Hack Bohannon
Created by Joseph Hansen (pseudos
include Rose Brock & James Colton; 1923-2004)
Tall, lean, with a "shock of Indian-black hair," usually clad in jeans, cowboy boots and a plaid shirt, HACK BOHANNON looks more like a cowboy than a private detective. And, if he had his druthers, that's probably the way he'd prefer to live his life, riding horses and working his boarding stable and ranch in Rodd Canyon (Ho-ho! Good one, Joe) out near Madrone, on California's rugged central coast. Truth to tell, Hack loves animals, especially horses. It's people he's not sure of.
However, after fourteen years in the sheriff's department, people seem to just naturally come to him when they need help. So he keeps his PI license up to date--just in case. Several years ago, his wife, Linda, was brutally attacked and raped and has been in a coma in a mental institution ever since. Hack left the sheriff's department, feeling the sheriff himself was partly to blame for what happened.
Now he works his ranch, with the aid of Stubbs, a cranky old cuss of an ex-rodeo rider, who works as Hack's cook and all-round handyman, and Rivera, a slender, dark youth studying for the priesthood, who works part-time. It's a man's man's world, all right, where men are men, and women tend to bring trouble. A sub-theme right out of Hemingway--men without women.
Hack does a bit of PI work now and then, when people come to him, but he wishes they would leave him alone. Still, he's no man's fool, and, reluctant or not, he goes about his business in a very efficient, yet dry and detached fashion that would make Gary Cooper proud. Even his increasing sense of mortality, and his growing dissillusionment with himself and the world he lives in, can't diminish that.
The Hack Bohannon short stories appeared more or less regularly for several years in the pages of Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen, where Hansen's work definitely stands out. Of course, Hansen is best known for creating homosexual freelance insurance investigatort Dave Brandstetter, not just one of the most important private eye series, for introducing a realistic gay investigator into the world of detective fiction, but also, and this is usually overlooked, simply one of the best. Under the name of Rose Brockman, Hansen also wrote romantic suspense novels.
SHORT STORIES
COLLECTIONS
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.