“COKE! SEX! LIES!”
Those neon-lit provocations appear on the back of a sitcom star’s hoodie in “A Violent Masterpiece,” Jordan Harper’s latest Hollywood-flavored crime novel. It’s a tiny critique of hedonism as fashion, but it also sums up Harper’s primal-scream approach to storytelling.
“I’m just not convinced that this is the moment for subtle art,” Harper, 49, said over coffee in Eagle Rock, the Los Angeles neighborhood where he lives (and where he once encountered a corpse, an incident that influenced his writing). “The world we exist in — the world we’ve made — is all death drive, all the time. It’s hard to make the villains in your book as villainous or stupid or disgusting as the villains in real life. So writing at an extremely high volume was quite intentional.”
His 2023 book, “Everybody Knows,” was an indictment of Hollywood and its culture of moral shapeshifting — a perspective informed by firsthand experience: From 2010 to 2020, Harper primarily made his living as a TV writer, contributing to hits like “The Mentalist” on CBS and “Gotham” on Fox.
He still writes the occasional screenplay, but novels now take up most of his time.
“I want this one,” he said, “to be even louder, even more violent, even more over the top.”
First impressions of Harper do not prepare you for this. He comes across like a Criterion Collection archivist — calmly self possessed, a little nerdy, nobody’s idea of a rabble-rouser. Asked whether his amiable demeanor matched his interior state, he grinned and scratched his left elbow, revealing a tattoo of a scorpion with oversized claws.
“There’s a lot of anger inside me,” he said. “I just think it’s getting closer to the surface now.”
“A Violent Masterpiece,” which arrives on April 28, includes a few holdover characters from “Everybody Knows,” notably a pedophile producer of tween TV shows. But the new book is more about the corrosiveness of extreme wealth than Hollywood itself.
You meet drug-addled tech bros, marauding nepo babies, private security wet work teams and ultra-high-end prostitutes. There’s an underground concierge service that a character describes as a “Make-A-Wish Foundation for the terminally rich.” A climactic scene unfolds at a three-day, $50 million wedding.
Writing in The New York Times, Sarah Weinman said the book “reads like pure rage cooled into crystalline prose.”
Unlike a lot of noir writers, Harper offers glimmers of hope amid the rot. “A Violent Masterpiece,” for instance, has three likable protagonists: a cynical night crawler who livestreams from crime scenes; a terrified, self-medicating young woman who works for the concierge service; and a world weary bus-stop-bench lawyer.
Follow them through 372 voyeuristic pages and, just when the sleaze and corruption become too much (junkies urinating on cars! unethical cops in riot gear! tantric bondage prostate massage!), a few rays of sunlight arrive: By taking a stand, the three characters rediscover their humanity.
“I try really hard to include messages of personal redemption — there is something good inside us,” Harper said. “The world doesn’t have to be this way.” (The novel in some ways explores the Brechtian idea that people can change society, but only if they see social conditions as constructed rather than inevitable.)
He didn’t seem to like it when a reporter made an offhand comment about noir generally being a downer. “I personally think that experiencing darkness through fiction can be a lot of fun,” Harper said with a twinkle in his eye. “But maybe that’s just me.”
In other words, well-written pulp can be pleasurable even if the particulars are grim. “That’s my pretentious goal,” he said. “I’m very proud of the language that’s in this book. It thrums like a drumbeat — more like Anglo-Saxon war poetry as opposed to, like, a French type of poetry.”
A fascination with crime and brutality came early for Harper, who grew up in southern Missouri. He described his maternal grandfather, a prison guard, as “an old Ozarks badass” who slept with a gun under his pillow. A great granduncle, a police officer, was murdered alongside five other officers while trying to serve a warrant to a family of criminals holed up in a farm house.
Harper started his writing career as a music and film critic for alternative weeklies in St. Louis and New York. In the late 2000s, he moved to Los Angeles to try his luck as a screenwriter. Rather quickly, he landed a yearslong writing job on “The Mentalist,” a drama about a phony psychic who helps police solve murders. A spot in the “Gotham” writers room followed in 2015.
