by Ralph Dennis
Copyright © 2018 Adventures in Television, Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction “Ralph Dennis & Hardman”
Copyright © 2018 by Joe R. Lansdale. All Rights Reserved.
Afterword “The Literary Life of Ralph Dennis”
Copyright © 2018 by Richard A. Moore. All Rights Reserved
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
ISBN: 1-7320656-8-3
ISBN-13: 978-1-7320656-8-0
Published by Brash Books, LLC
12120 State Line #253,
Leawood, Kansas 66209
www.brash-books.com
The Hardman Series
Atlanta Deathwatch
The Charleston Knife is Back in Town
The Golden Girl and All
Pimp For The Dead
Down Among The Jocks
Murder Is Not An Odd Job
Working For The Man
Deadly Cotton Heart
The One Dollar Rip-Off
Hump’s First Case
The Last Of The Armageddon Wars
The Buy Back Blues
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE LITERARY LIFE OF RALPH DENNIS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
INTRODUCTION
Ralph Dennis and Hardman
By Joe R. Lansdale
Once upon the time there were a lot of original paperbacks, and like the pulps before them, they covered a lot of ground. Western, adventure, romance, mystery, science fiction, fantasy, and crime, for example.
There were also subsets of certain genres. One of those was the sexy, men’s action-adventure novel with a dab of crime and mystery.
These books had suggestive titles, or indicators that not only were they action packed with blood and sweat, fists and bullets, but that there would be hot, wet sex. They were straight up from the male reader’s perspective, the perspective of the nineteen seventies and early eighties.
There were entire lines of adult westerns for example. They sold well at the time. Quite well. These Westerns sold so well, that for a brief period it seemed as if it might go on forever. They made up the largest number of Westerns on the stands rivaled only by Louis L’Amour, and a few reprints from Max Brand and Zane Grey.
An agent once told me I was wasting my time writing other things, and I could be part of this big stable he had writing adult Westerns. Although I had nothing against sexy Westerns, which may in fact have been pioneered as a true branch of the Western genre by a very good writer named Brian Garfield and his novel Sliphammer, but I didn’t want to spend a career writing them. Not the sort I had read, anyway.
Still, a small part of me, the part that was struggling to pay bills, thought maybe I could write something of that nature that might be good enough to put a pen name on. Many of my friends and peers were doing it, and some actually did it quite well, but if ever there was a formulaic brand of writing, that was it.
I was a big fan of Westerns in general, however, so I thought I might could satisfy that itch, while managing to satisfy the publisher’s itch, not to mention that of the Adult Western reader, primarily males.
I picked up a number of the so called adult Westerns, read them, and even landed a job as a ghost for one series, but the publisher and the writer had a falling out, so my work was never published, though I got paid.
Actually, for me, that was the best-case scenario. Once I started on the series I knew I was in for trouble. It wasn’t any fun for me, and that is the main reason I write. I woke up every morning feeling ill because I was trying to write that stuff. It was like trying to wear a tux to a tractor pull.
I thought, maybe there’s something I would like more in the action-adventure line, crime, that sort of thing. I had read The Executioner, and had even written three in the M.I.A. Hunter series, and frankly, next to nailing my head to a burning building, I would rather have been doing anything else. But a look at our bank account made me more pliable.
But that was later. At the time I was looking at this sort of genre, trying to understand if there was anything in it I could truly like, I picked up a book by Ralph Dennis, The Charleston Knife is Back in Town, bearing the overall title of Hardman. The books were billed by the publisher as “a great new private eye for the shockproof seventies.”
The title was suggestive in a non-subtle way, and I remember sighing, and cracking it open and hoping I could at least make it a third of the way through.
And then, it had me. It gripped me and carried me through, and one thing was immediately obvious. It wasn’t a sex and shoot novel. It’s not that those were not components, but not in the way of the other manufactured series, where sometimes the sex scenes were actually lifted from another one in the series and placed in the new one, in the perfunctory manner you might replace a typewriter ribbon.
I was working on a typewriter in those days, and so was everyone else. If that reference throws you, look it up. You’ll find it somewhere between etched stone tablets and modern PCs.
Dennis wrote with assurance, and he built characterization through spot on first person narration. His prose was muscular, swift, and highly readable. There was an echo behind it.
Jim Hardman wasn’t a sexy private eye with six-pack abs and face like Adonis. He was a pudgy, okay looking guy, and as a reader, you knew who Hardman was and how he saw things, including himself, in only a few pages.
You learned about him through dialogue and action. Dennis was good at both techniques. His action was swift and realistic, and you never felt as if something had been mailed in.
Hardman wasn’t always likable, or good company. And he knew that about himself. He was a guy just trying to make it from day to day in a sweltering city. He had a friend named Hump, though Hardman was reluctant to describe him as such. In his view he and Hump were associates. He sometimes hired Hump to help him with cases where two men, and a bit of muscle, were needed.
