Richard Aleas Books in Order

Richard Aleas is the pen name of Charles Ardai, a New York-born writer, editor, and entrepreneur whose path into crime fiction began with a teenage love of old pulp paperbacks. Born on October 25, 1969, in New York City, he grew up there in a family shaped by his parents' survival of the Holocaust. Their stories gave him an early sense that danger can sit very close to ordinary life.

At Hunter College High School, Ardai was already finding his way around publishing. He interned at Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, getting an early look at writers, editors, and the practical work of putting stories into print. He graduated in 1987, then attended Columbia University, where he studied English and British Romantic poetry.

The old paperbacks never lost their hold on him.

While at Columbia, Ardai worked part-time in publishing and wrote for magazines. After graduating summa cum laude in 1991, he joined D. E. Shaw, a financial and technology firm. There, he helped develop what became Juno, an early internet service provider, and later served as its chief executive before its 2001 merger with NetZero.

That career gave him experience in a very different kind of fast-moving business. It also gave him the chance to return to the sort of crime fiction he had loved since high school. After Juno's merger, Ardai and graphic designer Max Phillips built Hard Case Crime, a paperback line devoted to new and rediscovered hard-boiled stories. The line launched in 2004 with compact books, painted covers, and an obvious affection for mid-century pulp.

It was a very digital career built around a very analog love.

For his own noir novels, Ardai chose the name Richard Aleas, an anagram of his real name and a wink at the word "alias." His first novel, Little Girl Lost, introduces New York private investigator John Blake, who is pulled into the murder of a woman he once loved and discovers how little he knew about her life. The book moves through strip clubs, cheap apartments, and criminal back rooms, but its real engine is Blake's need to make sense of the past.

Songs of Innocence returns to Blake after the first case has left its mark. A college student's apparent suicide draws him back toward investigation and into another hidden corner of New York. Readers who like the books tend to respond to their lean pace, troubled but determined protagonist, and the way the mysteries keep the personal stakes close. Songs of Innocence won the Shamus Award for Best Original P.I. Paperback.

Ardai also published Fifty-to-One under his own name, a 1950s-set pulp caper about an aspiring writer, a shady publisher, and a fictional mob heist that may be far too close to the truth. His short story "The Home Front" won an Edgar Award in 2007. Across his work as a writer and editor, he keeps returning to people in over their heads, bad choices that grow bigger by the page, and the uneasy line between an invented story and real trouble.