He felt fulfilled. “I was cynical about Hollywood when I arrived and then sort of dropped my guard for a while,” Harper said.
But the TV business extracted its price. CBS passed on his adaptation of James Ellroy’s “L.A Confidential,” which had been a dream project. An original idea for a series about a gang war in Tampa, Fla., also stalled. The setbacks contributed to a deep disillusionment.
“In Hollywood, a pitch to network and studio executives is not a demonstration that the story you’re pitching will be good,” Harper said. “It’s just a seduction. And who is really good at seducing people? Manipulators and sociopaths.”
He pulled his shoulder-length hair back with his thumbs and rested his hands behind his head, thinking. “Some of that is probably sour grapes, because I’m really bad at pitching,” he said.
Harper’s gloominess about Hollywood was heightened by the cultural moment: It was the beginning of the #MeToo era, when lurid and sometimes criminal behavior by Hollywood power players — long covered up — came gushing to the surface. “I had to put my rage somewhere,” he said.
It went into “Everybody Knows,” which follows a “black bag” public relations strategist named Mae. Working in the shadows and using unethical tactics, she kills or contains news that could destroy Hollywood figures. Harvey Weinstein sometimes relied on P.R. people like this to perpetuate his sex crimes. Similar practices have figured into the ongoing legal battle between the actress Blake Lively and the director Justin Baldoni.
Harper continues to work in the entertainment industry while writing about it (blowtorching it?) in his novels. He recently completed a screenplay for an independent film, and he’s working on a spec script that he described as an erotic thriller involving MK-ULTRA, the notorious mind control experiments the C.I.A. conducted between 1953 and 1973. He also does video commentary for Blu-ray releases of cult crime films, most recently “The Beast to Die,” a 1980 Japanese movie about a delusional journalist who goes on a killing spree.
But no more TV writing.
“TV used to be a place where writers were allowed to execute a vision — something that’s very important to Jordan,” said Sarah Carbiener, a writer who has worked with Harper on multiple shows. “He thinks deeply about what he wants to say. He’s very serious about craft. But there’s almost no room for that anymore. Now, as a TV writer, you’re micromanaged by companies whose whims change by the week. Creatively, that is almost unbearable.”
Asked to explain Harper — sweetheart in person, deranged on the page — Carbiener laughed. “That’s just him,” she said. “On one hand, he’s this kind, sort of cerebral guy who wants to have dinner at 5 p.m. On the other, he has the most violent taste. Like, when I read the scene with the drill in ‘A Violent Masterpiece,’ I had to get up and do a lap. It’s so gross!”
Harper’s first book, “She Rides Shotgun” (2017), about a girl and her father on the run from a gang called Aryan Steel, won an Edgar Award. (A film adaptation arrived on streaming platforms last year. Harper helped adapt the screenplay.)
The Times named “Everybody Knows” one of the best crime novels of 2023. It’s been his biggest seller, moving 34,000 print copies in the United States, according to Circana BookScan. A film is in the works, without Harper’s involvement.
He is currently at work on a crime novel called “The Wildest Things” that doesn’t have anything to do with Los Angeles. He didn’t want to say more about the project, except to say that he’s been writing it longhand from home. (He lives with Megan Mostyn-Brown, a playwright and TV writer whose first book, a horror novel called “The Need,” comes out in the fall.)
“I’m very slow, and I write incredibly bad first drafts, like very, very, very bad,” Harper said.
He did the hair thing again.
“I’m trying to speed up,” he added. “I have become really aware of the fact that I have a finite number of novels left. And every moment I give to another kind of project is taking away from the time I could be spending working on one. This is what I really care about — writing about power and the evil that we swim in, finding out how to live with yourself in this violent, gorgeous country of ours.”
Brooks Barnes is the chief Hollywood correspondent for The Times. He has reported on the entertainment industry for 25 years.
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