Right out of his college days, my buddy and me ended up in Jacksonville Florida. I was still drifting in and out of colleges back then about to take up a criminal justice degree that would later turn out to be fairly useless. Well, expect maybe as a crime writer. Anyway, he wanted to go down to Florida for some sort of job fair and had a free ticket. I soaked up free booze and food, rode a monorail like that one in that Simpsons episode, hit the bookstores and loafed.
I had heard of the Hardman books before that from my lurking around the Thrilling Detective website. They sounded up my alley. I was on the lookout for something to bring up the James Crumley feeling that Joe R. Lansdale feeling. Something low-down and mean. That cynical 70s-thing that so many try to replicate but came easy back in the day. I hadn't really dipped my toe into the Men's Adventure world at the time, so the numbers on the covers worried me a bit. But I knew I liked private eyes and action and, hell, that's what it promised on the cover.
It was also before I really bought books online. I remember thinking spending four bucks on a book with free shipping sounded like a ripoff. the young me would certainly look cross at me for how much I've spent on online book purchases now. So, my purchase pool was small, and I never came across a Hardman book. But it turns out this bookstore was a good one and it had a whole stack of them, for something like two bucks a piece. What a score.
After humping back to my hotel room with a bag of books and a few quarts of beer I read Atlanta Deathwatch while my buddy sat in seminar and my mind was blown. Ralph Dennis's work was something special. It was different, hard-boiled as hell but Jim Hardman himself wasn't a cartoon character. He lived and breathed, (and drank) he was fallible but got his man and was tough but knew his limitations. And his partner Hump was cool, confident and a real buddy. A good guy to have in your corner. They had a certain vibe or a certain music to them. They felt like a good Guy Clark album or a riotous live country show, hard-bitten with a few lines of pure poetry. Things I know well.
What really struck me is, like Joe R. Lansdale's Hap and Leonard books is that they felt like men I knew and grew up with. Being from a small KS town, I didn't feel much connection to New York or L.A., but Atlanta didn't seem too far away, and the restaurants and bars seemed like they could be familiar. I really understood the small towns that Hump and Hardman would go to from time to time, which I imagine would be alien to some city folk. It was a nice change of pace.
So, I eventually tracked them all down, a few more added from a Gardner's Used Books in Tulsa with a few of Ralph's stand-alone books, one picked up on the road in a truck stop along with a few Bruno Rossi Sharpshooters, the rest on online. They were a secret to me then, a series of books that only I seemed to know about and dig. I read a good chunk of them while working as Pinkerton guard at an aircraft plant. Eventually Lee Goldberg found out he loved them too and got them reprinted and I wasn't alone, a lot of people found out how good Ralph was.
Atlanta Deathwatch is the one I started with, and it's been the longest since I read it, so I pulled it off the shelf. It was a good choice; I read it with ease and enjoyment rather quickly. I forgot how rough and tumble this first one is, some of the edges are smoother (just a bit) as the series goes on. Maybe it's Ralph or Hardman getting slightly older, maybe its Marcy, Hardman's complicated girlfriend. But they're a tour of the mean streets of 70s Atlanta with detours to the rich dudes as Hardman and Hump investigate the death of a co-ed who was tangled up with The Man, a black mobster. There're beatings, killings, shoot-outs and sieges, you know all the good stuff. It's a twisty mystery to boot. It's really just a helluva book.
So, I'll probably re-read them again, this time fully in order (I had to read what I had the first time) and since I remember only the feelings not the plot by this point, it'll be as close as new to me as I can get.
