Big, loud, and nasty

Behind the scenes with Jordan Harper

Steph Cha & Jordan Harper at Stories Books & Cafe

Last September I went to Minneapolis to attend Bouchercon, the annual conference for crime and mystery writers. There was a lot of buzz about Jordan Harper’s new novel Everybody Knows. Intrigued, I pitched a book review to a few places when I got home, but didn’t get any bites, which happens. I was traveling and the holidays were coming and it just seemed like one of those things that wasn’t meant to be.

After Bouchercon, I saw a number of crime writers I’d met at the conference gushing about Everybody Knows on Twitter. Some of the praise was so over-the-top that the aging Gen X-er in me became suspicious. Praise is one thing, but this was starting to feel like hype. Perhaps it was a good thing I wasn’t reviewing the book…

Then the week before Christmas I got an email from my editor at the Los Angeles Times. Would I be interested in interviewing Jordan and could I write a profile in a couple of days?

Sure, I said. Why not?

The publisher sent off a copy of the book. In the meantime, I started reading a PDF on my phone. It’s not the ideal way to read a book, but from the opening scene I was hooked. I tore through the novel in two days. HFS, I thought, now I understand the hype. Everybody Knows isn’t just good: it’s electrifying.

On the day before Christmas Eve I drove up to Los Angeles, dropped Nuvia off at our hotel in the City of Downey, and made the trek up to West Hollywood. The photographer for the Los Angeles Times wanted to shoot Harper in front of the Whisky, so I suggested we meet at Dialog Café on the corner of Sunset and Holloway Drive.

I’ve been to Dialog a handful of times, usually before going to readings at Book Soup, which is down the street. Dialog is the kind of place where you are guaranteed to see writers working on their screenplays or hear industry people talking about their film and television deals. I worried that Jordan, who works in television, would think meeting at Dialog was corny (because it is).

Sunset Boulevard across from Dialog Cafe

When you research a subject for an interview, you learn all these things about them before you meet them. For instance, I knew Jordan by reputation as the author of She Rides Shotgun, an ultra-violent neo-noir about a father-daughter duo that takes on a gang of murderous Nazi skinheads. I also knew from an excellent interview Jordan did with Eli Cranor for Crimereads, that he prefers cold beverages to hot.

It’s odd to sit down with someone and know that level of detail about a person who is for all intents and purposes is a stranger. Was Jordan going to be like one of the hardboiled characters from his novels? Or was he going to ridicule me for my taste in coffee shops?

Thankfully, neither. I found Jordan to be affable and laid back. He certainly didn’t come across as someone with a buzzy new book that is already being hailed as one of the best crime novels of the year.  

Interviewing writers is different than interviewing musicians. Musicians, especially punk musicians, tend not to overthink what they do. Some don’t think about it much at all because playing music is something they do and the doing doesn’t require a lot of thought. Writers, on the other hand, overthink everything. It’s what we do.

Jordan, I was pleased to discover, enjoys talking about his writing process and because I wasn’t able to include these details in the profile, which if you haven’t already read you may want to do so now, I thought I’d include some of them here in Message from the Underworld.

Everybody Knows is a lurid, neon-lit descent into LA’s underworld, but it’s also a classic crime story. I wanted to know if Jordan considered himself a pulp writer.

“Yeah, absolutely, I absolutely adhere to sort of that maxim of really deep, strong characters and stories and themes that are told in the most exciting way you can tell them. I will never understand why anybody would do anything differently at the end of the day. Sometimes I refer to the Stan Lee style of storytelling, which is to take these human emotions and wrap them in a candy-coated shell. Because there's a different kind of writer who says, “Oh, I get so angry sometimes I don't know who I am so I'm going to write a novel about a guy in Brooklyn who wants to be a writer but he gets so angry, sometimes he doesn't know who he is.” And Stan Lee's solution to that is, “Oh, I get so angry sometimes I don't know who I am. I'm going to write a story about a nuclear physicist who gets bombarded by gamma rays and becomes the Incredible Hulk.” And to me, crime fiction, superheroes, supernatural fiction, all of those so-called genre fictions, use that tool to worm into people's brains in a much more effective way than something that again, strives for mere realism. To me, realism is a tool not a goal.”

At the book launch for Everybody Knows with Steph Cha at Stories Books & Café last night, Jordan repeated this last nugget. He spoke at length about LA’s multitudes and how it’s the most American of cities with its infatuation with money, sex, fame, and real estate. This really resonated with me because it’s such a mutable place. Everything is constantly changing, which is true of all places, but LA is always being developed, made-over, enhanced but not necessarily improved. It's always erasing its past but completely beholden to it—or at least to its mystique. These conditions are ripe for mythmaking on an epic scale.

For Jordan, this means mapping out the territory before he dives into it. Some writers outline their novels before they write them, others make things up as they go. (If you’ve ever been to a writers conference, you know this question comes up all the time.) For Jordan, his practice of plotting the story first is a product of his TV training:

“If you do the hard work of planning out the entire crime that has occurred before you start writing a book, you can start to reveal. You don't have to do the skeleton in the order that a skeleton occurs. You can start with a finger bone. What does that connect it to? Oh, here's a rib bone. Well, those two things can't connect but you can put the skeleton together piecemeal because you know where it's going.”

Jordan isn’t advocating for a formulaic, paint-by-numbers approach where different scenarios are plugged into the same narrative engine. Far from it. I suspect the reason why Jordan is so rigorous in his plotting so that he can reach someplace that is interesting and new in his writing. Plotting in advance removes barriers in his brain and lets him get to the good stuff.

“I'm a big believer in thinking about the unconscious and the belief that the unconscious fuels a lot of what we do as writers. Our job is to let that come out and then shape it as much as you can so that it is efficiently absorbed by the reader--but not trying to shape it or achieve any other goal other than inducing that dream state… That is very much my goal.”

Everybody Knows reflects this arresting combination of elements. It’s tightly plotted but propulsive and violent and strange. His view of LA reflects his own interests and obsessions, but he’s a seasoned guide.

“I think there's a certain narcissism involved in not thinking you need to entertain your audience. I also think there's a mistake that people always equate something that is on the surface intelligent as being more intelligently created than something that isn't. That actually doesn't follow. Something can be big and loud and angry and nasty and sweaty and dirty and made with more intelligence and more care than something that is oh-so polished, and be oh-so boring.”

Jordan Harper & Nolan Knight

Jordan will be doing another event for Everybody Knows in LA at Vroman’s Books in Pasadena with S.A. Cosby. Subscribe to Jordan’s newsletter, which includes meditations on writing, Welcome to the Hammer Party. The next Bouchercon will be held in San Diego and registration is open now.