Hardman

by David Karp

This rare and vintage book is a perfect addition to any bibliophile's collection

Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1953

About the author

David Karp was an American novelist and television writer. He also used the pseudonyms Wallace Ware and Adam Singer.

Reviews

[Bill Wallace · Rating 3 out of 5]

After reading David Karp's One, I'm looking for his other books and this is the first one I found. I wish I could say it was another lost masterpiece, but it isn't. Obviously written before the writer had established his style, the book feels like an amalgam of several ideas -- a clever satire about lurid publishing, censorship in the early 50s, and changing ideals of manliness, a Jim Thompson-like story of a brutal antihero, and a perverse love story. The pieces never really came together for me, partly because the viewpoint veers wildly from omniscient to individual, so we never really get that sense of being in the head of the monster, an effect Thompson achieved so well. I'm certainly not giving up on the author though. There's enough strangeness in this book and occasional passages of great writing to keep me on the trail of his other works.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

This noir is more of a character study than a crime story. The title character, Jack Hardman, is an infamous, best-selling, hard-boiled writer whose demon is sadism. The problem with this book, as a character study, is that there is never that much character to study. Readers are not meant to like Hardman. Perhaps they are meant to be intrigued or fascinated. But his character is too one-dimensional for that. He enters the book a sadistic punk, he leaves the book a sadistic punk, and there is nothing much interesting about him in between. Oddly, it is the characters who surround Hardman--his agent, his editor, his woman, his hangers-on, his reading public--who give this book its interest.