Jordan Harper delivers a sharp and compulsive slice of modern LA noir in A Violent Masterpiece, taking on the current American malaise and dropping readers deep into the dark side of American life. Those who have read James Ellroy, in particular his LA Quartet, will recognise both the style and the city, which has not seemed to change fundamentally since the era in which those books were set.
A Violent Masterpiece revolves around three characters. Jake Deal is a nightcrawler, who drives around the city and livestreams crime to his feed called Creepy Crawl. His most recent obsession is a serial killer known as the LA Ripper. As Jake drives from crime scene to crime scene, he provides a live commentary for his listeners, including his take on the current state of his country:
‘We are America dreaming itself. We’re a fractal of fortunes and crimes, fortunes and crimes. We’re cars and guns and land grabs and tacos, money and movies and big tits and death, all served under a dirty sky – please rise for the national anthem, am I right?’
Kara Delgado was taken out of her barista job by her friend Phoebe to work for a private concierge company called Sub Rosa that caters to the obscenely wealthy. It is described by one character as the ‘Make-A-Wish foundation for the terminally rich’. In particular, Kara serves a group of depraved men who call themselves ‘The Kids in the Candy Store’ and get whatever they can pay for, and they can afford anything. Kara gets through her life by being constantly medicated:
She burps, tastes red wine drunk on the sly. Her veins laced with lorazepam and benzos and THC. It makes her blood glue-thick, holding her together.
Phoebe has disappeared without a trace. And Kara is finding life even more difficult without her.
Doug Gibson is a lawyer mainly representing people on the street who are being ground down by the US legal system. He calls himself the knife that his clients bring to a gun fight. At one point he tries (unsuccessfully) to explain this to some real estate agents:
‘It’s easy for you; you live in this world of contracts and lawyers. It’s easy for you because you think the law is real. But the law isn’t real.’
‘Of course the law is real. Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘Handcuffs are real. Jails are real. For my clients, the law is just a bunch of words that get said before the stomping starts. And when they get charged with a crime, it’s a fight for their life. It’s them against the whole world. What good are some words against that?’
Their worlds start to collide when the police arrest a high-profile movie producer called Eric Algar on paedophilia charges. Algar calls in Doug to represent him as he cannot trust his own lawyer and claims he has information that can bring down the city. Not long after that, Algar is found hanging in his jail cell and is written off as a suicide. Doug knows better than to keep digging, but is obsessed with getting to the truth, and his investigating attracts the attention of some very powerful and violent forces. Meanwhile, Jake has been hired to gather dirt on some of LA’s elite, most of them clients of Sub Rosa, and Kara begins to suspect that Phoebe was killed by the LA Ripper, who is somehow also connected to those men.
This is dark, excoriating stuff, written in the modern noir style that evolved from Chandler and Hammett but came into its own with James Ellroy. Short, muscular and action oriented, but with purpose:
He drives one-handed, pans the dashcam to catch Randy’s Donuts … He switches lanes, drives over the 405. It’s late; the eight lanes of traffic below actually move. The 405 is LA’s major artery. Every rush hour it clogs to a stop; every evening LA has a fatal heart attack; every night the jam clears and the city rises from the dead.
And with descriptions that take readers into the heart of a crumbling cityscape:
The drugstore feels like the aftermath of an apocalypse we didn’t notice. The lighting is sickly, the aisles empty, the carpets grey with muck. An AI voice reads off specials over the loudspeaker, the cadence just off enough, the tone just wrong enough, to render the voice demonic.
Informing all of this is the very Jeffrey Epstein-like story of Eric Algar. This is a story of privilege and the power of privilege. Of the ultra-wealthy who stand on the backs of the rest of the population and feel entitled to take what they want when they want because they can afford it. It is about the structures that protect those with power and repress those without it. Again, like Ellroy, Harper is intent on ripping the bandaid off and exposing the blight at the centre of American life: the huge gulf between the haves and the have-nots and the ways that is exploited.
If it were to have a trigger warning, A Violent Masterpiece would probably have a page full of them. It would include, among other things: violence, paedophilia, sexual assault, police brutality, torture and cannibalism. So, readers beware. But this is not violence for its own sake – Harper deploys all of this darkness and depravity for a purpose. A Violent Masterpiece is a thinly veiled and localised exposé of what is happening in the whole of the United States. Harper is angry about it. His main characters are angry about it. But there is an optimism here. Because in the end, after all of the mayhem, if this book is about anything, it is about the fragility of the entitled and the power of small players to effect change.
This review first appeared in Newtown Review of Books.
A Violent Masterpiece by Jordan Harper
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