Why Jordan Harper’s San Bernardino novel ‘Last King of California’ was delayed in the U.S.A. ...Middle East

Jordan Harper’s latest book couldn’t be more American, but U.S. readers have had to wait years to dig into it. 

“The Last King of California” was first published in the U.K. in 2022 but only became available stateside late last year. 

“It was kind of a long journey,” Harper says of his new book. “I wrote it on and off at the same time that I wrote ‘Everybody Knows,’ and I think for the American market there was a feeling that, and I agree with this, that ‘Everybody Knows’ was going to be a big book, and ‘The Last King of California,’ [the publishers] thought, would do better after ‘Everybody Knows’ came out and my name was out a little more.”

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“Everybody Knows” did indeed get Harper’s name out; the 2023 novel received rave reviews from critics and was nominated for the Barry and Anthony Awards. Harper was already on the radar of crime fiction aficionados thanks to his 2017 novel, “She Rides Shotgun,” which is currently in the works as a film directed by Nick Rowland and starring Taron Egerton, Odessa A’zion, and John Carroll Lynch.

“The Last King of California” follows Luke Crosswhite, a 19-year-old man who is forced to return to his childhood home — a San Bernardino compound that used to be run by his father, who is now serving time for murder. The young man finds himself having to choose between a life of crime or the straight and narrow path.

Harper, who has written for television series including “The Mentalist” and “Gotham,” lives in Eagle Rock but spoke about his newest book via Zoom from his hometown of Springfield, Missouri, where he was visiting last fall when this interview occurred (before the Eaton and Palisades wildfires). This conversation has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

Q: How did the idea for this book come to you?

I worked on this book on and off for a long time, and it actually is a mutation that sprung from a separate story that I tried telling. That story, “My Savage Year,” was eventually published in Southwest Review. It’s a vaguely true story about the Ozarks and a famous murder that happened there. I created a character to fit inside that story, which turned into Luke. It didn’t quite work, and I found that I really liked this character, but he didn’t fit into this other story that needed to be a little more truthfully told. 

And while I’m from the Ozarks, a lot of my writing takes place in the Inland Empire outside of Los Angeles, because to me it is a place inside California that has echoes of my home area. There are poor White criminals and gangs, which are things that have always interested me since I was a young kid in Springfield and we had to deal with skinheads and things like that.

Q: Luke navigates the world in a really interesting way, and while you never forget that while he’s kind of a tough guy, he’s also just a kid in this really adult world. Was it difficult to get in that mindset?

No, I tend to really believe that people contain their opposites within them, so that a pacifist and a warrior have more in common than somebody who’s just a good soldier who does what they’re told or doesn’t do what they’re told. I feel that a lot of people who are inwardly focused and have a violence going towards themselves are people who can, in the right circumstances or wrong circumstances, channel that violence outward. If you read my first book, “She Rides Shotgun,” Polly is a similar character, someone who learns to harness this bad energy going in and learns to push it out where it actually does belong. Luke is a lot more of an ambivalent case. I think he’s a much more noir character, somebody who is trying to do good and winds up doing some bad things because of that.

Q: Luke’s got a good heart, but a lot of the characters in the book are pure monsters, obviously. Is it emotionally taxing at all to write about that kind of person?

I don’t like to do a lot of research for my work. I write about the things that I’m naturally interested in, and as someone who grew up in Springfield and had an older brother who ran a punk rock club and got into fights with Nazis, those people have always been natural to me. I write about violence. It fascinates me as somebody who is a pretty peaceful person, but also has big feelings inside me and a lot of anger and anxiety, as I think most people do today. I think that crime fiction has appealed to people because it lets you step outside of this wiffleball that we all live in that keeps us safe, but also keeps us contained.

I’ve said this before, but I think that people read superhero comic books so they can imagine what it’s like to fly and defy the laws of gravity. I don’t think it’s that different to read crime fiction in a lot of ways, because you want to place yourself beyond the laws that we all have agreed to live in, and for a lot of good reasons, but it’s so thrilling to kind of go past these wiffleball boundaries that we’ve put around ourselves. And I don’t think there’s any harm in that. In fact, if anything, I think it’s good.

There’s so much violence in this world and so much violence in this country in particular, and I’m fascinated by it, and I think we all should be fascinated by it, because we all live on piles of bones in a lot of ways. There are a lot of people who are put in situations where good moral action is essentially impossible or meaningless, and then you have to decide how to live and what does it mean to be a good person in a bad system? I’m very critical of the system we live in now, and I think that it rewards the wrong things. You can see that in my writing about Los Angeles, that we have built a system that rewards monsters and then gets confused when monsters rise to the top.

Q: You’re associated with California noir. Are there any authors you’d recommend to readers who might be new to the genre?

I’ve made no secret about my deep love for James Ellroy, and I really think he had a five- or six-book run in the middle [of his career] that is some of the best American writing, period, starting around “L.A. Confidential” through “The Cold Six Thousand” or so. You’re talking about somebody whose politics I disagree with, but whose perception of America as a nihilistic power grab is, to my mind, extremely accurate. I find it really interesting that we would disagree about many things, but we certainly agree with the diagnosis. I don’t think we would agree on the cure. 

I think Kem Nunn is a criminally underappreciated writer. “Tapping the Source” is one of my all-time favorite books, and I try to drop his name whenever I can. I think that book is in danger of being lost and it shouldn’t be. It is truly a great Southern California noir book. L.A. is the world capital of noir, and I think that is because L.A. is also the great American city. It might not be what most people would name, but it is, to me, the essential American city, the most American city. It represents what we actually are, not what we want to be.

Q: The book is set against a series of wildfires. What made you decide to introduce that element?

I started this book several years ago, when California was really getting hit hard by wildfires. My partner and I took a little road trip to get some donuts at a famous place out in the Inland Empire, and we ended up having to pull over at one point because the gusts of smoke were coming across the highway and nobody could see. That’s just a reality of life now. One of the things I’m trying to say with the book is that we’re all fighting each other, and there’s something else going on that is so much bigger than these gangsters fighting over their backyards, this little patch of turf. The world’s on fire and we’re not doing anything about it. And I think that all of us kind of nod our heads and say, “Oh, that’s too bad,” and then we go on with all our workaday concerns, all our little problems, and the fires are just going to keep coming and rising, and we’re going to keep fighting with each other. 

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