by Ralph Dennis
“Something’s changed in you. I don’t know what it is yet. But . . . since a woman always thinks it’s just one thing . . . I’ll ask that one question. Have there been any girls in my bed while I was in Fort Myers?”
“One,” I said and then that line out of Marlowe floated up out of nowhere, out of some night course at Georgia State. “But that was in another country and besides the wench is dead.”
“Tell me about it, Jim.” She was calm and that wasn’t at all like her.
I told her about Heddy, the whole story, waking up in the bed and finding her there. Heddy’s gift that wasn’t a gift but a bribe and how I couldn’t take it. And death face down in a ditch. At the end she kicked off my shower shoes and stretched out on the bed beside me. I shifted over to make room for us and straightened out the pillow and offered her part of it.
“And all that’s the truth?” she asked.
“Yes.”
I waited but it wasn’t a long wait. Marcy turned and put an arm across my chest and pressed against me. “Maybe there’s hope for you yet, Jim. Maybe you aren’t so hard-assed after all.”
And after a time we slept the sleep of good, kind lovers.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ralph Dennis isn’t a household name . . . but he should be. He is widely considered among crime writers to be a master of the genre, denied the recognition he deserved because his twelve Hardman books, which are beloved and highly sought-after collectables now, were poorly packaged in the 1970s by Popular Library as a cheap men’s action-adventure paperbacks with numbered titles.
Even so, some top critics saw past the cheesy covers and noticed that he was producing work as good as John D. MacDonald, Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes, Dashiell Hammett, and Ross MacDonald.
The New York Times praised the Hardman novels for “expert writing, plotting, and an unusual degree of sensitivity. Dennis has mastered the genre and supplied top entertainment.” The Philadelphia Daily News proclaimed Hardman “the best series around, but they’ve got such terrible covers . . . ”
Unfortunately, Popular Library didn’t take the hint and continued to present the series like hack work, dooming the novels to a short shelf-life and obscurity . . . except among generations of crime writers, like novelist Joe R. Lansdale (the Hap & Leonard series) and screenwriter Shane Black (the Lethal Weapon movies), who’ve kept Dennis’ legacy alive through word-of-mouth and by acknowledging his influence on their stellar work.
Ralph Dennis wrote three other novels that were published outside of the Hardman series—Atlanta, Deadman’s Game and MacTaggart’s War—but he wasn’t able to reach the wide audience, or gain the critical acclaim, that he deserved during his lifetime.
He was born in 1931 in Sumter, South Carolina, and received a masters degree from University of North Carolina, where he later taught film and television writing after serving a stint in the Navy. At the time of his death in 1988, he was working at a bookstore in Atlanta and had a file cabinet full of unpublished novels.
Brash Books will be releasing the entire Hardman series, his three other published novels, and his long-lost manuscripts.
