Exploring the Human Animal With Crime Fiction Novelist Nick Kolakowski

Nick Kolakowski

By Sean Tuohy

Author Nick Kolakowski loves crime fiction. From his work with ThugLit, Crime Syndicate Magazine, and his upcoming novel A Brutal Bunch of Heartbroken Saps (out May 12), it’s easy to tell that the author truly values the hardboiled crime-fiction genre and knows how to write it well.

Kolakowski sat down with me recently to talk about his love for the genre, the seed that created the storyline for his new novel, and “gonzo noir.”

Sean Tuohy: What authors did you worship growing up?

Nick Kolakowski: I always had an affinity for old-school noir authors, particularly Raymond Chandler and Jim Thompson. What I think a lot of crime-fiction aficionados tend to forget is that a lot of the pulp of bygone eras really wasn’t very good: it was all blowsy dames and big guns and writing so rough it made Mickey Spillane look like Shakespeare. But writers like Chandler and Thompson emerged from that overheated milieu like diamonds; even at their worst, they offered some hard truth and clean writing.

ST: What attracts you to crime fiction, both as a reader and a writer?

NK: I feel that crime fiction is a real exploration of the human animal. You want to explore relationships, pick up whatever literary tome is topping the best-seller lists at the moment. You want a peek at the beast that lives in us, crack open a crime novel. As a reader, it’s exciting to get in touch with that beast through the relatively safe confines of paper and ink. As a writer, it’s good to let that beast run for a bit; I always sleep better after I’ve churned out a lot of good pages. 

ST: What is the status of indie crime fiction now?

NK: I’d like to think that indie crime fiction is having a bit of a moment. A lot of indie presses are doing great work, and highlighting authors who might not have gotten a platform otherwise. Crime fiction remains one of the more popular genres overall, and I’m hopeful that what these indie authors are producing will help fuel its direction for the next several years.

Not a whole lot of authors are getting rich off any of this, but writing isn’t exactly a lucrative profession. There’s a reason why all the novelists I know, even the best-selling ones, keep their day jobs. We’re all in it for the love.  

ST: What is your writing process? Do you outline or vomit a first draft?

NK: I keep notebooks. Over the years, those notebooks accumulate fragments: sometimes a line of two I’ve overheard on the subway, but sometimes several pages of story. Usually my novels and short stories start with a kernel of an idea, and I start writing as fast as I can; and as I start building up a serious word count, I begin throwing in those notebook fragments that seem to work best with the scene at the moment. It’s a haphazard way of producing a first draft, and it usually means I’m stuck in rewrite hell for a little while afterward as I try to smooth everything out, but it does result in finished manuscripts.

I simply can’t do outlines. I’ve tried. But outlining has always felt very paint-by-numbers to me; once I have the outline in hand, I’m less enthused about actually writing. But I know a lot of other writers who can’t work without everything outlined in detail beforehand.

ST: Where did the idea for A Brutal Bunch of Heartbroken Saps come from?

NK: A long time ago, I was in rural Oklahoma for a magazine story I was writing. It was early February, and the land was gray and stark. Near the Arkansas border, I saw a Biblical pillar of black smoke rising in the distance; as I drove closer, I saw a huge fire burning through a distant forest. This would be a really crappy place for my car to die, I thought. It would suck to be trapped here.

So that real-life scene rattled around in my head for years. Eventually I began depositing other figures in that landscape—Bill, the elegant hustler, based off a couple of actual people I know; an Elvis-loving assassin; crooked cops—to see how they interacted with each other. The result was funny and bleak enough, I thought, to commit to full-time writing. 

ST: You referred to A Brutal Bunch of Heartbroken Saps as “gonzo noir.” Can you dive into that term?

NK: I love crime fiction, but a lot of it is too serious. That seems like an odd thing to say about a genre concerned with heavy topics like murder and misery, but more than a few novels tend to veer into excessive navel-gazing about the human condition. As if injecting an excessive amount of ponderousness will make the authors feel better about devoting so many pages to chases and gunfire. 

