by Ralph Dennis
The Man checked the Samsonite briefcase first. When he was satisfied with the stack count, he closed the top and pressed the catches home. He pushed the briefcase away and pulled the paper-wrapped bundle toward him. I hadn’t bothered the tape or the paper. He ripped it away like a kid opening a Christmas present.
“It’s short count,” I said. “Mitchell got his share and I don’t know where it is.”
“One third?”
“That’s what I heard.”
“We’ll write it off.” After he approved the count, he began building a stack of tens and twenties over to one side. That completed he tapped the top of the stack with a fingernail and pushed it across the table toward me. “Five thousand. That’s what I owe you, isn’t it?”
I lifted the stack without counting it and passed it over my shoulder to Hump. He cracked the bundle and stuffed half into each of his topcoat pockets.
“That takes care of the business.”
The Man said, “It came out better than I thought it would.”
“Now I want to know where Regina Clark is.”
Black hands palm down on the table top. A vein on the back of the right hand twitched. “That’s not your concern anymore, Hardman.”
“I think it is.”
The black who’d made the ride from my house with us took that moment to step over and hand The Man the fold of xeroxed pages. The Man stripped the twine away and flipped through them.
“Vince here heard you tell Maloney that Falco is dead and that the girl got away.”
I nodded. “I must have burned him worse than I thought.”
“With Falco dead that solves one problem, but it leaves the girl. Think about it a minute. Think about what she could tell the police.”
“She in a three foot deep hole in the woods?”
“That’s too easy,” The Man said.
“Here in the apartment?”
“You’re welcome to look if you like.”
I eased back my chair and stood up. “I’m tired of this game.”
“You know what a field nigger whorehouse is?” he asked. I shook my head. “It’s the last step down. It’s where the busted-up ones, the ones with diseases and god knows what else, end up. Tomorrow night she’ll be working in one of those houses. And she’ll shake her ass and grunt with the rest of them.”
“I could find her.”
“Not in a year. Not in five years.”
“What’s to keep her from running away?”
“White powder. Smack.”
“She’s not a user.”
“A few weeks,” he said, “and she will be.”
“You hate that nasty?”
Both eyes closed, he nodded. “Two years and you could pass her on the street and not know her.”
It was cold and dark in the parking lot. Above me stars that were a billion or two miles away were as bright as the lamp out on the street. How small and vulnerable we are. Burning until the pale fire in us burns out.
Hump shivered and pulled his topcoat collar up. “Got to see if my car’s still in the Follies lot.”
I passed him the car keys and got in the passenger seat.
“You going to look for her, Jim?”
“I don’t know. I’ll get my head straight tonight. I’ll think about it tomorrow.”
“You find her,” Hump said, “and they’ll kill her.”
“She’s dead already.”
Shocked at myself. Feeling the pain in my chest. I remembered where I’d heard that earlier. And it tied her to me like an anchor. I knew I could drown in it and I put my head back against the seat and closed my eyes.
Street lights fluttered against the closed lids like so many stars. Like so many white butterflies.
THE END
AFTERWORD
Ralph Dennis is The Man!
By Hank Wagner
Come along with me, and pick up your portable time machine, namely, this new edition (the original editions are even more of a time machine, smelling of old paper, and containing cigarette ads at their midpoint) of Ralph Dennis’s Hardman #7: Working for the Man. Open it up, and travel back to Atlanta, in the early nineteen seventies, a time before CNN, competitive sports teams, or urban renewal. It’s a darker, more dismal time, the perfect place for a less than heroic ex-cop named Jim Hardman to scrounge out a living doing PI work, which he makes sure to refer to as “doing favors for friends,” since he doesn’t have a license, and only operates under the sufferance of a pal on the force, the long-suffering Art Maloney. He doesn’t pursue these somewhat squalid quests alone, though, as he is supported by his wise and knowing girlfriend, Marcy, and his partner (the original jacket text insists on calling him a sidekick, but, make no mistake, they are partners), the formidable and unflappable ex-football star Hump Evans, whose height and weight varies from book to book, always increasing.
As Hardman himself states in his all too reliable, self-deprecating narration, “Hump and I have been doing odd jobs for a couple of years. He’s a lot like me. Shiftless and lazy, Marcy would say.” The jobs come his way haphazardly, usually missing persons type cases, or, in this particular instance, a missing ledger, which contains information which could cripple a local gangster’s operations. That gangster, a black crime lord known simply as “The Man,” plays on Hardman’s relationship with Ronny Gellin, a down on his luck card sharp who was murdered, apparently over the ledger. As in each of the Hardman novels, twelve in all, the truth is a bit more complicated and sordid.
