Author Andre Hardy is bringing a bold new voice to American noir with his debut release Tear the City Down.
Tell me about your latest book.
Tear the City Down is a noir crime novel centered on Coltrane Davis, a San Diego fixer who has spent years solving other people’s problems. He’s trying to close the accounts of his old life when Anthony Riddell, a former NFL All-Pro, suddenly disappears just days before the biggest game of his career.
What begins as a search for a missing football star quickly takes Coltrane into a much darker world involving extortion, drugs, prostitution, violence, and old debts. The deeper he goes, the more he realizes this case isn’t just about finding Riddell—it’s forcing him to confront the life he’s been trying to leave behind.
Coltrane isn’t a conventional hero. He’s complicated, he’s made mistakes, and he’s capable of violence. But he has a code, and that code matters to him. The question is whether a man who has spent his life cleaning up other people’s messes can clean up his own.
At its heart, Tear the City Down is about karma, consequence, loyalty, and redemption. It’s also deeply influenced by my love of John Coltrane. Music isn’t decoration in the novel; it is part of the character, the atmosphere, and the way Coltrane understands the world.
Why did you decide to write it?
I’ve always loved crime fiction because it puts people under extreme pressure. That’s when character reveals itself. When everything is going well, everybody thinks they’re a good person. Put somebody in a desperate situation and you find out who they really are.
I wanted to create a character who lived in that pressure every day. Coltrane is a fixer, so his profession naturally puts him in situations where morality isn’t black and white. He’s constantly making choices between bad and worse.
I also wanted to write the kind of crime novel I love reading—one with tension and violence, but also with character, atmosphere, and something larger underneath the story.
And I wanted to bring my own influences into the genre: football, Southern California, Black literary traditions, spirituality, and above all, music.
What’s your favorite place to write?
Anywhere I can disappear.
For years it was coffee shops with headphones on, listening to John Coltrane. I just moved to Charlotte and now have the dream office. It is finally complete after years of rewarding myself with aesthetically pleasing pieces—desk, chair, bookcase, LCD monitor, and so on—as I crossed milestones on the journey to publication.
What’s the nicest thing a reader has ever said to you?
The best compliment a reader has given me is that they couldn’t stop thinking about the characters after they finished the book.
I can’t imagine a greater compliment. If a character stays with you after the story ends, the writer has done something right.
When did you realize you wanted to be a writer?
I think I was a writer before I knew I was a writer.
I’ve always been a voracious reader, particularly of crime fiction—fascinated by how writers could create people who felt completely real and then put those people under enormous pressure. Once I got my hands on Devil in a Blue Dress, which completely blew me away, the idea that maybe I should try to write something so profound began to percolate. This was somewhere around 2000.
I started to tinker later in 2005 after my son went away to prep school in New England. He’d been an elite basketball player, and I was a single dad driving all over Southern California and Nevada taking him to games. I distinctly remember thinking after dropping him off, Now what do I do? Maybe it’s time to write that book.
By 2011, I was enrolled in UCLA’s Writers’ Program, where I conceived and wrote the first sentences of Tear the City Down. I wrote in fits and starts from 2011 to 2016. Starting. Quitting. Feeling like I wasn’t getting better, wondering if I was wasting my time. But every time I quit, it didn’t stick. I kept hearing the voices of the myriad of people who’d encouraged me over the years.
2016 was the pivot. I was frustrated. I’d exhausted what was available at UCLA’s Writers’ Program, I tried private coaching, and nothing was working. I was thinking, again, that I was wasting my time. But then I happened to be talking to the great Ray Ellis, my former Eagles teammate. He asked if I was aware of the NFL Trust—an NFL Players Association offshoot launched in 2013 to provide former players with the support they need to succeed in life after football. Once he mentioned one of the benefits was free education, I thought, MFA. Maybe that’s what I need to finally get my story to work.
I had the opportunity to study anywhere in the country, but I chose Antioch University Los Angeles because Gary Phillips, crime writer extraordinaire, was teaching there at the time.
What author would you love to meet?
If he were alive, hands down, it’s Donald Goines.
It is estimated he sold around five million books, which suggests he tapped into what moved readers. I’d want to talk character, survival, and the moral complexity of people living under pressure. Goines understood that his characters could be deeply flawed, even destructive, and still be fully human. He didn’t sanitize their worlds or ask permission to tell their stories.
What books have you read lately and loved?
I just finished George Pelecanos’s novel The Blue Flame, which of course is fire. Derrick Strange is one of my all-time favorite characters, and he’s back in action. I’m currently reading Into the Water, a Paula Hawkins novel written in 2017. I’m not sure if there is a contemporary writer who is her equal when it comes to psychological thrillers. Love her.
What books are at the top of your to-be-read pile?
My TBR pile is becoming less of a pile and more of an architectural structure. Walter Mosley is always in the mix; his novel Ghalen is in the queue. I am also looking forward to cracking open Colson Whitehead’s Cool Machine.
What’s next for you?
Tear the City Down is the beginning of a much larger body of work. I am currently writing book two in the series and have an idea I’m excited about for book three. I’m interested in following Coltrane as he explores the worlds of crime, morality, music, identity, and redemption.
Do you have anything you would like to add?
I’d say that Tear the City Down is a crime novel, but I didn’t write it simply to tell a crime story.
I wanted to explore what happens when a person tries to escape the life they’ve created for themselves and discovers that the past has a very long memory.
Coltrane is a man trying to figure out whether redemption is something you can actually earn, or whether you’re simply given another chance to prove that you deserve it.
That’s the question underneath the violence and the suspense.
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To learn more about Andre Hardy, author of Tear the City Down and former NFL running back, visit his website (AndreHardy.com) or connect with him on instagram.com/AndreHardyBooks.