Bookwild - Nick Kolakowski's Where The Bones Lie: Bodies in Barrels, An LA Fixer and Smugglers

Episode Date: March 18, 2025

This week, I talk with Nick Kolakowski about his mystery-thriller Where the Bones Lie! We dive into the inspiration for the story, his closeness to one of the characters, and how he subverted the noir genre.Where the Bones Lie SynopsisFor Dash Fuller, Hollywood’s underbelly is home. He’s spent years making the film industry’s worst secrets disappear, and it’s left him a cynical burnout with a taste for bourbon and self-loathing.But when a young woman comes to him with a peculiar quest, Dash sees a chance at redemption. Madeline Ironwood is the daughter of Ken Ironwood, a notorious smuggler and murderer who disappeared 20 years ago. Ken’s skeleton has just been discovered in a barrel at the bottom of a dried-up lake, and Madeline wants to know who killed him.Dash agrees to help, and as this desperate daughter and jaded cynic claw their way through a world of sun-bleached secrets, crooked cops, and Hollywood thugs, they soon uncover a conspiracy involving some of LA’s most powerful people.Learn more about Nick Kolakowski here Get Bookwild MerchCheck Out My Stories Are My Religion SubstackCheck Out Author Social Media PackagesCheck out the Bookwild Community on PatreonCheck out the Imposter Hour Podcast with Liz and GregFollow @imbookwild on InstagramOther Co-hosts On Instagram:Gare Billings @gareindeedreadsSteph Lauer @books.in.badgerlandHalley Sutton @halleysutton25Brian Watson @readingwithbrian 

This week I got to talk with Nick Kolakowski about his L.A. Noir where the bones lie. If you know anything about me, you know L.A. and noir are two of my favorite things to have in a book. So I was super excited to dive into this one. For Dash Fuller, Hollywood's Underbelly is home. He spent years making the film industry's worst secrets disappear, and it's left him a cynical burnout with a taste for bourbon and self-loathing. But when a young woman comes to him with a peculiar quest, Dash sees a chance at redemption. Madeline Ironwood is the daughter of Ken Ironwood, a notorious smuggler and murderer who disappeared 20 years ago. Ken's skeleton has just been discovered in a barrel at the bottom of a dried up lake, and Madeline wants to know who killed him. Dash agrees to help, and as this desperate daughter and jaded cynic claw their way through a world of sunbleached secrets,

crooked cops and Hollywood Thugs, they soon uncover a conspiracy involving some of L.A.'s most powerful people. I flew through this one. Like, I just had to know how it was all going to work out. It has a really fun, darkly comedic voice. It's a little bit satirical about L.A. and Hollywood as an industry. And Madeline, pretty cool. I want a friend like Madeline, basically. So that being said, let's hear from Nick. I am super excited to talk about where the bones lie, but I did want to get to know a little about you first

and kind of like your journey as an author. So when did you know you wanted to write a book or what was your moment that you were like, I think I want to be an author or a writer? So I think I've fallen to that same bucket as a lot of writers where when I was a little kid, I liked to write and illustrate my own stories. And granted, those stories were like, you know,

10-page adaptations of Mega-Man or whatever Super Nintendo game I was playing at the time. But I still had that impulse. And that just sort of laddered up to writing, writing. Not that what little kids do isn't right, because it's often creative and fun, really cool. But, yeah, and then inevitably, you kind of go through the teenage phase where you write stuff that you subsequently want to shred. Even though at the time you think it's brilliant.

And then I became a journalist because that seemed to be the easiest way to get paid to write. Right. You know, and kind of consistently keep a roof over my head. And then I kind of dropped off writing fiction, though, for a really long time. I threw out my 20s. And I only, when I got in my 30s, then I decided not really it's now or never, but just kind of you have this impulse that doesn't really ever go away. And I finally decided to kind of put my shoulder to it and then started writing books.

And because from a young age, I started, from a young age, I always love crime novels and horror novels. Like I grew up on Raymond Chandler and Stephen King and Agatha Christie and Clive Barker and people like that. And then I, that's inevitably when I started writing regularly, that's where I ended up. and that's why we're here. And I bounce regularly as a writer between crime, fiction, and horror. And people keep telling me to settle on one and build an audience around one. And I just can't do it. I keep going between the two.