But real-life mayhem and misery, as awful as it can be, also comes with a certain degree of hilarity. You can’t believe this dude with a knife in his eye is still prattling on about football! A reality television star might dictate whether we end up in a thermonuclear war! And so on. With gonzo noir, I’m trying to blend as much black humor as appropriate into the plot; otherwise it all becomes too leaden.

ST: Your main character, street-smart hustler Bill, is on the run from an assassin and finds himself in the deadly hands of some crazed town folks. Why do writers, especially in the crime fiction genre, like to torture their characters so much?

NK: Raymond Chandler once said something like: “If your plot is flagging, have a man come in with a gun.” I think a lot of current crime-fiction writers have a variation on that: “If your plot is flagging, have something horrible happen to your main character. Extra credit if it’s potentially disfiguring.” It’s an effective way to move the story forward, if done right, and how your protagonist reacts to adversity can reveal a lot about their character through action.

Done the wrong way, though, it becomes boring really quickly. Take the last few seasons of the TV show “24.” Keifer Sutherland played a great hardboiled character, but subjecting him to the upteenth gunshot wound, torture session, or literally heart-stopping accident got repetitive. When writing, it always pays to recognize the cliché, and figure out how to subvert it as effectively as possible—the audience will appreciate it.

In A Brutal Bunch of Heartbroken Saps, Bill has done a lifetime of bad stuff. He’s ripped people off, stolen a lot of money, and left more than a few broken hearts. I felt he really needed to really pay for his sins if I wanted his eventual redemption to have any weight. Plus I wanted to see how much comedy I could milk out of a severed finger (readers will see what I mean).     

ST: What’s next for you?

NK: I’ve been working on a longer novel (tentatively) titled Boise Longpig Hunting Club. It’s about a bounty hunter in Idaho who finds himself pursued by some very rich people who hunt people for sport. I’ve wanted to do a variation on “The Most Dangerous Game” for years, and the ideas finally came together in the right way. It’s an expansion of my short story, “A Nice Pair of Guns,” which appeared in ThugLit (a great, award-winning magazine; gone too soon.) 

ST: What advice do you give to young writers?

NK: A long time ago, the film director Terrence Malick came to my college campus. He was supposed to introduce a screening of his film “The Thin Red Line,” but he never set foot in the theater—unsurprising in retrospect, given his penchant for staying out of sight. However, he did make an appearance at a smaller gathering for students and faculty beforehand.

All of us film and writing geeks, we freaked out. Finally one of us cobbled together enough courage to actually walk up to him and ask for some advice on writing. He said—and you bet I still have this in a notebook—“You just have to write. Don’t look back, just get it all out at once.”

I think that’s the best advice I’ve ever heard. It’s easy to stay away from the writing desk by telling yourself that you’re not quite ready yet, that you’re not in the mood, that somehow the story isn’t quite fully baked in your mind. If you think like that, though, nothing is ever going to have to come out. Even if you have to physically lock yourself in a room, you need to sit down, place your hands on the keyboard, and force it out. The words will fight back, but you’re stronger.  

ST: Can you please tell us one random fact about yourself?

NK: I like cats and whiskey.

To learn more about Nick Kolakowski, visit his official website or follow him on Twitter @nkolakowski.

The Writer's Bone Interviews Archive

Seeking Old School Thrills With Author Tom Claver's Debut Novel

Tom Claver (Photo courtesy of the author)

By Daniel Ford

I'm fairly certain I would have enjoyed Tom Claver’s debut thriller Hider/Seeker even without the rabid endorsement of my jewelry biz buddy Peggy Jo Donahue.

His main character, Harry Bridger, makes a living helping people run from their enemies, however, his life becomes endangered after he arranges for Angela Linehan and her son to disappear abroad from her violent husband in London. Throw in a ticking clock, an ex-wife, and a Central American location and that’s a novel I’m going to finish in two nights (one with the right blend of coffee).

Also, first lines in a thriller tend to be even more important than in literary fiction and Claver lands a beauty: “Harry had sat in the restaurant for over an hour, bloating his empty stomach on grissini and cold Prosecco.” Yes, please. 

