by Ralph Dennis
That year the Hardman series were up to nearly all of the books that would be published. It was also all over the racks of the bookstores.
I hunted down the first book and read it. I’d changed and was more accepting of the violence in Hardman’s world.
I burned through the novels at that point. Couldn’t get enough of them. Thankfully they were easy to find and I was working at a job where I had more money (big upgrade from fifty cents an hours to $2.32—minimum wage was only $2.10 at the time).
Although I wasn’t ready for my first read of The Charleston Knife’s Back In Town, I re-read it when I plunged into the series and loved it. I loved it so much that I glued that book’s cover back on twice. Those old Pyramid Books paperbacks were pretty shoddily produced at times. In fact, it wasn’t until the eighth book, The Deadly Cotton Heart, that I stopped worrying about cracking the glue along the spine when I opened the book—and that was when I bought it new!
Ada, Oklahoma, was the big town near where I grew up in Francis, Oklahoma, population 332. At twelve thousand strong and a university town, Ada was a lot bigger than anywhere I’d thought I would live.
Ada was also extremely segregated, not too surprising in the 1970s. Civil Rights movements were still taking place. When you grow up in that environment you’re of two minds. If you want to stay small town and segregated, you think you know everything you need to. I didn’t. One of the high school janitors, Mr. Hightower, was African-American and talked to me. I was pure white trash and helped raise hogs. He told me he took that job at the high school so he could be close to his two sons. And from everything I saw, he was. He impressed me and that feeling stuck.
I played basketball at school and joined pickup games at the local gyms, so I knew a lot of the African-American guys who did the same. Growing up in that environment made it hard to get to know each other, though, because everybody kept walls up.
I think that’s one of the reasons I enjoyed Hump Evans in the Hardman series. I knew guys like him. Guys who were college stars but couldn’t make it to the Bigs for one reason or another and sometimes played South American Pan-Am leagues, and were still trying to figure out where they were going to go from there. We were all incredibly young then. I know some of them didn’t do well after that, and there were a lot of sad stories and some not so sad along the way. Those stories are in every color and every culture, but they spoke to me then.
As I recall, Hump is in every Hardman novel, but we never knew much about him outside of him being ex-NFL with a knee that took him a step off his best game, six feet six inches tall, and two hundred seventy pounds. So when Hump’s First Case came out, I was excited by the promise of learning more about the character.
Hump’s First Case delivers some of that, but not as much as I’d wanted. It presents more of the dynamic that made Hardman and Hump work as a team, and why they were together. Atlanta was, and is, a black and white city with a Southern bent. Except for technological advancements, some pop culture additions, and some re-zoning, I think Atlanta remains what it was: a city in constant motion trying to figure out where the balance is.
The author’s efforts to pen authentic dialogue to represent the times he was writing in, as well as the underbelly of Atlanta, is pretty dead on from what I recall of the times. Of course, times have changed and some readers might be offended at the way Dennis handles black and white relationships and women. But I’d caution everyone to remember that these books are just representative of those days, much as Edgar Rice Burroughs’s depiction of black nations in the Tarzan novels.
At the heart of the Hardman series are two guys, one white, one black, who strive to make their way in a harsh and unforgiving world. Dennis’s stripped-down prose, his unflinching look at the way things were and the way people comported themselves, his bare knuckles approach to crime and criminals, all of those things prepared me as a writer to write cleanly and honestly.
I’ve still got the original paperbacks in a storage unit where I’ve got a treasure trove of books I’ll probably never live long enough to see again. I think about them every now and again, and I promise myself I’ll dig them out. Thankfully Brash Books is bringing out these new digital editions and trade paperbacks so I can simply add them to my Kindle and re-read them, which I plan to do.
Often, you can’t go back and read a novel you read forty years ago and enjoy it. Most of you who discover these books now are simply too young to have known them when they first came out. And many times so much has changed about the world or changed about you that the read just doesn’t even come close to that first experience. Hump’s First Case does. And I’m betting all the other books do too.
I just wish Brash Books had more of the series to reprint. They were gone far too soon.
Mel Odom is the Alex Award-winning author of The Rover and has written over two hundred novels in the fantasy, science fiction, and adventure genres. His tie-in novels include books in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and Wizards of the Coast’s Forgotten Realms. You can learn more about him at www.melodombooks.com
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.