Nearly a decade ago, I fell in love with the twelve, out-of-print, Hardman crime novels by the late Ralph Dennis… an obsession that led me to acquire the copyright to his work, published and unpublished, and to co-found Brash Books, a publishing company to get his novels back into print.
His Hardman series, with numbered titles like Hardman #1: Atlanta Deathwatch, were all released in paperback in the mid-1970s by Popular Library, which packaged them as cheap, sleazy, men’s action-adventure novels. Most of the books in the genre were disposable hack work, slim volumes full of violence and sex with titles like The Butcher and The Penetrator, that were doomed to a short shelf life and oblivion.
But Ralph’s Hardman novels were something different, terrific crime novels with nuanced characters, strong plots, a remarkable sense of place, and something meaningful to say about race relations in the deep south.
Even so, the novels slipped into obscurity and Ralph never achieved in his lifetime the recognition or success that he deserved, despite publishing three standalone novels outside of the series.
At the time of his death in 1988, Ralph was a destitute alcoholic, sleeping on a cot in the backroom of George’s Deli in Atlanta, and working as a clerk at a used bookstore.
However, Ralph wasn’t entirely forgotten. His Hardman series remained beloved by crime writers, like novelist Joe R. Lansdale (Hap & Leonard) and screenwriter Shane Black (Lethal Weapon), who credited Ralph for inspiring their work and who passionately recommended the yellowed, hard-to-find paperbacks to their friends.
In fact, that’s how I discovered Ralph, because a friend made me read a Hardman novel. And I got hooked…bad.
When I set out to republish the Hardman novels, I recruited successful authors who were influenced by the series, as well as people who knew Ralph, to write essays for the new, reprint editions. Two of those essays in particular – one by his close friend Ben Jones, the actor and former U.S. Congressman from Georgia, and another by author Cynthia Williams, a former student of Ralph’s who declined his marriage proposal – gave me revealing insights into the author I’d been investing my time, money and passion into editing and publishing.
I went on to substantially edit and republish his three standalone novels (The War Heist (aka MacTaggart’s War), The Broken Fixer (aka Atlanta) and A Talent for Killing (aka Dead Man’s Game combined with the previously unpublished sequel) and to publish his unsold manuscripts The Spy in a Box and Dust in the Heart.
I’m pleased and proud to say that all of the books, the Hardman series and the standalones, received enthusiastic media reviews in the United States and abroad… the kind of literary respect and acclaim that Ralph Dennis craved, but was sadly denied, in his lifetime.
At that point, I’d read every novel, sold and unsold, that Ralph had written, with the exception of Wind Sprints, his long-lost, unpublished first novel. I’d noticed many recurring themes and plot situations in his books, particularly when it came to his portrayals of women, sex, and romantic relationships. After I read the essays by Ben and Cynthia, and traded lengthy emails with them, I was pretty sure that I knew how Ralph’s fiction mirrored the experiences and disappointments in his own life.
But I still wanted to learn more.
I knew from Ben and Cynthia, and from articles that I’d read, that Ralph was a student, and later an instructor, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill during the 1960s. So, in the summer of 2019, I went to Chapel Hill on a research trip to read through Ralph’s papers at the UNC library, to meet some of his old drinking buddies, and to see the places mentioned in his books.
I spent my days in the library’s archives. I read old issues of several Chapel Hill literary magazines that he’d contributed to, first as a writer and later as an editor, in the 1950s through the late 1960s. I read carbon copies of the acceptance and rejection letters that he sent to writers seeking publication in the magazines that he was editing. And I read the letters that Ralph wrote in the 1970s to his colleagues at UNC, after he left Chapel Hill and moved to Atlanta, that chronicled some his early and later life as a novelist.
In the evenings, I spent time with some of Ralph’s old friends, who shared with me what they knew about him and their insights into his life.
I learned that Ralph, while a student at UNC in the early 1960s, had an affair with a Chapel Hill woman who was still in a relationship with the man who’d fathered her daughter. She left that man for Ralph and they got married.
Ralph graduated from UNC and moved his family to New Haven so he could pursue a Master’s Degree in playwriting at Yale. Not long after arriving at Yale, he discovered that his wife was having an affair. History repeating. The marriage crumbled. He returned alone to Chapel Hill, where he ultimately received his Masters and stayed as a lecturer in the TV & film department.
I unearthed his marriage license and reached out to his ex-wife (who has since passed away) and to his step-daughter, both of whom kindly and honestly shared their memories of him with me.
I came away from that research, and those interviews, with a much deeper, richer, and nuanced understanding of Ralph Dennis as a man…and the many ways that his life influenced his writing.
But I also wanted others to be able make those same discoveries for themselves. So, in 2020, I collected several of his earliest short stories and poems and published them, along with Ben and Cynthia’s essays for my Hardman reprints, and some excerpts from articles about Ralph, into a slim collection called Tales of a Sad, Fat Wordman, the title borrowed from one of his stories.
The final story in the collection is Wind Sprints, which was originally published in the Chapel Hill literary magazine Lillabulero in 1967 and is essentially the first few pages, and a short synopsis, of the heavily autobiographical first novel Ralph was writing at the time.
He completed the novel after moving to Atlanta in 1970 and sent it off to his agent. The reaction wasn’t good, as Ralph told an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter in 1974: “As far as I know, the only people who liked it were my agent and me.”
He eventually gave up on the book and decided to write a mystery novel instead about Jim Hardman, a disgraced ex-cop turned unlicensed Atlanta private eye, scraping together a living with the help of best friend Hump Evans, a Black former NFL player sidelined by a career-ending injury.