Claver recently answered some of my questions about how he first became interested in writing, his writing process, how the idea for Hider/Seeker originated, and how he went about getting his work published (He also earned Writer’s Bone favorite status by referring to me as a journalist).

DF: Did you grow up wanting to be a writer, or was it a desire that built up over time?

Tom Claver: I always wanted to make films since I was small. I used to like drawing comic strips, mainly about the U.S. Cavalry as I was mad about cowboy films, particularly those made by John Ford. But it was not until I was studying for an economics degree in London that I became interested in writing. I enrolled in a creative writing course set up by Dr. Rod Whitaker, a visiting U.S. professor from the Department of Radio, Television, and Film at the Austin School of Communications in Texas. His opening line in his first class caught our attention immediately. “Sorry, I’m late, but I’ve just been on the phone to Clint Eastwood.” Needless to say, I was all ears from that moment onward as he told us about a blockbuster thriller he’d written called “The Eiger Sanction.” Eastwood had just bought the rights and was going to make a film of the book. I think it was right there and then that I wanted to write a thriller as it was something I’d never contemplated before.

Whitaker was quite a character who wrote under the name of Trevanian, although he had several pseudonyms and wrote across different genres. He kept his identity a secret, but didn’t seem to mind sharing it with us in London. Despite achieving best-seller status he avoided interviews and publishers promotions that would reveal his true identity. Sometimes he would send imposters to represent him at interviews, just for fun. However, in 1979 he publicly revealed his true identity in an interview with The New York Times Book Review. He scotched a long-running rumour that Trevanian was actually the thriller writer Robert Ludlum. You can read more about him at my website.

After finishing my degree, my interest fell more in the direction of making films. One 30-minute film I scripted was distributed in British cinemas while another short I wrote and directed was sold to Central Television in the U.K. I started writing feature length scripts, one of which formed the basis of Hider/Seeker. It had another title and was genuinely in an awful state, but the BBC saw something and invited me to discuss it. Nothing happened. I then decided it was time to stop writing and raise a family.

But the desire to write a book never left me. The turning point came just over ten years ago when I decided to teach myself to write a thriller, more as an academic exercise. By reading books about writing and by sending my work for professional critique, I gradually improved. Two unpublished books later, I decided to take another look at the film script I’d sent to the BBC. I re-worked it into Hider/Seeker.

DF: Who were some of your early influences in the crime genre, and which modern crime writers are you currently hooked on?

TC: This is not an easy question to answer. I read thrillers as well as other books of fiction while I was growing up and I think subconsciously they determined the style of writing I have today. It was anything from Raymond Chandler to Philip Roth. I also liked John Updike a lot.

Ian Fleming was compulsory reading for young boys wanting a bit of titillation and action. I also enjoyed the adventures written by Alistair MacLean. But when I discovered Len Deighton, I think that brought it full circle. Deighton’s sardonic hero in the Ipcress File was a bit like Chandler’s Marlowe.

But it was much later in life that I started reading Dashiell Hammett who I then realised was the grandfather of these types of thrillers. The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man are effortless reads. Such perfect economical sentences. It’s something that American writers are good at in my opinion.

But I’m fundamentally a Hitchcock fan and when I saw “The 39 Steps” as a young boy, I thought it was the most exciting film I’d ever seen. It was only when I was on holiday in Scotland in later years that I read John Buchan’s book, which incidentally is a 100 years old this year. I admired the book tremendously because the set-up used by Buchan had such a contemporary feel, providing you could ignore the anachronistic characters he describes in Edwardian Britain. You can read more about Buchan’s impact on thriller writing in a blog I’ve written.

Buchan was the first modern thriller writer and Hitchcock’s rebooting of the story years later paved the way for the chase thriller. I’m a sucker of the man-on-the-run theme and in my debut thriller, Hider/Seeker, I have used it in an inverse way.

Among the contemporary writers, I like Jo Nesbo’s Harry Hole series. I’m also a fan of Olen Steinhauer and his creation of Milo Weaver. Similarly, I have a soft spot for Martin Cruz Smith’s Russian investigator Arkady Renko. If anyone ever thinks of remaking Gorky Park as a film, they might like to focus on the second half of the book, which was totally ignored in the original film.

