Hard Boiled

Like any genre fiction, crime fiction has quality output that, depending on your perspective, floats upon or is buried by oceans of hack-work. Said hack-work is churned out by the metric ton in order to get sellable material in front of the fans, and a writer who spends more than the bare minimum of effort on his or her output may get lucky and have his or her work noted, highlighted and appreciated not only by fans but also by people who appreciate that effort. Or he or she may see their long hours of sweat forgotten by a publishing company that wants a manuscript fast more than it wants it good. The first thing happened to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. The second happened to Ralph Dennis. Dennis's "Hardman" series, published in the first half of the 1970s, was slapped together between some lurid eyecatcher covers, tossed out onto the shelves and promptly forgotten by his publisher, Popular Books. It was left to modern crime-fiction authors like Joe Lansdale to rediscover him and point out the top talent involved in the Hardman series. Brash Books is reprinting the existing Dennis catalog, starting with Hardman, and adding several unpublished manuscripts found after his 1988 passing. The left-hand cover is the original publication, the right-hand one is the Brash Books version.

The Charleston Knife Is Back in Town is the second Hardman book and one I enjoy more than I do the series opener. Dennis doesn't need to waste more than a paragraph or two identifying the protagonists -- disgraced former Atlanta cop Jim Hardman and his friend, former Cleveland Browns defender Hump Evans -- and describing what they do -- everything from off-the-books investigating and instigating on behalf of Hardman's friend on the force Art to some straight-up illegal errands for various Atlanta criminal figures.

Dennis dives right into the action. Hump is one of several people attending a party who get robbed by a crew of sneaky but inexperienced thieves. Several people at the party prefer extralegal means to reacquire their property and have the resources to do so, which will be bad news for the thieves when they are found out. Hardman wouldn't care, except that it looks more and more like one of the thieves is a young man he's been asked to find by someone from his past. Another figure, the murder-for-hire thug called "the Charleston Knife," is hunting the robbery crew as well in order to recover the stolen property and money and leave the stealers dead. If he has to make other people dead in order to get the job done that's no problem, except that one of the ones he tried that on is Jim Hardman.

The best genre fiction writers did not pretend they were writing literature. Instead they wrote like they were. They crafted their sentences to supply atmosphere and tone as well as information, and shaped a narrative that could make a reader stop and think for a second about people and the way they live and the way things are. Hardman initially tries to find the young man without much desire to do so and even after figuring out he could be connected to the theft in which Hump was involved is still only interested in tracking him down for the fee. The involvement of the Charleston Knife makes it personal because of the attack on him and the bodies the assassin leaves in his wake, but we see that quest take on a more poignant role for Hardman because of it.

Ralph Dennis, like a lot of us, wonders if someone who starts out good but loses his way can still have some good in him -- does a knight's heart beat beneath tarnished armor still? He thinks it can and wrote a story that showed what it might look like if so. Because it involves a little hot sex and a lot of brutal violence and decidedly non-upstanding members of society means it'll get filed with the gung-ho bullets-and-babes paperbacks that get read today and tossed tomorrow -- and it works as one of those stories too -- but it still asks some questions that, if you're inclined to consider them -- are worth thinking about.

The Hardman books were written in the mid-1970s and would cause the average woke book reviewer of today a stroke by the end of the third paragraph. The racial and sexual attitudes of the characters reflect that they were born in the 1920s and 30s and had yet to shed that upbringing. Hardman and Hump may eventually shake out as good guys for the most part but they aren't nice, so a reader looking for stories that end, "And then I decided to leave this life of crime" had best keep searching. But Ralph Dennis knows how to keep a page turning, how to hook eyeballs and how to leave an interesting question or two in the wake of his butt-kicking protagonists.