills me with delight every time I see it.
Then Max Phillips, who not only founded Hard Case Crime with me but also wrote one of the series’ most celebrated titles, the Shamus Award-winning Fade to Blonde, agreed to pen one of the book’s 50 chapters. (I’ll leave it to you to figure out which chapter was the one Max wrote.)