Introducing Harry and Johnny

New to Harry and Johnny? You might want to read this intro before jumping into the two novels: Magnum Force: Davis or Magnum Force: Harry.

Harry and Johnny fandom (known as H/J) was an offshoot of Starsky and Hutch fandom powered by Ruth Kurz‘ love for David Soul and Clint Eastwood. Ruth, with Teri White, invented the H/J universe because she couldn’t bear to see David Soul’s character, John Davis, die at the end of the movie, Magnum Force. She figured the stunt man didn’t die, why did Johnny have to? Starting around 1980, Harry and Johnny grew from this small idea into a shared universe of over 40 zines that were still being published in 1991. She wrote much of the fiction and created a shared universe with canon, a timeline, and recruited other fans to join. You can find out more about H/J’s origins on Fanlore and Ruth’s philosophy about her fandom.

Eventually, many S&H writers joined in and expanded the franchise, which went on for years. Ruth was the engine, photocopying all the zines herself and distributing them for cost. The stories are impossibly sweet, with lots of sex, romance, and true love with all the hearts and flowers you can bear. There was no gen portion of the fandom. It was slash all the way.

The series starts with two short novels, one by Ruth alone and the other by Ruth and Teri White. You may remember that Teri was the one of the first SH zine writers to give permission for her classic zine stories to be posted to the Starsky and Hutch Archive. She and Ruth had long collaborated on projects with Ruth providing a lot of art for Teri’s SH stories and zines.

In the late 1990’s, I promised Ruth I’d get Harry and Johnny on the internet. She was very excited by the idea but knew she couldn’t do it herself.

At the time Ruth was writing and publishing H/J zines, Clint Eastwood was a famous actor and leading man. He was in the news frequently, and was featured in numerous movie magazines and other media. David Soul’s role in Magnum Force is credited with securing his role as Hutch of Starsky and Hutch, and between that popular role and his singing career, like Clint, he was featured everywhere. You didn’t have to explain to anyone who they were or about the roles they played. Magnum Force, and the other popular Dirty Harry movies, appeared on television frequently. And Dirty Harry Callahan, Clint Eastwood’s role, was familiar to most of the public.

But now, Magnum Force, the movie that started the whole thing for Ruth, is over 50 years old. Many modern media fans may not be familiar with this violent, male-dominated movie as H/J fans were when they were writing for Ruth’s zines.

This was an era before computers. The stories in Ruth’s zines were produced on manual typewriters and eventually the more modern Selectric typewriters. Ruth was an artist and loved using images in her stories, so she collected a vast number of photos of Clint Eastwood and David Soul from their various roles and magazine appearances. She also spent hours photographing the TV screen (using real film!) to make still-frames pictures of screenshots using VCR footage, to create what we called telepics, so she could build primitive “photomanips” that suited her story. She made these photo-manipulated images by literally cutting and pasting images together and drawing over them. And Ruth painstakingly drew Johnny’s glasses over David’s images by hand. She also drew original art to enhance her stories.

Ruth produced most of the H/J zines herself and photocopied them for anyone who wanted them at whatever it cost her to produce them.

To bring Ruth and Teri’s stories to life, we scoured the internet for the source images Ruth used for her illos and used the originals when we could for clarity since the photocopied images reproduced poorly and were often hard to make out. When we couldn’t find them, we used Ruth’s original photocopies. We hope the effort we put into this will help clarify what Ruth was seeing that prompted her to use these images. (And if you know where we can find any of the missing pictures, we’d love to have them!)

THE CHARACTERS

So to introduce the characters in the Harry/Johnny world, here’s a cheat sheet.

Johnny Davis is part of a group of four motorcycle cops. They include the actor Robert Urich who played Mike Grimes, Kip Nevin who played Red Astrachan, and Tim Matheson who played Phil Sweet.

John Davis’ Crew

Mike Grimes

Red Astrachan

Phil Sweet

Other characters you need to know include Fenton Perry who plays Harry Callahan’s partner, Early Smith.

And Hal Holbrook who plays Harry’s superior, Lt. Briggs.

There’s an original character, a doctor Harry knows, named Ben Klein. Ruth cast Paul Michael Glaser in this role. In later zines, she cast Elizabeth Glaser, Paul’s wife, as Ben’s wife, Miriam. This was years before the Glaser family had to cope with their daughter’s and Elizabeth’s HIV diagnosis. At the time Ruth was writing these stories, the Glasers were just a happily married couple with two lovely children who often appeared in magazines and newspaper articles.

You don’t have to watch Magnum Force to follow the first two novels of Harry and Johnny. The first novel, Magnum Force: Davis, covers Johnny’s origin story: his early life and the relevant events of the movie that helps set up Harry and Johnny’s future life together. The second novel, Magnum Force: Harry, deals in detail with the events of the movie and extrapolates Johnny’s resurrection from his near-death experience and his rehabilitation from the cold-blooded killer the movie portrays to the love-sick good guy Ruth wanted him to be. It is a prime example of what every fan who creates “ships” does with characters they love.

Readers should start with Magnum Force: Davis, and follow up with Magnum Force: Harry.

When Ruth was creating her world, she had no trouble getting many of her friends involved, like Teri White, but lots of other n fans got involved, like Rosemary C, Leslie Fish, and others.

For those of you who remember this fandom with fondness, we’re hoping you’ll enjoy seeing these stories available to a wider audience. There will be more H/J stories to come, including stories that crossover with Starsky and Hutch and deal with why Johnny Davis and Ken Hutchinson look like twins.

Flamingo and the Archive Team

The first novel in the series is Magnum Force: Davis.