The Charleston Knife is Back in Town Read online

  Copyright © 2018 Adventures in Television, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Introduction “Ralph Dennis & Hardman”

  Copyright © 2018 by Joe R. Lansdale. All Rights Reserved.

  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: 1-7320656-7-3

  ISBN-13: 978-1-7320656-7-3

  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, that’ll work for me, and though my characters are quite differen
t 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

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER ONE

  In the prelim bout two welterweights were going at it, a young black from Atlanta and a Cuban from New York City who had large raw patches of acne on his chest and back. Every time the black hit the Cuban on one of the splotches I’d catch myself wincing. In the seat next to me, big and black, six-seven and 270 the last time I asked, Hump Evans was facing away from the ring, not because the punches on the acne bothered him that much but because the show in the aisles was much better than the one down in the ring.

  We were in the Omni, the new sports palace in Atlanta, that red-rusting, egg-carton jumble of steel that the owners assured everybody would weather into a bluish-purple beauty of a building in time. But that was the outside. Inside it reminded me of Madison Square Garden the last time I’d been there for a holiday tournament. The same seating hassle. Good seats in the low and courtside area but hell up in the nickel seats. We were in the good seats because we’d done a bit of a favor for one of the promoters a few months back and Hump had had brass enough to remind him of it. That was how we’d ended up in the $50 seats.

  Hump turned around and looked at the prelim fight for a second and then grinned at me. “Hardman, you believe all this?”

  I guess I did. I’d been blinking ever since we’d parked over in the lot and followed the underpass over to the Omni. We were in the middle of a massive black celebration, complete with all the far-out fashions and a carnival spirit. It had been going on for about a week and this was the high point of it all, the J.C. Cartway fight, his first since the Supreme Court had ruled for him and sprung him out of the New York pen where he’d been doing five for possession of hard drugs. The Cartway case, from the arrest through the trial and right up to the series of appeals, had seemed tailored for cause purposes. It had been a big cause, not just for the blacks but for everybody who thought the system of justice in this country could be warped at times. J.C. Cartway was probably the best young heavyweight in the country since Ali. By itself that would have been all right. What rubbed some of the Establishment wrong was that he was a Black Panther and he didn’t take shit off anybody. To say the least, the arrest had the stink of a big fish-kill on the Coast. Just earlier that day Cartway had had a row with some white cops outside a bar on Sheridan Square. He wasn’t doing anything. They probably stopped him because he looked prosperous and for a black that must have meant to the cops that he was a pimp or a dealer. Cartway had had enough sense not to be baited into using his fists, but he’d given them a lot of mouth. So it looked strange, not twelve hours later, when a narc squad showed up at Cartway’s apartment with a search warrant. In the search, while J.C. sat in the living room drinking buttermilk, the narcs found twenty decks of H. ready for street sale. According to the cops, that made J.C. a dealer. According to J.C., the stuff had been planted on him because he wouldn’t let the cops play with his balls.

  The Free J.C. signs sprouted all over the country and it was almost a year after the heated trial before the appeals worked their way through the courts. During that time J.C. sweated in the prison laundry and worked out in the gym. He got meaner and harder and he stayed in shape. Still, he hadn’t had a fight in that time and maybe he had overtrained. When he had got out of the pen four months previously, the world was waiting for his next fight. Even if he hadn’t been a damned good fighter, they’d have been waiting for it.

  There was, it seemed, one problem. The New York State Boxing Commission had revoked his license to fight there and it looked like they were dragging their feet about reinstating it. It might have been the Black Panther tie-in at the center of that. It was at that moment that five civil rights leaders in Atlanta put together a packag
e and offered the Omni as the site. They pointed with pride to the fact that Ali’s first fight after the long suspension had been in Atlanta, the one with Quarry. The contracts were drawn up and the opponent chosen, a fairly good white heavyweight from Texas named George Higgins. Higgins might not have fought Cartway except for the long layoff Cartway had had. The word was he thought that he might catch Cartway when he wasn’t sharp and beat him. That would open the door to the big money and the chance to move up in the ratings. It was a gamble and I guess he knew it. Or maybe his manager talked him into it.

  The week before the fight, Atlanta seemed to be changing right before our eyes. All the big-name blacks from show business and sports crowded the Regency and right behind them came the big-time gamblers and bookies. And in their wake came the pimps and the whores and the small-time hustlers, the fringe world people hoping to pick up some crumbs from the fat table. There’d already been more than the weekly allowance of rip-offs, muggings, and con games.

  But that was outside. Here in the Omni it was a festival, all the far-out and wild fashions warring in the aisles and the newly emerging black middle class pressed armpit to armpit with the pimps and their string of whores and the hustlers with a new hustle every minute or so.

  That was the parade that Hump was watching rather than the awkward welterweight match down in the ring.

  “Look at all that trim,” Hump said, “look at all that out-of-town sweetmeat trim.”

  I nodded. I thought of the racist story I heard a big tobacco farmer from North Carolina tell once. I didn’t remember the whole story but the punchline had this young black field hand looking him in the eye and saying, “Cap’n, if you could be black one Saturday night you’d never want to be white again.” Maybe that was the way I felt, that it would be a hell of a thing to be black and feel the celebration the way Hump did and the way that whole milling mass of people did. In fact, I felt a little out of it. I’d been getting some hard-looking screw-yous from some of the studs seated around me, like they wanted me to know that I’d helped put J.C. away and don’t you forget it. It might have gone beyond that if I hadn’t been so obviously with Hump. I guess he’d felt the rankness around us and he was making a big thing of being friendly. There might have been some mean studs among them, but I think they knew who he was. He hadn’t been out of pro football that long. Before the knee injury he’d been with Cleveland and right up there among the best defensive ends, about as big as Bubba Smith and maybe a step or two quicker. For the last few years Hump and I had been working together and drinking together and maybe we were friends. It was hard to tell with him. The work we did was anything that came up, as long as it paid good money and didn’t call for us to work eight-hour shifts. That meant most of the time it was shady stuff, pretty far off-center. The more off-center, the better the money was. Neither Hump nor I cared that much about the Sunday school and church aspects of the jobs we did. Getting by out there in the fringe world could be hard and dirty and if you stopped to think about the ethics of the whole thing you’d get your plow cleaned fast and sudden. And you could end up down on Whitehall with a flat pocket. I wasn’t quite ready for that yet and I was fairly sure that Hump never would be.