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.
Cover Photograph of the Ford Maverick by Accord14, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52131087
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: 1-732-06566-6
ISBN-13: 978-1-732-06566-6
Published by Brash Books, LLC
12120 State Line #253,
Leawood, Kansas 66209
www.brash-books.com
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, t
hat’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.
The Hardman Series
Atlanta Deathwatch
The Charleston Knife is Back in Town
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
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This book was originally published in 1974 and reflects the cultural and sexual attitudes, language, and politics of the period.
CONTENTS
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
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHAPTER ONE
There was a blizzard, or what looked like one, up in New York City. In the TV news footage the snow drifts looked about hip high. And there was a sleet storm over Maryland and Virginia. But here in Atlanta the sun was out all day and the temperature was in the low 60’s. It began to drop around dusk, and the wind was up. Now it was in the upper 40’s and holding, and that was fine for me. I didn’t want it any lower. I’d had enough of sitting around in parked cars in freezing weather, waiting for my feet to turn into ice cubes. I guess that’s a sign I’m getting old, but I don’t like to think so.
It was a simple tail, a follow-around for the evening and report-back in the morning—that kind of thing. Like most of that kind of work, it was a goddamn bore. Most of the evening I was in my ’65 Ford, parked at a slight angle across the street from the Dew Drop In Cafe. Every half-hour or so, I’d leave the car and cross the street. I’d pass the cafe and look in. Each time, so far, she’d been there. Emily Campbell, 19, blonde and pretty, hunched over the bar sipping a glass of beer. There were eight or ten other drinkers in the place and they were all black. What interested me was that there were exactly two empty bar stools on each side of her. None of the studs seemed to be trying to make time.
The last pass by the cafe, a big stud with an Afro turned slowly on his stool and stared at me past the neon sputter of the cafe sign. That stare curdled my blood a bit, and I thought about calling Hump and having him drop into the cafe and see what he could find out from the inside. Hump’s black, and that’s a great disguise in the part of town I was operating in this Friday night, the 10th of December.
I decided against calling Hump. The fee for the tail was too low, and it wouldn’t do to split two ways. On the way back to the car my blood started flowing again and the hard ridge of muscle high in my back relaxed. It was just routine. Nothing to worry about.
The phone call earlier in the day shouldn’t have surprised me. The state legislature was in special session, and I usually got some work out of the members’ back-alley merry-making. Mainly nasty little jobs. Things I’d straighten out, so the folks back home wouldn’t hear about them. The first favor I’d done was for old Hugh Muffin, a long-time state senator from the southeastern part of the state. It involved some pictures of Hugh being blown by a 16-year-old hippie chick. The pictures, according to the chick and her boyfriend, were worth ten thousand dollars. Hump had talked to the boyfriend in the bathroom of the little apartment in the 10th Street area, and I’d reasoned with the girl in the bedroom. In the end, we had the prints and the negatives and they had a few new bruises.
After that, there were other jobs. A few bucks here and a few bucks there. Some of them came through Hugh and others by way of the legislative grapevine. In this new job there’d been no mention of Hugh, though I knew that he and my new client, Arch Campbell, were drinking friends. Maybe Hugh had suggested me. Maybe not. Anyway, the job seemed simple enough. Arch Campbell had a daughter at Tech. Apple of his eye and only child and all that. Now, according to him, it looked like she was headed for hell in a handbasket. After a fine freshman year, dean’s list, her grades were down, and she’d decided against going into her mother’s sorority. She wouldn’t return her mother’s calls. Twice her mother had driven out to Tech to see her, and both times she’d been out. My job was to tail her around for a day or two and find out what was distracting her. That was fifty dollars a day, flat fee.
I started the job in the late afternoon. I drove out to Tech and found
her dormitory without any trouble. Then I cruised around the parking lot until I spotted her green Toyota with the tag numbers the old man had given me. I parked in a space two rows behind her, and walked around until I found a pay phone. From the noise in Arch Campbell’s room at the Regency, it sounded like they were having a hell of a party. He had to shush them down before we could talk.
“Call your daughter,” I told him, “and say you’re coming right over to see her.”
“I don’t understand . . . ”
“Say you’ll be there in ten minutes.”
“If you say so, I will, but . . . ”
I said, “Do it right now,” and hung up.
I got back to my car and waited. Sure enough, about six or seven minutes later, a girl came running out the side entrance of the dorm. She was fumbling her arms into a sweater and looking around as if she expected the devil himself to appear. She got into the green Toyota and burned rubber leaving the parking lot. A block or so later, the panic seemed to drain out of her and she eased down to fit into the traffic. I fell into place two cars back and relaxed. She was a driving-manual driver, and it wasn’t hard to keep her in sight.
When she reached West Peachtree and North, she turned and headed downtown. She went through the main part of Peachtree and reached Whitehall. I was right behind her then. When she took an abrupt right into a service station, got out, and went to a phone booth. From where I was, she seemed upset. She had slammed the receiver down hard on the final call. Right after that, she’d driven to the Dew Drop In Cafe. That was almost four hours ago, and she was still there. If she was waiting for someone, as I guessed, then that someone was a few hours late.
It was time to check on her again. I didn’t relish that much, not after the big black with the Afro had taken that hard look at me. But if she took a quick run out the back door, I’d have to start over again the next day, and I didn’t want that, either. I was sitting there, debating with myself, when a set of headlights struck the back window and lit me up. A car eased to the curb behind me. I leaned down and got the slapjack from under the seat. I placed it on the seat beside me and, as the headlights went out, I turned and saw two blacks get out of the car. One was on the walk side and the other on the street side. They were arguing and raising a lot of good-natured hell, like they’d already had a few to drink. The one on the walk said he had to get home before Annie did, or there’d be shit in the soup the next day. The other one was kidding him about Annie and trying to talk him into some pig feet and another beer at the cafe. It sounded so real that I believed it, but I kept my eye on the one in the street. He was edging toward my car, but that seemed normal enough because he was waiting for a spurt of traffic to go by. Watching that one was my mistake. The other one, the one who was insisting that he had to get home before Annie, whipped open the door next to the sidewalk and eased into the seat beside me. He was carrying one of those nickel-plated .32’s, the ones we called Saturday Night Specials. They weren’t much good, but they’d kill you from a couple of feet away.
