A Hardman Is Good to Find

Beginning next month, publisher Brash Books plans to reissue all 12 of Ralph Dennis’ crime novels starring Jim Hardman, an Atlanta, Georgia, cop who becomes an unlicensed private eye after being improperly accused of corruption and stripped of his badge. As author and Brash co-publisher Lee Goldberg told me in September, the first four Hardman yarns—beginning with 1974’s Atlanta Deathwatch—will reach bookstores by the end of this year, with the remainder appearing over the course of 2019. All of Brash’s Hardman editions will appear with stylistically uniform covers, as shown above.

Goldberg writes that Ralph Dennis (1931-1988) “isn’t a household name … I believe that he should be. He is widely considered among crime writers as a master of the genre, denied the recognition he deserved because his series of twelve Hardman books, which are beloved and highly sought-after collectables now, were poorly packaged in the 1970s by Popular Library as cheap men’s action-adventure paperbacks with numbered titles.”

Being curious about those “cheesy covers” that Goldberg says “present[ed] the series like hack work, dooming the novels to a short shelf-life and obscurity,” I went looking online for the original Hardman paperbacks, which rolled out between 1974 and 1977. Top-quality images weren’t always easy to locate, but I finally settled on the dozen displayed below.

While I agree that Popular Library’s presentation of Dennis’ novels suggested they were fit for the boobs-and-bullets crowd only, rather than for more discerning crime-fiction readers, at least the first seven of the 12 boasted cover illustrations by Ken Barr (1933-2016), a Scottish artist who worked for DC and Marvel comics, but is perhaps best remembered for the paintings he created for science-fiction and fantasy novels. (You can see examples of Barr’s artistry here, here, and here.) I can’t tell whether the final five entries in Popular Library’s Hardman line carry Barr’s work as well, for there’s no obvious signature on those covers, as there is on the first seven. But at least to my eye, they appear stylistically quite different.

What do you think of the new editions versus the old ones?

READ MORE: “The Literary Life of Ralph Dennis,” by Richard A. Moore (Brash Books); “Me, Ralph Dennis and Hardman #8: The Deadly Cotton Heart” (Bloody, Spicy, Books).

Chew on This

I don’t want to spend much more time on the subject of shark covers, but after Saturday’s post in The Rap Sheet about Roger Kastel and his illustration for the 1975 paperback release of Jaws, I came across the hardly less hair-raising book front featured below and on the left.

Killer Sharks: The Real Story, by Brad Matthews, was published in 1976 by Manor Books. As one customer review on Amazon says, it “purports to be the story of a survivor of the U.S.S. Indianapolis … who mounts a one-man crusade to kill a thousand sharks in his lifetime as revenge for the carnage following the sinking of the Indianapolis.”

Indeed, the U.S. Navy heavy cruiser Indianapolis was sunk in the South Pacific in July 1945, during World War II, following a torpedo assault by a Japanese submarine. Some 300 of the ship’s 1,196 crewmen went down with the vessel, while the rest were cast adrift on the ocean, dependent on whatever supplies they could collect from among the debris. More than three days passed before rescuers reached the site, and by then only 321 of the sailors remained alive; three more died soon after. Most of the deceased had succumbed to hypothermia, starvation, and dementia, but others were reportedly attacked by oceanic whitetip sharks or tiger sharks.

A boilerplate description of Killer Sharks’ story reads:

During WWII, Brad Matthews watched in horror as hundreds of his comrades on the torpedoed Indianapolis were torn to shreds by ravenous killer sharks. From then on, the young oceanographer vowed to devote his life to the study of nature's most perfect killing machine. His adventures span three decades of bloody encounters with the gaping jaws of death. He has witnessed sharks gorging themselves on human flesh, heard the cries of terrified victims he could not help, and barely escaped the savage attack of a great white. This is the real story--a saga written in the blood of countless men and women.

That all sounds good … except that “Brad Matthews” was a pseudonym of American thriller novelist Nelson DeMille, who was born in August 1943. At the time of the Indianapolis disaster, he’d have been approaching his second birthday. The story goes that DeMille was asked by his then publisher to compose a book capable of cashing in on the Jaws frenzy, and Killer Sharks was the result.

Despite the dubious veracity of its contents, the cover of Killer Sharks remains a grabber. Its painting is credited to Ken Barr, who was born in Scotland in 1933 and has also created movie posters and done a great deal of work for comic-book publishers. A small selection of Barr’s other book fronts can be enjoyed here.