I first dipped into the Hardman books in the late nineties, after hearing favorable comments from the likes of Ed Gorman, Bill Crider, and Joe Lansdale. The book scout and collector side of me was overjoyed, as I now had a quest to obtain twelve relatively obscure grails, combing my book haunts for copies of these purported gems. The reader in me was overjoyed to find out the hype was true, that Dennis was an unrecognized master of his craft, a talented journeyman writer whose work had been sadly overlooked over the years. I joyously read a handful, filing the rest away on my shelves, like fine wine, waiting for an appropriate time to revisit the mean streets of seventies Atlanta.
And along comes Lee Goldberg, who came to the books in a strikingly similar manner. Lee had much the same reaction that I did, except he took it a step further, by founding a publishing company to bring these slim volumes (the longest runs 68,000 words) back into print. He didn’t get to achieve his dream immediately, but he persevered, obtaining the rights to the Dennis’ literary canon (which, blessedly, extends beyond the Hardman series). You now have in your hands, or on your screen, one of those books, Working for the Man.
It’s typical of the series, as I confirmed by dipping into an earlier book, #4, Pimp for the Dead, and a subsequent installment, #8, The Deadly Cotton Heart. Pimp was written in 1974, one of seven books in the series issued that year, of which Working for the Man was the last. Cotton was the first of five releases in 1976, but you’d be hard pressed to tell that any time had passed, as Dennis writes with the same skill, heart, and verve in all of them, still sticking to his formula, but doing so in a way that allowed for inventiveness and innovation along the way.
Let’s go back to the time machine. Working for the Man was certainly a product of its time. The word “Blaxplotation” was probably just coming into use at the time, but certainly was a driving force in the marketing of this book, as witnessed by the back-cover copy, screaming in purple print, “BLACK GODFATHER.” Using the term Godfather evoked Mario Puzo’s 1969 novel and the 1972 film of the same name. The cover art recalls posters for the 1973 Bond film, “Live and Let Die,” which featured the black super villain Mr. Big. The language he employed was often harsh and abrasive by modern standards. Neither was he afraid of presenting the South in an uncensored manner, as Hump’s mere presence often evoked hateful exclamations, usually secretively mumbled by rednecks threatened by his size and confidence.
From a literary perspective, there’s also much to unpack. Although the novels were mar
keted and packaged as men’s adventure, in the vein of The Executioner (check out the original cover art to see exactly what I mean), prose wise, they fell somewhere between Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane, at least in terms of ambition and toughness. Title wise, they evoke the authors above, and the likes of the great John D. MacDonald (The Golden Girl and All? Come on!) They also broke some racial ground, as clear lines can be drawn from Hardman and Hump to Robert B. Parker’s Spencer and Hawk (and Susan Silverman and Martin Quirk, for that matter), right through to Joe Lansdale’s Hap and Leonard, a debt that Mr. Lansdale himself acknowledges in his introduction to the new edition of Atlanta Deathwatch. Of course, partners in mystery fiction were nothing new, but interracial partners were (I think of the Lone Ranger and Tonto as westerns, rather than mysteries). You could look to movies like 1958’s The Defiant Ones or 1967’s In the Heat of the Night (based on John Ball’s 1965 novel), or to television shows such as I Spy for precedents, but the Hardman series seems to be a major turning point, at least in terms of mystery/detective literature.
In the end, I think what sold me on these books is their central character, Jim Hardman. As a younger man, I appreciated this “everyman” for his normalcy and his averageness. He was just an ordinary guy, using a specialized skill set to try to pay his rent. He wasn’t above knocking back a drink or two on the job, but he never got sloppy. He was true to his girl (yet another word that resonates differently today), and to his partner, treating them both with respect and dignity. He always tried to keep his word. As an older man, I identify with him more than ever, as he slogs his way through his middle-aged existence, a few pounds heavier, a few steps slower, world weary and physically tired, yet still enduring, trying to use his experience and smarts to make sense of an ever more dismal world. In that way, he acts as a stand in for ordinary joes like me, making him a (an admittedly somewhat tarnished, somewhat disheveled) hero for the ages. I empathize with long time fans who are happily renewing their acquaintance with Big Jim, and envy those who are meeting him (and Hump, and Marcy, and Art) for the first time.
Hank Wagner lives in northwestern New Jersey with his wife, Nancy. A respected critic and interviewer, his work has appeared in numerous genre publications such as Mystery Scene, Crimespree, Hellnotes, Cemetery Dance and Dead Reckonings. Wagner is a co-author of The Complete Stephen King Universe and Prince of Stories: A Guide to the Many Worlds of Neil Gaiman. He also co-edited with David Morrell the Edgar, Anthony and Macavity Award finalist Thrillers: 100 Must Reads.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ralph Dennis isn’t a household name … but he should be. He is widely considered among crime writers as 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 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.
