Conversations with the Bookless: Jordan Harper

A couple of years ago Jeff Vandermeer ran a series of blog posts called Conversations With the Bookless. The Conversations with the Bookless series was designed to showcase those writers who are up and coming, who don’t yet have a collection or a novel out, who are making their names known writing short stories. With Jeff’s blessing I will be continuing the series here at BSC over the next couple of weeks, but with a focus mostly on mystery/crime fiction.

From the first generation successes of Anthony Neil Smith, Victor Gischler and Sean Doolittle that came out of Plots With Guns to the later success of zine author/founders Sandra Ruttan and Russel McLean to a lot of others the online zines have, over the years, proved to be a fairly successful and fertile ground for emerging talents to launch a career, highlight their own work and showcase the work of others.

These writers are the next generation and it will be interesting in the next couple of years to see which of them will make it and which will stand out.

Nothing else to say really except to end with a quote from the original series.

The fact is, if you don’t have a book out, it’s harder to get attention and it’s harder for reader attention to crystallize around you. I hope these interviews introduce readers to some of the great talent that, in the coming years, will be amazingly and bountifully bookful. — Jeff Vandermeer

    
Jordan Harper has been putting out stories for a few years now and has been writing for even longer. As a result his work has a real nice, polished feel to it. He understands pace, action and plot and his stories move, excite and entertain.

Of Harper’s story Playing Dead, Dave Zeltserman said the following:

This is as good a piece of dark urban pulp as I’ve across in years.

    
Who are your influences and what is your most unlikeliest influence?

First off, my Big Three: James Ellroy, Jim Thompson and James M. Cain. Guys who like to swim where the water is murky. The early books and stories of Stephen King, I obsessed over them in elementary school, which probably explains a lot about me.

Gangsta rap hit in my junior high years, which introduced me to the joys of criminal slangs and subcultures.

In high school Hunter S. Thompson taught me to love the power of brutal language.

Movies by David Lynch, Scorsese, Tarantino, John Woo and plenty of others shaped my love of crime fiction as much as any author.

More recently I’ve been blown away by the people who are pushing up television to rival novels in character and complexity, Shawn Ryan, David Simon, David Milch and Joss Whedon in particular.

My unlikeliest influence: I’m from the Missouri Ozarks, and the people and the history of that state have left a deep stamp on my work. In the years after the civil war, people called Missouri “the Mother of Bandits” for all the hardcases like Jesse James who came out of there. Some of my best work tries to capture the voice of the good ‘ol boy gone bad.

    
What do you most value in the fiction you love?

What Superman comics do for the laws of gravity, crime fiction does for the laws of morality: lets you escape them for a little while so you can go where you never get to go in the real world. I want fiction to take me to a place where anything can happen and where everything is on the line. And to paraphrase David Mamet, I don’t want to watch someone making a choice between right and wrong. I want to see him choose between two wrongs.

Crime fiction isn’t the only kind of story that can do this, of course. Right now I’m watching the HBO show Rome, which is amazing and fits all of the above requirements.

    
Why do you write?

I know it’s a cliché, but I write because I have to. I dictated stories to my mom before I was literate, I wrote comic books in elementary school, shitty poetry in high school. I’ve never had a job that didn’t involve writing in one way or another. I started to get serious about my fiction while I was working as a music critic in St. Louis. When I realized that even a sweet gig like that wasn’t doing it for me, I knew I had to make up shit for a living or bust.

What’s your favorite story written by someone else?

Tomorrow I might say something else, but today I’ll pick Queen of the Black Coast by Robert E. Howard. It’s one of the truly classic Conan stories, or “yarns” as Howard always said. Two quotes ought to establish its awesomeness, the first from Conan’s own mouth:

“I choked my ire and held my peace, and the judge squalled that I had shown contempt for the court, and that I should be hurled into a dungeon to rot until I had betrayed my friend. So then, seeing they were all mad, I drew my sword and cleft the judge’s skull.”

Or, from a battle scene:

“In an instant he was in the center of stabbing spears and lashing clubs. But he moved in a blinding blur of steel. Spears bent on his armor or swished empty air, and his sword sang its death-song. The fighting-madness of his race was upon him, and with a red mist of unreasoning fury wavering before his blazing eyes, he cleft skulls, smashed breasts, severed limbs, ripped out entrails, and littered the deck like a shambles with a ghastly harvest of brains and blood.”

Awesome.

What is the value and purpose of short fiction in mystery/crime fiction for you personally and overall for the form and genre?

If I had been born when Howard was, I would have probably concentrated on short stories. You could make a living at it back then. But those days are over. Stephen King was probably the last pop-fiction writer to come from the short-stories-for-cash school of writing. Today, you do it because you want to. Aside from the pure joy of telling a story well, writing short stories also gives writers calling cards, a way to build a reputation.

In the crime fiction world, short fiction is important. It’s the pulp tradition. And while there’s no market for short fiction, there’s plenty of readers, and lots of great places to get published and get noticed. No one’s done more for me than Todd Robinson at ThugLit, and it’s the best place to read crime fiction on the web. In print, I’m a real fan of Out of the Gutter, a real piece of pulp. Bloody pulp.

    
What do you like most about short fiction?

I like that I can hold an entire story in my head at once. It’s impossible to do that with a novel, screenplay or even teevee script. You can build an entire short story off of a good title, or a snatch of dialog. For my short story Red Hair and Black Leather, all I had was what I thought was a dynamite first sentence: “She had an ass like a heart turned upside-down and torn in half, and that’s what you call foreshadowing, friend.” And I was able to form an entire story around it. With a novel, you need much stronger supports than that.

When did you start writing short fiction and what prompted you to do so?

As I said before, I’ve always written, but the event that prompted the first of my “real” short stories was the death of my grandfather. He was a retired prison guard who made knives for fun, born and raised in the Ozarks. He’d always been tied in my head to Johnny Cash, and when the two of them died in fairly quick succession, I felt a real urge to try and record my grandpa’s character in fiction before it faded from my memory. The result was Johnny Cash is Dead, which was originally published in ThugLit #2 and recently reprinted in the anthology Hardcore Hardboiled. The story the protagonist tells about driving a man to Leavenworth be hanged is one that my grandfather told me a few years before he died.

    
Of your stories, which is your favorite; the one that showcases best your abilities?

Like Riding a Moped, which will show up this summer in the ThugLit anthology Sex, Thugs and Rock & Roll this summer, is probably my best work. It’s the story of a very obese, very lonely woman who allows herself to be seduced by a “homme fatale.”

    
Do you have any short story publications forthcoming?

I’ve spent the past year focusing on screenplays and television writing, having moved to Los Angeles in June. I just graduated from the Warner Bros. Television Writers’ Workshop, which is an amazing training program for young writers. But I’ve promised Todd over at ThugLit that I’m going to get him a short story for his next issue, and have finished a rough draft of a story currently called “Strange Appetites in West Hollywood.”

    
How do you plan to rectify your booklessness?

I’ve finished one novel, The Cool Hand War, which is making the rounds. It’s about a crime family in St. Louis which bumps up against the Bosnian mob. I’ve finished a very rough draft of another book, Poser, which is about sex and murder in high school. I’ve also started taking notes on a third book about dogfighting, Lucy in the Pit. However, right now I’m concentrating on getting work in Hollywood. To me it’s not an either/or proposition: success in film and television can open doors in publishing, and my fiction has certainly helped opening doors here in Hollywood. I just want to make shit up and, if I’m very lucky, get paid for it. That’s the dream.

    
_{Jordan Harper blogs at Beautiful Trash, a selection of his fiction can be found here.}