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As a young boy, Charles Ardai was one of millions who felt his pulse pound and his palms sweat in a dark theater as Indiana Jones took on Nazis, the unknown and even the wrath of God in 1979's "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

"There has never been another moment for me like that moment when I met Indiana Jones," Ardai said in a recent interview. "I walked out of that theater physically shaking. I was trembling. I'd never had an experience like that before. And I said to myself: 'I want more of this.' And there really wasn't any more."

Ardai is now on a mission to fix that.

His pulp revival imprint Hard Case Crime has been publishing award-winning hard-boiled mysteries since 2004, helping to reignite interest in the genre. With its success, Ardai thought back to Indiana Jones and the adventure heroes who had inspired him -- pulp magazine champion Doc Savage, Allen Quartermain of King Solomon's Mines, even The Three Musketeers.

"Raiders" had drawn on a rich history of adventure fiction -- globe-spanning searches for long-lost objects, heart-stopping cliffhangers, villains as deadly as the women are beautiful. With a new series of novels about a swashbuckling modern adventurer named Gabriel Hunt, Ardai is continuing the tradition.

"Adventure used to be a genre, and it isn't anymore," Ardai said. "There are no adventure bookstores, no adventure section in any bookstore. And that's a new phenomenon. In the 1930s, even the '40s and '50s, you would have had a well-understood category of literature called adventure fiction. Not anymore."

Ardai said "crypto-religious conspiracy fiction" like Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" and the occasional Clive Cussler novel are about as close to mainstream adventure as the modern reader gets.

"It could be because adventure fiction, more than any other category, simply is better realized on the screen," Ardai said. "Adventure fiction is very much about fist fights and car chases and other forms of visual action that are just easier to depict in a thrilling way if you show them visually than if you describe them in prose. And that's not true of crime fiction, which is only partly action, and romance, which is only partly action of a different sort, or any other category."

But Ardai knew those thrills could be accomplished just as well on the page. The age -- and accompanying racism and sexism -- of vintage adventure novels made Hard Case-style reprints impossible. Instead Ardai created a new adventure hero and then recruited some of his favorite writers to contribute books to a high-voltage series of original works that crackled with all the energy of the classics.

Six books in the series have been announced so far, taking the hero from the skyscrapers of Manhattan and the pyramids of Egypt to the jungles of Guatemala and the expanses of Antarctica. Authors like James Reasoner (" Hell's Half Acre," "Death Head Crossing"), Christa Faust ("Moneyshot") David J. Schow ("Lost Angels," "Gun Work") and Ardai write the books, though in fine pulp tradition they're credited to Gabriel Hunt himself.

"I like to think of it as a sort of crew, like in a heist picture like 'Ocean's Eleven' -- you have the veteran, the rookie, the explosives technician, the gadgeteer and the dame," Ardai said. "That's basically the team we assembled."

Ardai wrote a "bible" on his character -- about 10 pages explaining his tastes, abilities and back story -- and works with the writers to keep everything consistent. It works something like a writers' room on a TV series, Ardai said -- you get a consistent set of characters and voices, but every writer brings his own interests and perspective to the table. What unites them all, and hopefully, the readers, is a core love of adventure.

"I think it reminds people of their childhood in a good way," Ardai said. "This is one of those things that reminds you of the giddy excitement of childhood, the way your eyes open wide and your mouth stretches wide in a grin so much so that your muscles hurt from it, the way your heart beats faster and your palms start to sweat just because you're engrossed in a story that took your imagination. That's an experience we've all had as children, certainly anyone who is a passionate reader has had it. As you get older you become more jaded and it's harder to surprise you and it's harder to delight you.

"This sense of kinetic, propulsive adventure fiction where you surrender yourself to the storyteller who drags you bodily on an incredible adventure and leaves you gasping for breath," Ardai said."That's what I wanted to give people."

 Contact Joe Killian at 373-7023 or joe.killian@news-record.com