Andre Hardy remembers exactly when he fell in love with reading.
The former NFL player was in elementary school when his mother gave him $3.50 to buy “From Ghetto to Glory: The Story of Bob Gibson,” about the legendary pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals.
“I was immediately captured by the concept that he had gone to college for free on a scholarship, and then went to professional baseball, and he was able to buy his mom a house,” Hardy recalls. “No one in my home had ever been to college. At that moment, I thought, ‘That’s what I’m going to do.’”
Not long after, he encountered Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” It struck a chord for him: “I couldn’t figure out why my heart was beating so bad. What is this? What on earth is this guy doing to me?”
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Long after he retired from the NFL — playing for the Philadelphia Eagles, Seattle Seahawks, and San Francisco 49ers — he started taking classes at the UCLA Extension Writers Program, where he met the teacher who would become his mentor, novelist Mark Sarvas. He then got an MFA from Antioch University.
The classes he took helped him craft his debut novel, “Tear the City Down,” which follows Coltrane Davis, a San Diego hustler who wants to retire in peace, but is asked to track down a missing Los Angeles Chargers running back. The case threatens to tear his family apart.
The author will discuss the book, set for publication on Tuesday, Sept. 1, by Grand Central Publishing, at Vroman’s in Pasadena on Wednesday, Sept. 2, at 7 p.m. with Sarvas. Hardy discussed “Tear the City Down” via telephone from his home in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he recently moved after living in Los Angeles for years. This conversation has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
Q. It seems like writing has been your calling for a long time.
That’s it. I can remember in my early years hearing from the all-time greats saying, “If there’s something else you can do, don’t do writing. The only way you do this is if you have to.” That’s really what it is for me, and I think what it always has been for me, but I had never identified with it because sports took over my life. To play football and go on the journey that I went on at that really high level, you owe your life to it. There’s no other way around it. You don’t make it that far unless you give yourself over to the game, and it doesn’t leave a lot of room for anything else.
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[Football] was something that I spent my whole life doing, and then all of a sudden it’s not there. And who are you? How do you belong in the world, and where do you fit?
I’m naturally a high achiever, so I was doing really cool stuff. Had you looked at me from the outside, you might not have known that I wasn’t fulfilled, but I was really suffering. I ended up in therapy thinking, “I’ve got to do something about this. I don’t feel good.” The therapist said to me one day, “Andre, I’m pretty sure you’re an artist. I’m not telling you to stop what you’re doing and pursue art, but I think you’ll start to feel a lot better if you figure out a way to express yourself.” Even in college, the president of the school stopped me in the library one day — I was about to be drafted in the NFL — and he said, “That football thing is kind of cool, but you should probably take this writing thing seriously. There’s something there.”
Q. What drew you into crime fiction and noir?
Human beings are most interesting when they’re under intense pressure. And I bet the choices that they make may be the polar opposite of what they said they were going to do if they were ever put under pressure. So this idea of, you put people into this cauldron of intense pressure, oftentimes life-or-death pressure, you get to see who they are, and they are revealed. And the reveals are oftentimes the most surprising thing in literature.
Q. That certainly happens with Coltrane. What was behind the process of bringing him to life?
I thought long and hard about who he would be. I had the concept that he would be an Easy Rawlins-type character once I read “Devil in a Blue Dress.” And I thought, “What could I do to take what Walter Mosley has done and perhaps expand upon it to see if I could do something that would be fresh in the genre?” So as I began to think about building him, the thing that came to me is that at every turn, I need to either invert or subvert the genre.
You probably recognize right off the top that you have an anti-hero. He’s not a detective. He’s not established with law enforcement. And he also tells you he’s made more money than he could ever spend. So what then, if he has all of the money that he could ever spend, what then is this entry into the story? What motivates him to do it? And I immediately thought that he has a moral wound that he just cannot heal.
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As I was doing my research for my critical paper in grad school, I ran into Frankie Y. Bailey and Paula L. Woods’ books about Black male characters in crime fiction. I realized there’s a whole lineage here. Prior to Mosley, you really didn’t see Black male characters who are fully realized in crime fiction. So I just started to play. The questions I asked myself were, “Does this subvert the genre? Does it subvert stereotypes?” And if it doesn’t, if this is not the place for it, then OK, don’t worry about it. But if there’s an opportunity, I have to do it.
Q. How did you decide to incorporate jazz as a theme in the novel?
Another genre conceit: you typically see the detective, especially if you think about [Michael Connelly‘s character Harry] Bosch; he loves jazz. Art Pepper is his guy. If you think about John Connolly, his character is called Charlie Parker, and they call him Bird. So you have this jazz motif inside of the genre. Coltrane has arguably the names of the most famous jazz musicians ever, John Coltrane and Miles Davis. And so when I began to craft the novel, I thought, “No, he doesn’t like jazz; he is jazz, in the way that he moves throughout the story.” I began to build the architecture of the novel around these songs and weave them in periodically to take you into the music. It just provides this bigger atmospheric take, which is something that I learned from reading George Pelecanos, who is a master at that.