Ralph Dennis isn’t a household name… but he should be. He is widely considered among crime writers as a master of the genre, denied the recognition he deserved because his twelve Hardman books, which are beloved and highly sought-after collectables now, were poorly packaged in the 1970s by Popular Library as a cheap men’s action-adventure paperbacks with numbered titles.
Even so, some top critics saw past the cheesy covers and noticed that he was producing work as good as John D. MacDonald, Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes, Dashiell Hammett, and Ross MacDonald.
The New York Times praised the Hardman novels for “expert writing, plotting, and an unusual degree of sensitivity. Dennis has mastered the genre and supplied top entertainment.” The Philadelphia Daily News proclaimed Hardman“the best series around, but they’ve got such terrible covers…”
Unfortunately, Popular Library didn’t take the hint and continued to present the series like hack work, dooming the novels to a short shelf-life and obscurity…except among generations of crime writers, like novelist Joe R. Lansdale (the Hap & Leonard series) and screenwriter Shane Black (the Lethal Weapon movies), who’ve kept Dennis’ legacy alive through word-of-mouth and by acknowledging his influence on their stellar work.
Ralph Dennis wrote three other novels that were published outside of the Hardman series but he wasn’t able to reach the wide audience, or gain the critical acclaim, that he deserved during his lifetime.
He was born in 1931 in Sumter, South Carolina, and received a masters degree from University of North Carolina, where he later taught film and television writing after serving a stint in the Navy. At the time of his death in 1988, he was working at a bookstore in Atlanta and had a file cabinet full of unpublished novels.
Brash Books has released the entire Hardman series, his three other published novels, and his long-lost manuscripts.
The long-lost, never-before-published, autobiographical first novel by Ralph Dennis, author of the legendary Hardman series.
In the late 1960s, a balding, over-weight, heavy-drinking writer struggles to find his place in the literary/academic worlds of Yale and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, while desperately trying to figure out why all of his relationships with women, romantically and otherwise, seem doomed from the start.
The book includes introductions by #1 New York Times bestselling author Lee Goldberg and by Ralph's close friend Ben Jones, the Dukes of Hazzard actor and former U.S. Congressman from Georgia.
The late Ralph Dennis is beloved among crime fiction writers and readers for his Hardman series of detective novels from the 1970s. But little is known about the man himself. This collection of some of Ralph’s early short stories and poetry, framed with excerpts from articles about him and by essays from authors who knew him well, offers an emotional, poignant and ultimately revealing look at how he saw himself… and how his past profoundly shaped his enduring creative work.
Two gritty, fast-moving novels set in the world of basketball by legendary crime writer Ralph Dennis.