That said, Hump was obviously important to Hardman, and as the series proceeded, he was more so. The books developed their world, that hot, sticky, Atlanta landscape, and it was also obvious that Dennis knew Atlanta well, or was at least able to give you the impression he did.
His relationship with Marcy, his girlfriend, had a convenient feel, more than that of a loving relationship, and it was off again and on again; it felt real, and the thing that struck me about the books was that there was real human fabric to them. There was action, of course, but like Chandler and Hammett before him, Dennis was trying to do something different with what was thought of as throw away literature.
I’m not suggesting Dennis was in the league of those writers, but he was certainly head and shoulders above the mass of paperbacks being put out fast and dirty. When I read Dennis’s Hardman novels, the characters, the background, stayed with me. The stories were peripheral in a way. Like so many of the best modern crime stories, they were about character.
Due to
the publishing vehicle and the purpose of the series, at least from the publisher’s view point, the books sometimes showed a hastiness that undercut the best of the work, but, damn, I loved them. I snatched them up and devoured them.
I thought I might like to do something like that, but didn’t, and a few years later I wrote those M.I.A. Hunters, which I actually loathed, and knew all my visitations with that branch of the genre I loved, crime and suspense, had ended, and not well, at least for me, though the three books were later collected and published in a hardback edition from Subterranean Press by me and its creator, Stephen Mertz.
A few years after that journey into the valley of death, quite a few, actually, I had a contract with Bantam, and I was trying to come up with a crime novel, and I wrote about this guy named Hap standing out in a field in East Texas, and with him, out of nowhere, was a gay, black guy named Leonard.
The idea of a black and white team in the depths of East Texas would be something I could write about, and it was a way for me to touch on social issues without having to make a parade of it. I thought, yeah, that’ll work for me, and though my characters are quite different than Hardman, they share many similarities as well. The black and white team and Southern background (East Texas is more South than Southwestern), was certainly inspired by the Hardman novels. I think because it rang a bell with me, the clapper of that bell slapped up against my own personal experience, though mine was more rural than urban.
Even more than other writer heroes of mine, Chandler and Chester Himes for example, Hardman spoke directly to me. Chandler’s language and wise cracks fit the people I grew up with, and Himes wrote about the black experience, something that was vital to the South, though often given a sideways consideration and the back of culture’s hand. But Hardman had that white blue collar feel, even if he was in the city and was already an established, if unlicensed, private investigator and thug for hire. I blended all those writers, and many more, to make Hap and Leonard, John D. McDonald, certainly, but if I had a spirit guide with the Hap and Leonard books, it was Ralph Dennis.
So now we have the Hardman books coming back into print.
I am so excited about this neglected series being brought back, put in front of readers again. It meant a lot to me back then, and it still means a lot. You can beef about the deficiency of political correctness, but twenty years from now they’ll be beefing about our lack of political correctness on some subject or another that we now think we are hip to. And too much political correctness is the enemy of truth, and certainly there are times when fiction is not about pretty manners but should ring the true bells of social conditions and expression. Erasing what is really going on, even in popular fiction, doesn’t do anyone any favors. Righteous political correctness has its place, but political correct police do not.
I know very little about Ralph Dennis. I know this. He wrote other books outside the Hardman series. I don’t think he had the career he deserved. The Hardman books were a product of their time, but they managed to be about their time, not of it. They stand head and shoulders above so much of the paperback fodder that was designed for men to hold the book in one hand, and something else in the other. And I don’t mean a can of beer.
But one thing is for sure, these books are still entertaining, and they are a fine time capsule that addresses the nature and attitudes of the time in which they were written. They do that with clean, swift prose, sharp characterization, and an air of disappointment in humanity that seems more and more well-earned.
I’m certainly glad I picked that Hardman novel up those long years ago. They were just what I needed. An approach that imbedded in my brain like a knitting needle, mixed with a variety of other influences, and helped me find my own voice. An authentic Southern voice. A voice that wasn’t that of New York or Los Angeles or Chicago, but a voice of the South.
Thanks Ralph Dennis for helping me recognize that my background was as good a fodder for popular fiction as any, and that popular fiction could attempt to rise above the common crime novel. I don’t know that I managed that, but Ralph Dennis was one of those writers that made me try.
Dennis may not have made literature of Hardman, but he damn sure touched on it more than a time or two, and I wish you the joy I got from first reading these novels, so many long, years ago.
Read on.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This book was originally published in 1974 and reflects the cultural and sexual attitudes, language, and politics of the period.