DF: What is your writing process like? Do you listen to music? Outline?

TC: I work from one-line plots that I collect and file. When starting a new novel, I’ll try out a few of the plot lines to see how they feel. I might play around with the angles or setting, but once a story obviously has legs, I go for it. But I normally want to test out the early chapters and send them for critical appraisal along with a synopsis. I just want to see how the story is coming across to an outsider and whether they flag up something serious that I’ve not thought about. Once I’ve written the book, I don’t look at it for a minimum of six weeks, then read through it again. It then goes to another editor for critical appraisal. A long period, and I mean a long period, of re-editing the book follows until I’m ready to send it to an editor for editing.

You are the second American journalist to ask me if I listen to music while writing. The answer is no! I don’t like my thoughts being influenced by someone else’s mood or words. And it is also a big no to outlining. I prefer my characters to work out the story for me.

DF: Where did the idea for Hider/Seeker originate? 

TC: As I mentioned earlier, it started as a film script some 30 years ago. I vaguely remember watching a television documentary where a divorced father who had been denied access to his son by his ex-wife enters his son’s school unannounced and takes him away. It frightened me at the time, as the boy was clearly alarmed, and I thought it was definitely a scene I would like in my film. Then I worked out a story about why someone would need to take a boy out of school in that way. My aim was to have a story with a 1950s feel but in a contemporary setting. You’ve probably gathered I like older crime novels. However, I feel strongly that novels should be written in the present as this is our time to reflect what is going on around us.

DF: How much of yourself ended up in your main character Harry Bridger?

TC: I’m short and bald. Harry is tall with a mop of blond hair. Perhaps I share his North London wit.

DF: The crime genre has certain built-in tropes that can deter some writers from taking the plunge. How did you ensure that your tale was original? 

TC: Bertolt Brecht, an aficionado of the thriller genre, once said that the aesthetic quality of the detective novel is derived from the variation of its fixed elements. Yes, there is a formula to crime novels but the fun is using these same building bricks that have created this formula in a different way each time. The originality is what the writer does with the bricks that have been passed down to him or her by previous writers. To those of us who love this genre, we know that not all crime books are the same as some literary snobs enjoy pointing out.

The Coen brothers’ “The Big Lebowski” is a slobbish reincarnation of Marlowe. They not only rebuilt the character on a familiar likeable guy, but they also borrowed the premise of the story, i.e. one of mistaken identity, from Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, which Hitchcock also reused in “North by Northwest.”

DF: When you finished your first draft, did you know you had something good, or did you have to go through multiple rounds of edits to realize you had something you felt comfortable taking to readers?

TC: I knew the story was good when it was in a film script form because the BBC invited me to discuss it. So I was pretty confident that people would like it. My main concern was the style of writing. You could present the same story different ways. In the end, I chose a simple linear story as that helped to speed up the action as there were no distractions of sub-plots. This made it feel like the story was being told in real-time. I would not have published Hider/Seeker if the editor said it was not of a publishable standard. I didn’t prompt him, he just came out with it in his final report.

DF: Now that you have your first novel under your belt, what’s next?

TC: Everyone is asking me this. Let’s just say it is set in a very cold place.

DF: What advice would you give aspiring authors?

TC: Don’t give up like I did. It’s a big regret of mine. But at the same time don’t starve or you’ll never write your first book.

DF: Can you please name one random fact about yourself?

TC: I’m a coffee addict. I have a fantastic Italian espresso machine that makes coffee that would wake up the dead. My favourite brand of coffee is Kimbo Espresso. I recall visiting Balzac’s house once while holidaying in France many years ago and being more fascinated by his coffee machine than his books on display. I know, I’m a complete philistine. Perhaps I am more like Harry Bridger than I thought.

To learn more about Tom Claver, visit his official website, like his Facebook page, or follow him on Twitter @Tom_Claver. Hider/Seeker is available on Amazon. 

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