Pulp Poem of the Week

She pulled off her brassiere and

held it aloft. There were cheers,

and she turned from one side

to the other triumphantly.

Her breasts looked enormously

distorted in the moonlight,

their hard, clean crowns gleaming

and the shadows they cast hanging down

like ugly sinister forebodings

of the ruin age would bring

to their strength, their thrust.

David Karp

Hardman

1953

Book Review: David Karp, Hardman (1953)

Hardman is more of a character study than a crime story, but there is never that much character to study. The title character, Jack Hardman, is an infamous, best-selling, hard-boiled writer whose demon is sadism. 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. Grade: C-