Right. The Bones Lie is obviously detective fiction. So for this book, at least I've whacked on one. Yeah. It is interesting because they're, I think it's cool and authors are able to, like, write different genres. It's kind of fun, just seeing different takes in different genres. Um, so it sounds like horror and crime fiction was what you were reading growing up. Is there something that drew you to writing it or reading it?

Like, is there stuff you love about those genres? I think, I mean, with, with crime fiction, it was always the voice of it. Um, you and also just, uh, I was, I was kind of a very bookish cerebral kid growing up. And the idea of, you know, for example, Agatha Christie or any of those really, really old school mystery authors, like, you know, in the locked room genre authors of like the 1920s and so on, having a hero or an anti-hero who could solve stuff using their brain was enormously attractive. And I think that's sort of what pulled me into a lot of mystery fiction. And then, I mean, with horror fiction is mostly sort of a sense that, I mean,

granted horror explores like the darkness, but it's also showing you. that there's sort of like a world kind of beyond yours. When you read Clive Barker or anyone else, you know, who kind of pushes the bounds and kind of makes you realize that, you know, whatever your narrow frame of mind has, it's just been expanded, even if it's in terrible ways, like you suddenly kind of get a, and I still get that feeling or I read like Cassandra Kahl is one of my favorite authors, you know, and she, they bounce regularly between horror and sci-fi and so on, like the all-consuming role in those books. Every time I read one of their books, like my mind blows up in the same.

way. I still get that feeling. I still, it's pretty continual thing from then to now in that sense. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I can't believe I've never, when you were saying, like, the idea of someone who can solve something with their brain is appealing. I'm like, duh, of course, that's, that's why I'm going to tell people why I love thrillers now. But also kind of like, like magic box type or not magic puzzle box type books. I really end up loving and I feel like I'm always like so engaged in them. And it probably is because I'm like, oh, my brain alone could maybe figure this out. Yeah, it's also with thrillers. I mean, the other, the other author that I fell in love with early on, I still really love. In fact,

I just reread strangers on the trains, Patricia Highsmith. And that's sort of a slightly different way of using one's brain because inevitably the protagonist of her books like do horrible things. But it's a lot of fun. And I've always found it very inspirational to have a, a huge, who gets themselves in trouble and then has to use their brain to like kind of figure their way out of it. And they're trying to think three or four steps ahead of everyone else. And normally there's at least in the context of mystery fiction, there's always a detective or someone like that who's also trying to play this chess game with them. So that's that's, I've always loved Patricia Heismith Smith stuff. There's so many great stories about her as an author as well.

Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, yeah. He was a complete misanthrope. and she used to do things like show up to parties with like her pet snails and everything like publishing parties like she was really um and and at one point i mean to be a fly on this particular while another crime fiction author i really love is chester hymns who wrote these these great harlem set um mystery novels um probably around like the like the 1940s 1950s like in that era and he was also a huge

misanthrope and i guess but patricia highsmith and him were also really great friends and they used to take road trips together. That's cool. So you have like these two extraordinarily angry, misanthropic authors like trapped in a car together, like going cross country to like writing conventions or whatever in the 60s when it was not really a great time to, you know, necessarily be driving through the South as like, you know, as a woman and a black man together. And like just, it's amazing to think about that. Just yeah, anyways, that's a, that's a good thing to decide. Yeah. I, you're reminding me that I need to like or that it would be fun, not like a, I have to.

to learn more about just like authors of the past. I love those stories. One thing I had to ask, though, because you said, strangers on a train, have you read Stephen Kavanaugh's Kill for Me, Kill for You? I have not. I know him. And that that is, that is a gap in my, in my, I guess, bibliography of him. I knew too, though.

I read it last year. And it is my favorite, most unique take on the strangers on a train approach. he like really has such a unique take on it so anytime i hear about it i'm always talking about his book now um but yeah it's it's really good it's very dark uh naturally yeah given him yeah that that's inevitable um yeah it's it's really funny because so many people have done variations on that theme because it's such a kind of an evergreen great plot and sometimes you see people carry it off but it's encouraging to hear that he really carried it off because I mean, you do read things and it doesn't quite work.

