(photograph of Maxence Lawrence, c. 2007)

"Johnny Kite and Friend" appeared in literary magazine The Fledgling Egg in the Winter Edition, 1989. It marked Harry Hardiner's first (if compromised) publication, his first collaboration with longtime editor Maxence Lawrence, the first appearance of Lawrence's detective character Lord Parker, and the first opportunity critics had to encounter a mind bent on bending yours. 

The story was billed as "an experiment in hybrid prose" by the editor of the magazine, Maxence Lawrence, but could more realistically be described as a hijacking. What we have of Hardiner in the story is the relationship between Johnny Kite and the always-unnamed Friend who would come to be fixtures in the future Rosewire series. The Lord Parker mystery is shoehorned in, fairly gracelessly, in huge chunks that obviously come from a different hand. The beautiful passage that closes the story, however, that describes Johnny Kite seeing his Friend "beneath different branches"—that is pure Hardiner, and sets up the relationship that drives the beginnings of Rosewire.

Contemporary write-ups of the story overwhelmingly pay attention to the Lord Parker mystery, heaping praise on the now-overdone twist (which, to give Lawrence credit, was at the time fairly novel), but one critic took time to appreciate the prose and the titular characters. This critic, Rex Patch, who wrote freelance out of his Village apartment, would go on to develop close ties to the author later in his career, performing three of the four interviews Hardiner gave during his active period.

In one of these interviews, Hardiner describes his first reactions when he saw the edited story in print. He did not seem upset, considering most of his story did make it into the magazine intact, and he even gave Lawrence some faint praise for how fluidly he fit the stories together. 

Nevertheless, the professional and personal relationship between the two men that followed is still fraught with rumors of sexual intimacy and psychological and physical abuse—Lawrence edited most of the first Rosewire books, but was "fired" (as the mystery writer put it) after turning in changes to the long-form play Election Day, only returning to offer his services on the eighth entry, Conquest of Algiers. The gap has been variously explained as a disagreement over style and intent, a romantic spat, and the fallout of some traumatic event between the two. 

In her fictionalized film Max Larry, Haunted Fairy, filmmaker Jazra Jaban portrays the relationship as mutually sadomasochistic. She conjectures that Maxence Lawrence, after one particularly violent encounter with Hardiner and in a fit of passion, put a hit out on his lover. When the contracted killer fails, Hardiner goes into hiding, staging the Murfreesboro disappearance to lower Lawrence's defenses—but our hidden Harry slowly and deliberately wears away at Lawrence's sanity and security from afar, borrowing on tropes from Gaslight, Rebecca, and Ten Little Indians, until finally Lawrence willingly crawls into the refrigerator in which he was found shortly after his own disappearance in 2008. 

While there are some serious theories regarding Maxence Lawrence's role in the vanishing of Harry Hardiner (and we'll touch on them more later), Jazra Jaban's is simply a fun bit of fan fiction... that nonetheless taps into the cloud surrounding the two writers in the 90s. Neither writer ever said much about the other in public (which is strange on the part of loquacious Lawrence, who once issued a press release to announce his detective's favorite brand of soap—Irish Spring), but those who knew them both have long harbored suspicions that some of the more violent exchanges between Johnny Kite and his Friend throughout the rest of the Rosewire books were thinly-veiled autobiographical details that Hardiner added, perhaps even at Lawrence's behest. 

Maxence Lawrence disappeared himself in early 2008 after teaching one semester at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. The writer and editor had fallen on financial straits, and accusations of plagiarism began to surface towards the end of 2007. While initially some rumors swirled across the internet that Lawrence had swept himself off the map to join Hardiner in some hidden bungalow, most serious attention was paid to his connections with organized crime in New England and Texas. When Lawrence's body was found in a busted out refrigerator deep in the Alabama woods, some thin attempts were made to tie his death to Hardiner, but most of those fit squarely in the fantasy range. Jaban's film, for instance, suggests that the refrigerator was actually out in the woods of the Hardiner property in Murfreesboro where the museum to his work today resides, and that Hardiner moved the appliance in the bed of a broken down farm truck, dumping it in rural Alabama, and driving back to Bookbright, Tennessee, where he lives peacefully with his family. A lovely if incredibly disturbing thought. But "creative" would be euphemistic. 

You'd be hard pressed to find any law enforcement officials or serious Hardiner scholars who think Lawrence's death was anything but retribution for enormous personal debt. Nonetheless, the editor's dark end throws one more wrinkle into the already warped and knotted life of Harry Hardiner.