The great mystery writer Dennis Lehane says that if James Ellroy and James M. Cain had a love child, it would be Jordan Harper. Which checks out, because Ellroy is one of Harper's literary heroes.
Harper's novel, "She Rides Shotgun," won the 2018 Edgar Award for Best First Novel by an American author. And we wouldn’t be surprised if Harper wins another Edgar for this follow-up, "Everybody Knows."
This compelling novel focuses on a publicist named Mae Pruett who works for one of Los Angeles’s most powerful crisis PR firms.
Harper writes so eloquently about the City of Angels that L.A. feels like one of the characters in the novel. But his vision of the city doesn't include many angels. Before he started writing fiction, Harper worked in television as a writer for the CBS drama series "The Mentalist."
"The Mentalist" was a drama series that aired on CBS from 2008 to 2015. The show focused on Patrick Jane, played by Simon Baker, who worked as a consultant for the California Bureau of Investigation, or the CBI. He used his supposed powers as a psychic medium to help CBI agents solve murders. Patrick Jane worked with law enforcement in order to track down the serial killer who had murdered his wife and daughter.
"I learned by helping produce over 140 episodes of the show, and writing 14 of them, a really strong sense of structure and storytelling that I would equate to like maybe if somebody learned how to do architectural drawings before becoming an artist," Harper told Wisconsin Public Radio's "BETA." "It's the most precise and mechanical form of storytelling you can do. And I think it's a really strong base to start off with."
Pivoting from writing for TV to writing novels
Harper wrote crime-based short stories before turning his attention to novels. One of his short stories was adapted into a script, which helped him get a job in television.
"I've always had fiction as a primary thing that I wanted to do," he explained. "But as much as I loved writing for 'The Mentalist,' it was such a relief to get to write in a world where I didn't have to worry about studio notes or network rules about what you can and can't do and to write something that was just more purely what I wanted to do as a storyteller."
And this is the world he was in while writing "Everybody Knows."
The protagonist in "Everybody Knows" is Pruett, a "black-bag" publicist.
"A 'black-bag publicist' is my term for a crisis manager," Harper said. "The way I explain it in the book is she's a publicist who doesn't get the good news out. She keeps the bad news in."
"And she is the person who is tasked with cleaning up the messes for the rich, powerful and famous. Anytime you read any kind of news about a powerful person who's been accused of something terrible, you're going to find a crisis manager in there somewhere. Whether or not their name gets mentioned in the story, they're there," he added.
Location, location, location
The opening chapter of "Everybody Knows" takes place at the famous Chateau Marmont Hotel in L.A., which is where John Belushi passed. Harper actually wrote this chapter in one of the hotel's bungalows.
"I'm a big believer in vibes. I'm a big believer in getting the atmosphere right, not just the sights and sounds, but the feeling of something and trying to transmit that," Harper explained.
He credits his appreciation for vibes to Megan Abbott.
"She paints a dream that is so vivid with her word choice in the way that she lives so deeply in the characters," Harper said. "And you feel what they feel and you see not the concrete world that exists, but the world that they see. And you notice what they notice. And I just think it's really beautiful."
He said that he can't of a think better way of doing that than going to a place he's writing about, sitting there and living in it.
"I did check into the Chateau Marmont for a couple of days to start the book. But I also wrote in a lot of other places. The beauty of a laptop is you can get in your car and you can drive to Koreatown. You know, you can drive out to the beach and take a look. You can see what's there. And a big part of this was trying to capture as much of Los Angeles in a book as I could."