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Former NFL player Andre Hardy is paying homage to his hometown of San Diego as he enters a new chapter in his career with the release of his debut novel, “Tear the City Down,” which will be published Tuesday, Sept. 1. Hardy, who grew up in southeastern San Diego and attended Hoover High School, played as a running back with the San Francisco 49ers and Seattle Seahawks. After retiring from professional football, Hardy said he sank into depression and started attending therapy, where he received encouragement to pursue writing. “I think writing saved me,” Hardy said. “There’s a thing that happens when you sit down to write and you are mining your subconscious, and a part of it is looking for truth and honesty inside of the characters and the choices that they make. It’s almost impossible for those not to affect you. You begin to think about, what are your choices, and what are truth and honesty, and what can you do to do better?” Hardy returned to school for a Master of Fine Arts and leaned into his voraciousness for novels, reading 200 books over the course of two years. Finding inspiration in Black protagonists of crime fiction by Walter Mosley and S.A. Cosby, he spent 11 years working on “Tear the City Down.” Hardy’s football background provided ample inspiration for his novel, which follows the character Coltrane Davis into a seedy underworld of San Diego. Davis is searching for the running back on the then-San Diego based Chargers team, who has gone missing. At the same time, Davis is trying to extricate himself from the dangerous world of crime to protect his daughter, Naima. Hoping to subvert the crime genre’s historical stereotyping of Black characters, Hardy sought to create a unique, multi-faceted protagonist in Davis: making him a fixer instead of a detective, and setting the criminal activity in the world of white San Diego rather than Davis’s diverse neighborhood community. “The crime is with the white folks; the sweetness is in the urban environment,” Hardy said. “It was a conscious choice to really flip those things on its head.” The setting of the novel is San Diego is also unconventional for a crime novel, but Hardy believes his hometown city is rich with material for the genre. “San Diego, in my opinion, is unquestionably the best crime city in the world,” Hardy said. “We have a contiguous border with Mexico, we have this incredibly strong military presence and we have weather that draws 33 million-plus people a year to the county. Riding underneath all of it is, oftentimes, the potential that it’s often realized for debauchery.” Hardy said he is now working on a sequel as part of a two-book deal. The sequel will also take place in San Diego and is centered around million-dollar Name, Image and Likeness agreements for high school athletes, which he sees as “an incredible setting for crime.” Hardy hopes that San Diegans pick up on local references in “Tear the City Down,” such as the Mexican restaurant Las Cuatro Milpas, located in the Barrio Logan neighborhood. “What I’m hoping is that San Diegans who read the novel will go south past I-8 and spend some time in these very beautiful communities,” Hardy said. “The beautiful thing about novels is that they give you proximity, and hopefully, this proximity that they gain from the novel that happens to be about this part of San Diego.” Andre Hardy ‘Tear the City Down’ book event When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 1 Where: Warwick’s, 7812 Girard Ave., La Jolla Admission: Free; $30 for book and reserved seat Online: warwicks.com/event/hardy-2026