CHAPTER ONE
The Early Bird flight from Atlanta to New York touched down at Raleigh-Durham airport at 6:59 A.M. There were twenty-eight passengers in the tourist section and eleven in first class. Only three passengers debarked at Raleigh-Durham. They moved down the ramp in single file and walked the hundred yards or so across the apron to the gate and through the gate into the terminal proper. It was January 15th, a Monday, and the land around the airport showed the damage from the ice storm that had blanketed the southeast a week before.
One of the three was a girl in her mid-twenties with pale, luminous skin and long flowing black hair that almost reached her waist. She wore a gray tweed pants suit and black boots. She didn’t seem aware of it but now and then she hitched the pants up and tugged at the shoulders of the jacket, as if the fit wasn’t quite right.
In the main concourse of the terminal she paused just long enough to get her bearings and then she headed for the Hertz booth. There she presented a Master Charge card and rented a Mustang. Before she went outside to wait for the Mustang, she stopped at the Eastern ticket counter to confirm a return flight.
The Mustang was waiting for her in the loading-unloading area and she drove past the outdoor baggage shelf where the two men who’d debarked with her waited impatiently, chilled, for their luggage. Where the airport exit road touched the highway she paused long enough to locate the sign that read CHAPEL HILL. She drove the distance in just a bit over half an hour. At 7:48 she was driving through the center of downtown Chapel Hill. It was cold and windy and the only human movement she saw on the street was in front of Jeff’s Campus Confectionary, where a swarthy, balding man was lifting huge bales of newspapers from the sidewalk and carrying them inside.
She seemed in no special hurry. She continued out Franklin street until she passed Spencer dorm on her right and, using that as a landmark, she turned left onto Pittsboro Road and followed this winding road until she reached the Madison Apartments. She slowed then and turned left under the archway and traced the figure-eight road that snaked through the colonial fronted apartment complex. At apartment 42A she’d slowed to about five miles an hour. She looked at the curtained windows and the Ford station wagon out front. Then, as if on a strong impulse, she u-turned and drove out of the apartment complex at an ever increasing speed.
At twenty to nine, she’d been parked in the unloading zone in front of the Estes Hills Elementary School for ten minutes. In the next five minutes, the traffic increased, the mothers and fathers dropping their children off and watching them scamper through the entrance. At thirteen to nine, she checked her watch and looked down the road in both directions. The traffic was thinning. But the woman covered the watch with her sleeve and continued to wait. At ten to nine the Ford station wagon turned into the driveway. The woman behind the wheel wore a scarf over tangled, uncombed hair and a light camel hair coat over slacks and a sweater. As soon as she braked the station wagon, she reached across the little girl next to her and pushed the door open. The little girl got out quickly and gave the door a push. It closed but it didn’t lock and the woman, impatient and seemingly in a hurry, opened the door once more and pulled it shut with a heavy slam. Then, without looking at the little girl, she pulled away from the curb.
The little girl was six going on seven and tall for her age, but very thin. Her dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail and tied with a red ribbon. She wore red, knee-length stockings and a short black dress under a red wool coat. She stood at the curb for a
moment and watched the station wagon move away. For a second it looked as if she might wave, but the hand didn’t go all the way up. She was turning and heading for the school entrance when she heard a car pull up behind and stop. The child turned and saw the woman who’d been waiting in the unloading zone. The woman slid across the seat to the passenger side and opened the car door.
“Maryann,” the woman said, “it’s me. Don’t you know me?”
At first it was surprise and shock but that gave way to happiness. “Yes, yes, I know you.”
The girl ran to the woman and hugged her. The woman whispered to her for a moment and the little girl got into the Mustang and the woman closed the door and pushed the lock button down.
At 9:55 the Eastern Whisperjet to Atlanta left Raleigh-Durham. The young woman and the little girl sat next to each other on the outside seats in the tourist section. The little girl cried part of the time and the woman with her cried too. The stewardess in their section was concerned at first but there were so many things to do on the short flight that she lost interest in them when she saw, a few minutes later, that they were calm again. It was, she decided, the first flight for the little girl.
I was in the bathroom shaving when the phone rang in the bedroom. It was a cold January morning and I had a feeling that the furnace was about to give its death rattle. If that happened I’d have to find a place to stay for a few days while they put in another one. I wasn’t sure that Marcy would take me in for that long. That meant that Hump might have to, even if that cut down on his round-robin circus of sweetmeat trim.
I got the phone on the third ring.
“Hardman? This is Jack Smathers. Remember me?”
For a brief moment I didn’t. I seemed to have gone blank. He helped me out. “I was on the D.A.’s staff a few years back.”
“Sure.” It came back to me. Jack was a young guy then, just out of University of Georgia law school, hungry as hell and with a pair of ears like a jack rabbit. He’d prosecuted a few cases I’d done the work on and a couple of times I’d taken him out for a few drinks afterwards.
