BY RICHARD A. MOORE

Ralph Dennis (1931-1988) was born in South Carolina and had a master’s degree from the University of North Carolina, where he also taught. For mystery fans Dennis will always be associated with the City of Atlanta, the locale for the twelve novel series about Jim Hardman, former cop and unofficial private eye, all published by Popular Library between 1974 and 1977.

Seldom has a city played such an important role in a series as Dennis delighted in sprinkling his novels with the restaurants, bars, nightclubs, hotels and street corners of his adopted home. I don’t know when Dennis moved to Atlanta but I can vouch for how well he knew the city for I spent most of the 1970s as a reporter in that city. And I admit that I derive special pleasure from the splendid depiction of a city I lived, worked and played hard in for that decade.

The decade was nearly over and I had become a mystery writer myself before I ever read a word by Dennis. The late Jud Sapp, bibliographer of Rex Stout, shoved a copy of the fourth novel in the series Pimp For The Dead into my hands and said I had to read it. Jud was an elementary school principal, and looked it, so given the title and the packaging, the recommendation was more than a little incongruous. From the first few pages, Dennis had me hooked and I’ve remained a fan.

The Jim Hardman series was packaged similarly to all the other action heroes of the time—the Destroyer, the Executioner, the Lone Wolf, and on and on. Each novel had a number as well as a title in these series because that helped the fans keep track of which they had read. The plots of so many of these series were too interchangeable for a reader to keep track without the aid of a numbered system.

So the novels were trumpeted as Hardman #1 "A great new private eye for the shockproof ‘70s." Jim Hardman on the covers and blurbs became HARDMAN. What made this all the more humorous is that the character in the novel was middle-aged and as out-of-shape as most guys who get their primary exercise lifting beers or glasses of J&B Scotch.

Jim Hardman had more than his share of fights in the novels, with mixed results. The true muscle was provided by Hardman’s friend Hump Evans, formerly a defensive end with the Cleveland Browns. Now having an Afro-American sidekick who provides the muscle or does the dirty work is something of a cliché. It was not so in the 70s and Hump was always an equal partner with Hardman. Jim participated in as many brawls, it was just that Hump was better at it. At 6-6 (or 6-7 as both were given at different times) and 270 pounds, Hump always retained a certain independence from Hardman. There was nothing demeaning about Hump.

The Dennis publishing history is interesting. The first Hardman novel appeared in April 1974 and a total of seven Hardman novels were published in that first year.

It was not unusual for a publisher to have three novels in a series ready to go out simultaneously or in quick succession in order to establish the concept of the series with the public. This was done with John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee, for example. But seven novels in one year is very unusual for a series that was not being ghosted.

Here is the sequence of the first seven Hardman novels:

Atlanta Deathwatch April 1974
The Charleston Knife’s Back In Town May 1974
The Golden Girl & All May 1974
Pimp For The Dead June 1974
Down Among The Jocks July 1974
Murder’s Not An Odd Job August 1974
Working For The Man September 1974

That is an incredible record of productivity. The Hardman novels do show signs of hasty construction at times but given this publishing schedule, it is amazing that Dennis could maintain the quality at this pace.

The eighth Hardman does not appear until 1976. In the intervening two years, Dennis published two novels:

Atlanta (Popular Library 1975) is a mainstream novel built around a basketball star who bears more than a little resemblance to Pete Maravitch, college hotshot from LSU who signed a then huge contract with the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks. At 318 pages, Atlanta is far longer than the Hardman novels, very character driven and worth seeking out. I wonder if Dennis’ agent shopped this around to hardback houses before turning it over to the same paperback publisher of the series.

Deadman’s Game (Berkley January 1976) features a former government agent named Kane who is now selling his services to private interests. Soon both the mob and the Agency are after him. I have this novel but have yet to read it. Bill Crider has, and says it is fun but not as much fun as the Hardman series.

After those two novels, Dennis returned to Jim Hardman with the eighth through twelfth books in the series:

The Deadly Cotton Heart November 1976
The One-Dollar Rip-Off January 1977
Hump’s First Case March 1977
The Last Of The Armageddon Wars May 1977
The Buy Back Blues July 1977

Dennis finally achieved a hardback sale with MacTaggart’s War, Holt 1979. By far his most ambitious work, the plot concerns an attempt to hijack the gold bullion that Britain moved to Canada for safekeeping during the dark days of World War II. While not completely successful, this novel outshines so many others that made the bestseller lists and were grabbed by Hollywood. At the time of publication, Dennis must have felt himself on the brink of a breakthrough. MacTaggart’s War was a great read and it would have made a wonderful Clint Eastwood movie. Alas, as far as I know, this was the last Dennis novel to be published.

