Stop reading this article and go read a Jordan Harper book right now

Seriously, you’ll have such a great time. Rich, violent prose, tightly strung action, movie script-like speed and efficiency, from raw short stories to refined novels with non-stop hold-onto-your-seat vibes. Grimy crimes and even uglier souls, with a “holy expletive”-level sentence every paragraph or two—he’d, of course, never shy away from the profanity.

I heard him referred to as “your favorite crime writer’s favorite crime writer,” which is as huge and painful an accolade as you can get. He primarily cut his trade in screenwriting on series like The Mentalist, with a bunch of short stories here and there and everywhere setting up the foundation for his novels.

Despite the genre differences, his television background clearly shines through his literary work—and the short stories already show a careful buildout of the unique world of raw and violent criminals his characters inhabit.

If you’ve seen a movie script before, you know that it’s a workmanlike product, an instruction manual for the director, with more white on the pages than ink. You have few words to work with and no time to mess around. Zero fat on the bones. Somehow, some way, he manages to keep the same efficiency and jolt in his proper prose, no matter the length of the story he is working with at the time.

Which ties us neatly into his debut novel, a true showstopper revenge story featuring a father-daughter duo on the run.

Also published as A Lesson in Violence (which I consider the strictly inferior title), perhaps the baseline of the story wouldn’t make your heart flutter. Nate, a convict fresh out of prison, snatches his estranged daughter, Polly, from her school in a stolen car because bad people are after them both. We know, and soon Polly will also learn that her mother and surrogate father have already been murdered by the gang that put out the “green light” to take out everyone associated with Nate.

But we already know they both have gunfighter eyes, Polly is a shy girl still carrying a teddy bear at eleven, with too high an IQ count to make do in a regular school. Watch the electricity crackle through every scene, feel it on your skin, and see the two change as Nate follows the voice of his brother’s ghost in his head, trying to atone and find safety. And that’s before the cross-country zigzagging begins, with cops corrupt and courageous alike following in their wake.

“Sirens went abooga in Scubby’s brain as A-Rod undid the chain and swung the door open for the little girl.

The world went action movie.

The girl stepped aside and out of nowhere came this badass. Jailhouse swole, jailhouse tats, same crazy blue eyes as the girl. He had a sawed-off in his hands.”

Somehow, I completely missed the fact that the obvious slam-dunk of a movie adaptation has finally been made, with Harper working on the screenplay alongside Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski—frequent collaborators of David Bruckner—with some pretty good reviews. I’ll have to report back on the adaptation, but at least I can give you a trailer to show off the vibes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9OkHjOnQPg They went with the correct title. (“Simply, the phrase ‘riding shotgun’ isn’t well-known in the UK, making the title nonsense,” Harper explains the choice.)

To me, Nate will always have the gruff voice of David Marantz from the audiobook, and the movie version of the character seems to have had its hardest edges sanded off, but these seem defensible adjustments all in all.

I want to quickly highlight Harper’s sophomore work, as The Last King of California seems to be the forgotten child of the bunch. Strangely, it only got a UK release in 2022, with US readers having to wait three years for the Mulholland Books edition. It’s the closest Harper’s zoomed in to the trailer-parks-and-crackheads world, in a story set alongside She Rides Shotgun – Polly and Nate never actually appear, but their exploits are referenced multiple times. The visceral, gut-punching prose is still there, but the characters are drifters in more ways than one, making it a little less memorable for me.

So, time to talk about the absolute showstopper. If downtrodden gang people aren’t your cup of tea, how about the Hollywood highlife and the black-bag PR people looking to keep shady deals away from the limelight?

“Los Angeles burns.

Some sicko is torching the homeless camps. Tonight they hit a tent city in Los Feliz near the 5. The fire spread to Griffith Park. The smoke makes the sunset unbelievable. The particles in the air slash the light, shift it red. They make the sky a neon wound.”

Just as tightly wound as She Rides Shotgun, this book shifts back and forth between “black-bag publicist” Mae and ex-bouncer turned studio bag-man Chris as they try to navigate a Hollywood crisis that spills out from a murder and gets sick and sinister fast. Brutal, bad, unputdownable. Takes your breath away. To me, it barely didn’t reach the heights of Harper’s debut novel, but that had more to do with my preference for the father-daughter dynamic than any fault of this volume, which has got all the plaudits it deserved.

I’ve left his short story collection as a little bonus for the end. It seems Harper started out with genre magazines first and collated a set of successful short stories years before She Rides Shotgun came to be, and tracing the evolution of some of the characters, settings, and storylines that echo across his later work is a ton of fun. Though a smidgen less refined, these are all excellent stories, too, perhaps even more openly violent than the novels that followed, with quick, raw flashes of sweat and blood forming exclamation marks at the end of each story as people in the underworld are pushed beyond their limits.

I won’t turn this article into comparative literary analysis, but seeing the contours of Everybody Knows in one of these short stories and seeing how a specific half-page passage of love—already so economical, so tight—made it into a novel version eight or more years later is electrifying.

“Number Five is Mister Suit, Mister Push the Button, Mister Brains All over the Fucking Floor. I told him in and out in two minutes and no one gets hurt.

I told him. Maybe he was a little hard of hearing. Don’t push the button. He pushed the button. So I swabbed out his fucking earwax with a Q-Tip of the gods. If he’d listened, there wouldn’t be the five cop cars outside and I wouldn’t be paying eenie-meeny-miney-hostage.”

Yeah. Damn. If you made it this far, you clearly weren’t paying attention to the title—now’s the time to track down a book from your favorite crime writer’s favorite crime writer.

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