Pimp for the Dead Read online

  PIMP FOR THE DEAD

  RALPH DENNIS

  Copyright © 2018 Adventures in Television, Inc. All rights reserved.

  Introduction “Ralph Dennis & Hardman”

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

  Afterword “A Hardman is Good To Find”

  Copyright © 2018 by Paul Bishop. 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: 1-7324226-0-5

  ISBN-13: 978-1-7324226-0-5

  Published by Brash Books, LLC

  12120 State Line #253,

  Leawood, Kansas 66209

  www.brash-books.com

  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

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  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

  AFTERWORD

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  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 fro
m 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 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.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This book was originally published in 1974 and reflects the cultural and sexual attitudes, language, and politics of the period.

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was early spring: warm and at the same time cool, greening and the dogwood had already bloomed. It was worth a drive around some of the old sections of Atlanta, and I guess some people who had done that last Sunday and would again this coming Sunday. Not me. I’m more the type to notice it if I accidentally run into a dogwood tree. I don’t go out of my way.

  Hump Evans is a lot like me in this. We’re more the type to sit around a cool, dark bar near a front window and watch the girls on the sidewalk passing by. On this particular day we were down on the Strip, near 8th and Peachtree. It was a day when there wasn’t much doing and we were between jobs, both the honest and the dishonest ones. Some weeks it’s like this, and we keep a little cash squirreled away against the bad times.

  Anyway, there we were in the Stein Club, and we were watching the girls prancing by and, now and then, the over–aged flower children, now dope freaks, who wandered into the Stein and out again, always as if they were looking for their best friends and couldn’t quite understand why they weren’t there with a large pitcher and an extra glass. It was Happy Hour. At the Stein, it’s from five–thirty to six–thirty, and we’d got there early enough to take the front corner table near the juke box.

  We were drinking draft beer and I was getting the bloat from it. Big as Hump is … 6’ 7” and 270 or so … he makes a large pitcher look like his personal beer mug. In the last year or so, either his capacity has gone up or mine has gone down. That might be partly age. He’s younger than I am and in better shape. Sometimes I think that, out of shape as I am, I must look like a loaf of homemade bread that’s still rising and has to be kneaded a time or two more.

  I’m Jim Hardman, and I used to be a cop here in Atlanta before I got some mud slung on me during a reform movement. I got the resignation in about half a step in front of the boot. I’m pudgy and over forty and deceptively mean and nasty. The dude with me is Hump Evans. For five or six years, he was right up there with the Deacon and Claude and Bubba until a knee injury finished him. He’s black and a little bitter now and then, and I think we’re friends, but I wouldn’t say that to him. He might laugh at me, or look at me in that fuck off way of his.

  The last few years, we’ve teamed together. We’ll do almost anything that pays enough and doesn’t call for eight– hour days. My girlfriend, Marcy, thinks the way I live is just lack of ambition, and if that’s true, Hump has twice as much of it as I do.

  Around six, this dandy came over with his glass of beer and stood in the aisle near our table, like he was looking for a place to sit. He looked about forty, with a thin pencil mustache, and he was wearing soft tweeds and had a bulldog pipe in his mouth. You could smell the sweet tobacco even over a few hippie armpits at the table next to us. After a tap dance of hesitation, he edged over to our table and nodded at the empty space next to me, against the wall.

  “Mind if I sit down?”

  That bothers me. I like to choose the people I drink with, but I knew the Stein was packed and I nodded, and he sat down. Now it was just a matter of letting him know that, just because he was at the table, it didn’t mean we wanted a conversation with him. For a couple of minutes I thought he’d read us and got our message. It turned out he hadn’t.

  “It’s interesting, out on the street,” he said.

  I nodded and looked away. I’ve found the best way of discouraging conversation with strangers is a vague nod or shake of the head, no matter what they say. Never a yes or a no.

  “Sisyphus,” the man said.

  Hump turne
d then and looked at him. I’d heard it, too, the giveaway in his voice. Real fay. Not that I had anything against homosexuals. My brother could be one if he wanted to, just as long as he didn’t talk to me while I’m drinking.

  I gave the guy another look. With my way of making bad guesses, I decided he was probably an English prof at Georgia State or Tech.

  “Huh?” Hump said finally.

  “I like to watch them also,” the guy said.

  But, I thought to myself, you probably watch the boys.

  “You know the myth of Sisyphus, don’t you?” And then, without waiting to let Hump answer, he went on. “The king who was condemned to push a large boulder up a hill in Hades. When it would almost reach the top, it would roll back down the hill and he’d have to push it up again. Over and over. Through all eternity.”

  “So what?” Hump said.

  “That’s what they’re like.” He leaned past me and waved his pipe at the street people passing outside the window. “They’re condemned to walk that three or four blocks of the Strip, from 6th to 10th. They push the rock from 6th to 10th, and then it rolls back down, and then they walk back to 6th and grasp the rock and push it back to 10th.”

  “What does all that mean?” Hump looked at him with the simple, put–on look of his.

  “It’s a metaphor for futility,” the guy said, leaning back from in front of me.

  “Is that right? Futility? That’s the straight word? That’s what you see outside that window?”

  “Well …”

  “What I see out there is girl–ass and girl–titty,” Hump said, “and I don’t see any futility in that, unless you’re not getting any of it.”

  Our man read the handwriting then and found himself another table. The scent of his cologne lingered after him. Hump watched him prance away, bulldog pipe tight in his teeth, back rigid with injury and insult. “The problem with these guys is that they think everybody but them was hiding behind the door when the brains were passed out.”

  Which meant, I guess, that we could see the futility in that march up and down the street as well as he could. At the same time, we could see the ass and the titty and, somehow, that made it easier to take.