Back to his heyday of the 1970s, I do wonder that I did not seek him out as I began writing mysteries. The Atlanta Constitution ran a feature on Dennis shortly after I began reading him and at that time Dennis had moved back to Chapel Hill. I might have looked him up but for that. Skip forward a few years. I moved to Washington in 1981 but made twice a year returns to Atlanta. Oxford Books was always one of the places I visited especially after they opened an Oxford II that featured used books. One day as I looked around Oxford II, I noticed this bald, middle-aged guy at a counter going through the new arrivals and pricing them. He looked familiar. Then I remembered the feature in the Constitution that included a picture of Ralph Dennis. I wandered his way and introduced myself. He did a double-take at being recognized but never asked me how it happened.

We chatted for several minutes. I wondered why I had not seen anything by him in several years. He pointed to a Richard Stark novel about the tough crook Parker that I had in my pile. Dennis said he had written a novel with a lead character that made Parker look like a sissy. His editor was enthusiastic and Dennis thought it was his best work. Unfortunately, the editor was let go by the publisher and his replacement did not care at all for the novel. It was the old story of the orphaned novel and writer. A publisher intended to reprint all the Hardman novels and oddly started with the second The Charleston Knife’s Back In Town (alas, the reprinting did not extend to the others as planned: it just wasn't to be).

All of this took place as other store personnel buzzed about us with censoring looks. I felt guilty for taking up his time and perhaps getting him in trouble as other staff members had hovered near us during our conversation.

Some months later I went back and he wasn't there. At the cash register there was a Ralph Dennis memorial sign and I was shocked to learn of his death.

Time passed and some years later an evening came when I was drinking and thinking and I picked up the phone and put my old reporter instincts to work.  I tracked down Ralph's sister in Michigan in a UP town where she owned and ran a restaurant. She loved her brother. As his situation and his health deteriorated, she begged him to come live with her. She felt she owed him that much for he had meant so much to her growing up. He refused out of pride. He died. There was a memorial in his honor at an Atlanta bar.

The day will come when I get the energy and the motivation to track the number again but anyone else is invited to beat me to it. You have no idea how many boxes of memories I would have to sort through to find these.

If I ever win the lottery or want to put it all on the line, publishing Dennis is something I would likely do. I do believe him when he said he pushed the envelope on anti-heroes and I also think this might have hurt him in that period and today might not be a problem.

Maybe one day we’ll see.

Hardman #1--Atlanta Deathwatch (Popular Library April 1974)

Some opening novels in series are never equaled—as if the author exhausted available creativity in the first book. Other maiden novels are so busy establishing the major characters and all the history that will become the back story for the rest of the series that they give insufficient attention to the novel itself. Such efforts labor forward carrying all this "back story’ weight on a flimsy frame.

Finally there are series that get off to a good start with the first novel but in every other novel in the series, time is devoted to re-establishing the basics for new readers. Reading the Travis McGee novels as they appeared, I found the constant repetition of how McGee won the Busted Flush produced involuntary groans.

Atlanta Deathwatch is a very good Hardman novel. Although there are some that are better, this is a nice representative novel and a good introduction to Hardman and the other characters. Dennis does tend to replay a brief background on Hump Evans but none of the other novels give as clear a picture of how Hardman and Hump began to work together. As I read this novel long after reading most of the series, I was shocked to find early in Atlanta Deathwatch Hardman and Hump doing something very illegal for money—making a drug run. While the duo were never straight arrows in the rest of the series, this act was surprising. After the debut, Dennis may have backed off a notch on the hard edges of the characters.

Atlanta Deathwatch gives the full history of how Jim Hardman came to leave the police force. A part of that history is how he came to meet his girlfriend Marcy and how their friendship nearly became a casualty of the crisis that ended his career with the police.

This is also the novel where Hardman first meets The Man, the African American who controls most of the girls, the games and the drugs in Atlanta. The novel opens with Hardman following a Georgia Tech coed on behalf of her concerned (and wealthy) white family. As the novel opens, Emily Campbell is looking very out of place in a black joint, the Dew Drop In. Hardman is also out-of-place in the neighborhood and is soon spotted and roughed up. He reports in to the girl’s father and then he and Hump head to New York on their drug run. By the time they return, Emily has been murdered and Hardman and Hump are retained to find the killer. This time the client isn’t Emily’s family but her boyfriend The Man. Dennis is very good at selling in the unlikely pairing of Emily and the black gangster. The trail takes Hardman to Emily’s hometown where he learns that a high school romance with a poor boy was broken up by her family. That boy was now AWOL from the Navy and roaming Atlanta with a .45 he’s not afraid to use.