So the fact that he's also a master. So the fact that he nailed it is inevitable. Right. In a certain way. Yeah. Yeah. The part that's unique was crazy too. When I read it, I was talking to one of my friends and she like sent me an interview with him.

And his wife had the idea for the part that makes it so unique. So thank you to her, I guess is what I'm saying. Because it is. I'm always like, okay, I do. I've heard this idea before, but obviously tropes work in different ways. times but I remember getting I think it's like the 50 or 60% point and you're like oh okay this is what's going on so it's pretty cool he's good that I mean but he's also done such great things like I mean courtroom thrillers used to bore me to absolute friggin tears and that's nothing about the genre like

I mean there are great examples of it I'm not denigrating any way shape performance just in terms of my personal preferences but I mean he's he's really good at doing that too he's good at taking those genres with all those tropes and being like okay I'm going to filter this through my style and it's going to work out properly like what was that one book 50 50 50 yeah yeah I haven't read it yet but I just got it on net galley because it's releasing in this in the US or the states or whatever here soon I'm super excited for that one too yeah yeah so yeah he's great yeah that will be good um what so what's your writing process like do you typically

outline do you know where you're headed with the story how do you approach it so I'm a pan i traditionally i'm a pancer so which i mean to anyone listen i assume everyone listening being writerly readerly knows what that means um yeah but i would go kind of on gut instinct and that would always end up being problematic simply because um inevitably the muse the muse can help power you to finish a book but the problem is that book might not be very good in terms of the first draft and you have to go back and like do really radical revisions to it um yeah with where the bones like this is the first book i actually outlined um And the interesting thing is that when I outlined it, I was like, okay, like, I'm not, I'm, this is going to ease the rewriting process.

You're not going to go through all this stress and trouble. You're not going to have to bash your way through five drafts to, like, kind of figure out the, the nodes of the story. And the irony was that I think I ended up rewriting this just as extensively as a Panzer book because my outline doesn't align with the final book. And as I was like, okay, this doesn't work. because you're still sort of feeling your way along a little bit. Right. And I'm sure anyone who outlines regularly could tell you that. And it seems like a very obvious fact, but I didn't know it.

So all of a sudden, I'm like, wow, this actually, it's kind of helping, but it's also kind of not. Right. So yeah. I feel like that's kind of what or what I've realized the more authors I've talked to is like is the fact that even when you're outlining kind of what you're saying, you're still having to come up with the ideas out of nothing. Like you're just like doing it before you like write it long form. But it is like you're still having to like think on the fly even if you're building an outline. I'm like, okay, so there really, there's no way to just like completely know exactly how to start out writing your book. The best advice I've ever gotten.

I'm not. I haven't done it yet. I just want it. And that's I think it's mostly because I, in order to do it properly, you need a whiteboard. And I just don't have in my, if I were to reverse the camera, you would see my office. which also serves as our storage room and everything else. I'm kind of squeezed in two-squeezed, but my friend Rob Hart,

who's the writer of Assassin's and Ominus, the warehouse and those books, has this great technique. Now, he's mentioned this before at conferences and so on, so I don't think I'm spoiling anything in terms of, like, the writing process, but he gets a whiteboard, and he does the entire outline of the book on it down to,

like, the second and third tier bullet points, like character details, everything like that, has it all arranged, spends lots of time on it, and then he erases it all like just and and he forces himself to do it from memory and his theory is that what you retain in your head and what like a sort of still preserve when you do it again like without any notes or anything like that is the stuff that's worth keeping um and it's it's it requires you to really have a kind of trust in your own instincts about like what works and what doesn't and sort of a trust that your memory and your creative instincts and so on are all in alignment. He does. I mean,

he's written so many books and short stories of words and blah, blah, blah, blah at this point. But I always thought that was a fascinating way to do it because it's people agonize over like, what should I cut? Is this valuable or whatever? And his technique, I think, if you do it, right? Yeah. Just kind of vaporizes all that and gets right to what's important, hopefully. That makes a lot of, like, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, because it's like what stuck with you. the person who like has to write the book now that's cool i love rob heart i think paradox hotel might still be my favorite sci-fi book ever i'm still chasing the high of reading the paradox hotel and i just got the medusa protocol which is the second one for assassins anonymous i'm so excited for

that um but yeah he has he has some cool writing tips is what i'm learning the longer i talked to him and other authors actually he he was a he was a He was one of the inspirations for this book. So in Where Do Bones Lie, the main character, Dash Fuller, and the young woman he partners with, Madeline, Ironwood, are amateur detectives, although that's kind of too much of a negative term. But they're people who are just kind of figuring out how to detect a case, or solve a case, rather.

