This week, I talk with Andre Hardy about his fresh take on noir in his debut novel Tear the City Down!

Listen to hear about:

• How Andre Hardy’s debut novel, Tear the City Down, grew from his lifelong love of noir—particularly Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress, which showed him a fully realized Black protagonist in a genre he already loved.
• The ways Hardy uses San Diego’s stark dualities—tourist paradise versus underserved neighborhoods, enormous wealth versus systemic oppression—as the foundation for Coltrane's story and the novel’s larger questions about social mobility, morality, and what happens when you actually reach the top.
• Why Hardy shied away from a traditional stoic noir hero, and created Coltrane to be masculine, dangerous, and deeply vulnerable.
• How the mystery expands from one missing girl into something far larger, illustrating Hardy’s belief that seemingly isolated injustices often lead back to systems of power and exploitation.
• How Hardy drew on his own NFL experience, love of jazz, reading, and upbringing in San Diego to give the novel its texture.

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