Crime & The City of Angels: An Interview with Jordan Harper
A VIOLENT MASTERPIECE begins with two epigraphs, one from Bertolt Brecht and another from the Brothers Grimm. Can you talk about the choice to include these and how they frame the reader’s experience?
The Brother’s Grimm quote was something I’d been saving for this book before I’d even started working on it. It just resonated with what I’m trying to illustrate with my LA novels, and my core argument that the current system is bad not just for oppressed people, but for everyone. Over-satiation leads to numbness. And because I had planned the central crime of this book while writing Everybody Knows, I knew as soon as I read this that I had to use it to lead this book.
The Brecht quote approaches the other side of my LA stories, the people I’m most interested in (and feel the most kinship with): the people who are not driven by avarice or cruelty but have simply found themselves captured by a system that requires evil of them in order to stay afloat. The strange feeling of watching the world burn and maybe also burning too, and not feeling in control but feeling responsible at the same time. I’m not interested in centering the truly evil, and I leave the centering of those who aren’t complicit to others. My characters tend to be the people in the middle, who might have been capable of being good if they had ever been asked to be in a meaningful way. But instead, they live in the belly of the beast and they learn to make a home in its guts.
You currently live in Los Angeles, which is the same setting for the book. How does the city act as its own force in the novel? How has living in L.A. shaped your voice as a writer?
Much of what Jake Deal says in Chapter One comes from my own view of this city: that it is America, the most American place for good or ill. A place where the contradictions of this country founded on hope and blood are most extreme. A place of dreams and violence. A place that could not exist without its immigrants, without the movies, without guns, without cars. You know, AMERICA.
My LA prose is my pulpiest prose. It is not a subtle place, and now is not the time for subtle art. You need hard consonants and fluid images to capture this place.
A VIOLENT MASTERPIECE? Tell us more about the inspiration for your title.
The title came from a terrific 70s trade paperback edition of Red Harvest that I own. A lurid red cover, a man standing over a woman’s dead body, and the words Dashiell Hammet’s Violent Masterpiece RED HARVEST. I saw the cover and thought to myself, I wish I could put that on the cover of one of my books. And then realized that I could.
I did find a way to work it into the book, coming out of the mouth of a man who trains cops how to kill. He says “America is a violent masterpiece.” He means it as a compliment. I don’t.
The narrative weaves together art, crime, and obsession. What draws you to explore the intersections between creative expression and violence?
My life’s work is making art about violence. I didn’t set out for that to be the case, but that’s is what it is.
The philosopher Simone Weil said in her essay “The Illiad, or The Poem of Force” that force (or violence) is “that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him.” She also says that force acts in both directions. That when you use force against another human being, turning them into a thing, you lose some of your own humanity yourself. An equal and opposite reaction. Art gives us an opportunity to do the opposite. To find the beauty and truth and humanity around us and thereby to increase our own share of humanity. So there’s something essential, in a dialectic sort of way, in art that explores its opposite.
Was there a particular real-world event, artwork, or artist that inspired elements of A VIOLENT MASTERPIECE?
Anyone who has read EVERYBODY KNOWS and A VIOLENT MASTERPIECE can see that I draw heavily from modern news, events, stories and myths. The connection between Jeffery Epstein and my work is pretty obvious. The part of that story that I really fictionalize in this book, Epstein’s death, is something I thought might have passed from public interest by the time this book was published (I had already planned this story while writing EVERYBODY KNOWS). By the time Trump retook office and the Epstein files came back into view, this novel was largely completed. But of course Epstein stands for something much deeper in the American psyche, and therefore will stay in the public’s mind for a long time. Like the JFK assassination, Epstein and his crimes and his death are both factual and mythic representations of the evil that swims underneath the waves of this ocean we find ourselves floating in. So while many of the events in the book are based on true moments, they are also echoes of the eternal and often unspoken truth about the world.
Los Angeles, right now. America with its back up against the wall. This Frankenstein’s monster of crimes and lurid dreams sewn together into something like a city.
A city ready to explode: A Hollywood pedophile is arrested, and is ready to tear down the city to get his freedom. A young woman goes missing—and men in black rubber gloves who look like cops clean out her apartment in the middle of the night. And the serial killer known as the LA Ripper is on the loose, leaving tragic/graphic/brutal crime scenes in his wake. Three people trying to keep their heads above the dirty water will find themselves coming together to unite these strands into one enormous, unspeakable crime …
Jake Deal is a gonzo live-streaming nightcrawler, beaming the city’s chaos straight to his audience of blood-hungry subscribers, giving them the view from the top of the mushroom cloud—until a job he can’t refuse drags him back into his old life of Hollywood glamour, drugs, sex and sleaze. Armed with cameras and hidden mics, he’ll infiltrate private clubs, gather high-class dirt—and stumble onto a conspiracy woven into the center of LA’s most powerful men, who call themselves “The Kids in the Candy Store.”
Doug Gibson is a street lawyer, who fights for his clients against the army of cops, prosecutors and judges—he is the knife they bring to the gunfight. But when he’s hired by a Hollywood pedophile ready to sell out his friends for a chance for freedom, he’ll take on a fight bigger than he could have imagined. And when his client “commits suicide” in prison, Gibson will have to stop being a weapon—and become a warrior.
Kara Delgado works for an underground private concierge company—a make-a-wish foundation for the terminally rich. She scores drugs, makes connections, and plans multi-million dollar sex parties.She has learned the secret truth of this world: there are no rules, only prices. Her best friend Phoebe has gone missing, and Kara’s the only person who knows that Phoebe’s place was wiped clean of evidence by men in black rubber gloves. But when she begins to unravel the mystery of what happened to Phoebe, and its connection to the killer known as the LA Ripper, it will drag her into the dark heart of the city.
As Jake, Doug and Kara all investigate these crimes, they’ll encounter ketamine-addled sitcom stars, bloody riots, homeless gangsters, a killer cop on death row, secret vaults in Beverly Hills, tech-bro orgies, medical cannibals, true crime junkies, private security wet-work teams, reality shows, street takeovers, car chases, coyotes, a sadistic Tarzan, and a three day, fifty million dollar wedding, before everything is revealed and they must each make their choice about how to fight back in this violent world before the bloody, blazing conclusion.