In Justin Halpern’s Get Lost, Lila Dixon reluctantly teams up with her disappointing, deadbeat dad to find her missing mother. Their search uncovers mysterious cash deposits, threatening notes, and dangerous criminals in dusty California. This darkly comic thriller balances crackling humor with emotional depth about fractured families and unexpected reconciliation.
Tricia Ford: You've made millions of people laugh on TV and with your bestselling books, but a mystery thriller is new territory. What made you think, "You know what? I should trap myself in a room and write a full-length novel about Russian thugs and a missing mom"?
Justin Halpern: It honestly started as I was walking the strike line for the WGA during the 2023 strike. Every day I’d carry a picket sign and walk 25k steps with nothing but my horrible brain to keep me company. It was the first time in my life I couldn’t write, and I was starting to go nuts. And it was during this time that I saw this article about this man who walked into this tiny bar in central California and ... never walked out. They never found him and there was no footage of him leaving. It haunted me. And again, I had only my aforementioned horrible brain to keep me busy. That was the impetus for the novel.
Dix Dixon sounds like the kind of dad who gives great one-liners but terrible life advice—which isn't too far from the dad in Sh*t My Dad Says. What's one thing Dix does in this book that would make your actual dad either nod in approval or shake his head in disgust.
I am so glad you asked this question. Because my dad absolutely hates people like Dix Dixon. My dad has never cared whether one single person has liked him. He is authentically himself and if you like him, great, and if you don’t, also great. But even more than that, my dad is honest (oftentimes to a fault), and he would be disgusted by Dix ripping people off in his contracting work. My dad hates a shitty contractor.
The book's been compared to Carl Hiaasen, who basically owns the "Florida chaos" genre. You're bringing that energy to dusty California. What about the less glamorous parts of Southern California make it the perfect setting for crime fiction?
People always conflate Southern California with the beach, but if you drive 20 miles inland you’re usually in a pretty rural area. It’s an area that grows a lot of the food for the entire country, and it’s also an area that has a pretty big chip on its shoulder. Even more than that, it’s an area where a lot of low-level seedy things happen because it doesn’t have the same oversight as the big cities. That combination of agriculture and seedy underbelly felt new and interesting to me. And also how often do we get to celebrate the full catalogue of the band Korn? Not often enough, would be the answer of many people in the inland valley of California.
When you're running a hit show like Abbott Elementary, you have a writers' room to bounce ideas off. When you're writing a novel, it's just you. Did you miss the collaboration, or was there something liberating about being the only voice in the room?
I think it was both of these things. I love collaboration and I adore working in a writers' room with brilliant, funny writers. But I enjoy the pants-shitting fear of having to figure things out on my own sometimes. Because I’m usually surrounded by a bunch of people who are smarter and funnier than I am, it’s helpful to force myself to do it alone to just make sure I can keep up when I come back into the room.
You’re used to seeing a group of actors bring your words and dialog to life onscreen—often ad-libbing and playing off one another. But audiobook narrators have to stick very close to the page and have to “become” an entire cast of characters. What was it like hearing Katherine Littrell narrate the book? How did she surprise you?
Apologies for my limited vocabulary, but it was cool as hell. The most amazing part of it is Katherine embodies the essence of a wide range of very specific personalities and yet always maintains the gravitas of her voice as a storyteller. I wouldn’t even begin to understand how to do that. It’s truly impressive, and what I think makes this audiobook really something to listen to.