Ralph sold Atlanta Deathwatch in 1973, two weeks after he finished writing it, finally becoming a published novelist at forty years old.
And Hardman was born, a series that he continued writing for eleven more novels.
Actually, it was twelve more.
While going through Ralph’s papers in Chapel Hill, I discovered some letters he’d written to his friends that revealed that his unpublished manuscript The Polish Wife, about a disbarred lawyer-turned-Atlanta lobbyist, was actually a rewrite of an unpublished, final Hardman novel. So, I used that evidence as justification to rewrite the book back into a Hardman novel, which I published in 2020 as All Kinds of Ugly to wide acclaim.
For example, Mystery Scene Magazine said that “All Kinds of Ugly is a beauty, a pure distillation of grade A, hardboiled pulp that dares to reach for more,” while Publishers Weekly noted that Ralph’s “strong prose and well-paced story-telling place him alongside the likes of George V. Higgins and Ross MacDonald.” Best of all, the Private Eye Writers of America chose the book as a Shamus Award finalist for Best Novel of the Year, their highest honor.
That was that, the perfect ending to my Ralph Dennis journey.
Only it wasn’t the end.
***
In late 2022, I got an email out of nowhere from a young woman I didn’t know in Atlanta. She was cleaning out her grandparents’ basement and stumbled upon a box that contained an undated, yellowed, cob-webbed, typewritten manuscript.
It was Wind Sprints by Ralph Dennis.
She google’d Ralph and discovered that I’d been republishing his work. So, she reached out to me and asked if I’d like to have the manuscript.
I told her I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it.
I’d never come across the names of her grandparents in my research on Ralph, so I asked her if she knew how they might have known him, or why he might have given them the manuscript of his novel for safe-keeping.
She didn’t.
All she knew was that her grandpa used to spend time at the Stein Club, an old Atlanta bar, and perhaps he’d befriended Ralph there.
That made perfect sense. Not only did Ralph hang out at the Stein Club, but the bar figured prominently in many of his books.
She went on to say that her late grandfather was an engineer by trade, but at one point in his life he had taught English at a small college south of Atlanta.
So perhaps, I thought, Ralph saw in him a kindred spirit. Perhaps Ralph gave the manuscript to him for his opinion of it.
What happened next? Who knows.
Maybe they never ran into each other again.
Or, maybe Ralph died before her grandfather could read it, or share his thoughts on the manuscript.
Whatever the reason was, all that mattered was that the manuscript ended up in the basement and wasn’t touched again for decades.
She sent me the book.
The cover page didn’t have a date, just the title, Ralph’s name, and his Atlanta address at the time.
I reached out to Ben Jones and asked if he remembered the address. He did. It was the place Ralph was living when he first moved to Atlanta. I looked at the prologue and I immediately recognized the first few paragraphs from the Wind Sprints short story.
If this wasn’t the final draft manuscript, it had to be pretty close to it.
***
After the research I’d done, I knew that Ralph had mined his own past for his fiction. But after reading Wind Sprints, his autobiographical first novel, it was clear that he’d been doing that from the very beginning. This was Ralph’s own story, tweaked and fictionalized.
It’s not surprising that publishers didn’t embrace the book. It’s not so much a novel as it is a collection of vignettes about a university instructor’s miserable love life, beginning with the dissolution of his marriage in 1966, on through his various other relationships with women, and ending with his doomed affair three years later with a younger woman.
The way women in Wind Sprints are depicted sexually and otherwise, not only by the first-person narrator, but by every other character, is unpleasant to read today and was probably even more so over fifty years ago. Consider that fair warning.
The narrator desperately wants to be loved by women, but yet he dislikes, distrusts and degrades them. Moreover, the narrator repeatedly abandons any woman who shows real feelings for him. It’s a contradiction that makes some sense, once you know about Ralph’s past.
The protagonist is obviously, and painfully, Ralph and comes across as a man incapable of loving anybody else because he doesn’t like himself much… but he lacks the courage, or even the interest, to do anything about it. About the only thing he does well, and consistently, is drink. He can down endless pitchers of beer and bottles of cognac while remaining completely sober.
That’s not to say there isn’t anything positive about Wind Sprints. There is much to appreciate — some beautiful, perceptive, and memorable prose and characters who are deftly sketched in just a line or two. It’s also a revealing time capsule of New Haven, Chapel Hill and New York in the mid-to-late 1960s…giving us an early glimpse Ralph’s remarkable skill at creating a sense of place.
And, most of all, you can almost hear what would become Ralph’s singular, utterly compelling, writing voice, which would find its perfect expression in the Hardman series, inspiring a generation of crime writers.
Although Ralph abandoned Wind Sprints sometime in the early 1970s, the book did see print before today… in a way. It will be immediately clear to anyone who has read all, or most, of Ralph’s books that he repeatedly returned to this manuscript over the years to strip it for parts, using various characters, scenes and even lines of description from it in his other novels.
It’s the essential, missing piece in understanding the man himself and his literary work. In that sense, it’s remarkably revealing.
It’s also haunting.
Because after reading Wind Sprints, it’s very easy to imagine the narrator’s fate matching Ralph’s tragic obituary, written eighteen years after this novel was finished.
It almost seems inevitable.
“Ralph Dennis of Atlanta, a writer of paperback mystery novels set in Atlanta, died of kidney failure Monday at Crawford Long Hospital. He was 56. At the time of his death, he was working as an Atlanta bookstore clerk…”
—The Atlanta Constitution, July 6, 1988
