Down Among the Jocks: 5 (Hardman) - Softcover

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 Hardmanbooks, 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 -Atlanta, Deadman's Game and MacTaggart's War- 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 At the time of his death in 1988, he was working at a bookstore in Atlanta and had a file cabinet full of unpublished novels.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 will be releasing the entire Hardman series, his three other published novels, and his long-lost manuscripts.