Atlanta Deathwatch misses the top rank of the Hardman series because Dennis gets sloppy with his plotting and character motivation as he brings the novel to a close. The ending is built around a secluded brothel that Hump and Hardman must assault to bring out the killer. By the time the reader reaches the brothel the logic of the plot and believability of the characters has evaporated. It was time to end the novel and I rather imagine the set piece of the assault on the heavily-guarded brothel appealed to Dennis. There are some nice moments as Dennis is very good with action scenes and, even with the flawed ending, this is a fun novel to read and a very good start to the series.

In the first novel, Dennis made some use of the Atlanta locale with mentions of the department stores Rich’s and Davison’s (the latter was to be absorbed by Macy’s), Grady Stadium, and Ft. McPherson. I don’t recall an Atlanta Dew Drop In but there was a black nightclub 60 miles away in Athens called the Dew Drop Inn.

By the time of this ninth novel, the city of Atlanta deserves co-billing with Hardman as the stars of the series. The One-dollar Rip-off opens with Jim Hardman and Hump Evans enjoying beers at George’s Deli on Highland Avenue. It’s one of those beautifully balmy October days in Atlanta. It’s also Monday and a football pool sheet is floating between George’s and Moe and Joe’s, the bar next door. Hump takes a flyer for a dollar. His draw is unlucky as he has a "three" both ways meaning that both ends of the score of the Monday night game have to end in "three" as in 33 to 13.

After a few drinks, Hardman and Hump head for their separate homes. Hardman crashes early but Hump takes in the game, which due to a last minute touchdown ends with the score of 23 to 3. In recounting this, Dennis adroitly moves from the first person viewpoint of Jim Hardman to a third person narration of Hump returning to claim his $100 prize. George’s had closed but Moe and Joe’s was still rocking with Emory University students (as it probably is tonight, a quarter of a century later). Hump is angered to learn that someone crossed out his name on the winning number and wrote in another. It wasn’t even for the $100 as a cheap con artist named Joe Bottoms resold the number for a single dollar. He had chosen Hump’s number because it was so unlikely to win and cause problems with dual winners.

The bartender tries to calm down a very pissed off Hump Evans after telling him the "other" winner had collected the money.

Hardman helps Hump track down Bottoms, who doesn’t have the $100 but he does have a check made out to him in the amount of $2000.00 from a construction company. They take the check which Bottoms can get back only if he hands over $100 in cash by 5 pm the next day.

Bottoms misses the deadline and is soon discovered very dead. Hump is arrested and Hardman bails him out of the DeKalb County jail while providing an alibi the cop in charge of the case reluctantly accepts.

The check Hump has from Bottoms turns out to be just one of several stolen from the construction company. The president of the company hires Hardman and Hump to get the rest of the checks back. Again, the reader must strain to believe something very unlikely—that this wealthy man will refuse to close the accounts as the simple and easy way to prevent further loss. He has already been taken for a half million dollars but pride prevents him from the obvious. He wants to stop the losses without closing the account.

Having served up that one bit of nonsense, Dennis outlines the scam very nicely. Hardman enlists the help of an old con man Bill Hefner, now deep in the bottle. Hefner recognizes the swindle as the work of a legendary con artist named Ben Pride. With help from Hefner, Hardman sets in motion a scheme to lure Pride out of hiding.

The novel moves quickly and suspense builds nicely as the showdown with Pride approaches. The Atlanta of the 1970s is everywhere in this novel. I doubt the Midnight Sun restaurant still exists in Peachtree Center or the Brothers Two in Colony Square. Heck, I’m not even certain if there is still a Union Mission downtown where the winos and other homeless line up for meals. But you can still find Moe and Joe’s on North Highland Avenue. The Papst is on tap and they make their special burgers just as they have since 1947. There is still a George’s Deli next door. Sadly, that was where they held the memorial service for Ralph Dennis.

The Last of the Armageddon Wars moves quickly from scene to scene, each drawn with precision by a writer with a good eye and ear. Dennis has a simple but solid plot that moves from beginning to end at high speed but without abandoning logic. It hangs together well and that frees the reader to enjoy a craftsman at work without the nagging doubts of plot and motivation.

This is one of the best novels in the series. It opens with the third person narration of a hitman from Detroit arriving in Atlanta. He’s rousted by the tipped-off Atlanta police as soon as he arrives and they put him back on a plane to Detroit. His target was The Man. The cops call on Hardman because he’s been known to work for The Man. Soon the hitman is dead as the result of a hit and run and The Man’s headquarters has been shot up. Hump brings a quasi-doctor named Boggs to patch the wounded. Boggs is a good example of how Dennis creates a fully realized character in very few words.

        "Boggs, you want a drink?"
        "Some straight gin."
        Hump poured Boggs about a fistful of the best and passed it to him on the way by. Boggs had a long swallow of it and put the glass aside. He worked over the wound in Dawkins side. "Cleaning it," he explained. "Got bits of cloth in it, trash like that."
        He’s about finished with the wound when Dawkins groaned and moved his head. Boggs duck-walked to his paper sack and took out a needle and what looked like a vial of morphine. "Got to be careful of shock," he said. He found a vein and popped Dawkins a heavy shot.
        Another swig of the gin and he bandaged the wound. He moved up a couple of feet and knelt next to the boy’s face. "Not sure I’m getting all the glass out," he said. "A doctor’d know more."
        "You’re doing fine," I said. He was. He had good hands. Gentle hands.

Soon after this, The Man returns with reinforcements to his headquarters:

        The door flew open and banged against the wall. The man’s other gun stood there, bent over, the two barrels of a sawed-off on us. Past him, I could see The Man. He had a .45 automatic in one big fist.
        "Come on in," I said. "I guess you could call us the cleanup crew."

Later Hardman looks for Hump and finds him at a joint called Pig’s Place. Outside, Hump is watching Boggs cook the barbeque. When he isn’t moonlighting as a doc, he’s cooking the B-B-Q. And friends, if you have ever had good barbeque, you will recognize both as noble professions.

        Hump leaned in and, getting Boggs’ nod, stripped away a peel of lean. It was crisp and dark. Hump broke the peel down the middle and passed half of it to me. We looked at each other and chewed.
        "Damned good," I said. "The best."
        "It might not be my best," Boggs said. "I think I let my vinegar hand shake while I was making the sauce."
        "Live with it," Hump said. "And quit all that being modest."

There is a war on between outsiders who want to take over vice in Atlanta from The Man. Hump experiences one of the battles as he attends the "Pimp of the Year" contest at a local establishment. The honors are chosen by secret ballot in the private ceremony attended by all the top talent in the city plus their pimps. Unfortunately, the celebration/election is interrupted by shotgun-firing masked men who kill some of The Man’s top allies. The challenge could not be more direct.

On another front, the outsiders get a foot in the door by operating clubs like the stripper bar The Bird’s Nest. The scene is dismal. As the club has no liquor license, only soft drinks are served. As the setting is back in the 1970s, strip clubs often made some attempt to achieve "social redeeming" qualities. As Hump and Hardman watch, the lights are dimmed.

        "The Bird’s Nest Revue presents our Bicentennial salute to America. After two hundred years it is still the land of the free and the home of the brave. In the beginning, before the white man came to these shores, there were the Indians."
        A loud blare of music. It was the pop recording of "Cherokee Nation." A young black girl, wearing nothing but a beaded headband, did a leap from the wings. She began a dance that was partly go-go and partly the stomp-and-trot parody of a war dance. In the downstage lights, front to the audience, her pubic hair looked like a pad of rusty steel wool.
        Hump said, "That ain’t no Indian."

Honest to goodness, I think I saw this presentation in Atlanta back in 1976. It certainly is representative of the times.

Before they leave the club, Hardman and Hump are recognized and have to fight their way out in a brawl that Dennis carries nicely over several pages.

The end comes at Hardman’s house with a one-on-one showdown with the killer. Jim Hardman prevails, of course, and now must come up with plausible lies that will cover the situation without exposing him or his friends to prosecution. He kills the man, then sets the scene, and with his story ready, calls the cops.

        "Five or six minutes later I heard the first car pull up in front of the house. Some cruiser that had been in the area. I stood and waited.
        Maybe I could make it fly. Maybe not. But I was still alive. That was a consolation prize of sorts."

Copyright© 2003 Richard A. Moore

***

RICHARD A. MOORE is the author of three novels and several short stories published by Ellery Queen, Alfred Hitchcock and Mike Shayne mystery magazines and various anthologies. He debuted in the July 1978 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine as EQ's "First Story" Number 499. His novel Death in the Past was named one of "One Hundred Notable Novels of Detection" by Marv Lachman in his The American Novel of Detection. One of his short stories was selected for Best Horror Stories of the Year Series VIII, edited by Karl Edward Wagner. Growing up in rural Georgia, Moore was hooked on mysteries by paperbacks featuring Mike Shayne, Mike Hammer and anything by John D. MacDonald and Frederic Brown. Paperbacks were 25 cents and on monthly forays to Atlanta used copies were two for a quarter. It was a good time to begin a collection. A former reporter and press secretary, Moore now lives in Alexandria, Virginia and works in Washington, DC for a public relations firm.
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