And I took a lot of inspiration from Rob, because Rob, before Aparadox, which is an amazing, amazing book, and before Warehouse, also an amazing book. Yeah. did the Ash McKenna series, which is basically kind of the Batman begins in a certain way of detective books, like because Ash McKenna, the character starts out as not a dumb person, but like certainly somebody who's more inclined to use their fists and not really think things through. And by the end, he's a pretty seasoned detective. And you have this whole character arc. Yeah. So I took a lot of inspiration from that in terms of like how to think about an evolving and emerging detective. right i love that um and i i love the noir genre as well just in general is so fun um and that's obviously a part of

this one what was it like so it sounds like you kind of took inspiration from actually asht mcken is what we're saying but what was it like kind of like diving into that noir vibe with this one it was so that I think it was a little complicated. And I only say, I love the genre, but the genre is also one of, there's so many kind of barnacle-crusted cliches that have emerged with crime fiction, mystery fiction, and noir fiction over the years. And I wanted to do, there's sort of this delicate dancer. On one hand, the people who come to the genre as readers expect a certain amount of those

trips. There's a familiarity to them. There's a comfort to them. It's the blanket on a cold night with a cup of tea. You know, and people want that. But on the other hand, people inevitably are attracted to new things. And they want, you know, things that kind of twist on that genre. And as a writer, you also want to twist on that genre as well.

You just, I mean, some people do a good job of like kind of playing the hits. But I think for most writers, you want to kind of do something new. So I found myself in this position where I wanted to write something that was kind of a bit of an homage to traditional California detective mystery. but on the other hand also played with kind of those tropes and so on. And the biggest one I really wanted to tackle was there's a tendency within not so much detective fiction, but much more kind of broader noir and hard-boiled fiction where you have a character who's kind of in a tailspin, they're on a descent. And like the whole point is that the, you know, the cruel dark world crushes them like a submersible,

you know, like into, you know, by the end of the book, they're completely destroyed. And I wanted to write a book that was a bit of a subversion of that where the characters' art wasn't bending towards destruction so much as towards I'm going to use a therapy term here, like self-actualization or something like that. And healing for both of them, for both Madeline and for Dash. Yeah. And two people who kind of want to make themselves better and kind of heal in their broken places. So that was a big driver.

And I wanted to do without getting too pedantic. But yeah, so I mean, and I think all writers confront this, you know, in terms of it's like, what you're talking about Steve Kavanaugh, like where it's like you want to give people what they want in the courtroom drama, but you also want to do something new on it too. So there's that. Yeah, totally. I did. That was something that was different that I did notice where Dash especially is kind of like reevaluating what he's done in the past. And then what that could mean for his future, like how he could kind of still use the skills, maybe in a different way. So that is a lot different. When you were saying the like tailspin, it was also reminding me of, uh, uh, Jessica Jones, the Netflix series was like such a good example of that. Like every like her life is just always falling apart. Like just like everything's going wrong. Um, so it was kind of cool seeing more of a character art because you don't always see

a character arc in like some crime fiction. Um, but with the, with both Dash and Madeline, they both felt like very flushed out, uh, very, very. like aesthetic to like Madeline has a very specific aesthetic. What was it like building those characters? Madeline, so Madeline is actually based a little bit on me when I was younger. I also walked around in a massive navy great coat just like she does. And I was also like kind of a surrog and trying to figure stuff out and so on. So a lot of her details are actually me in a lot of ways. I was doing great code at the beginning. I was like, okay, now I know. So I had what my, my grandfather,

had his one that was issued to him in World War II as the part of the Navy. When I was a teenager, I found it in a closet and it became like sort of like Madeline does, like kind of my armor to the world. I was walking around this huge Navy great coat. And like so a lot of her is me. I'm not quite as impulsive as she is. Like she likes to do things like drive dangerously and, you know, kind of get in people's face. I'm not quite at that level, but definitely that has sort of filtered through.

And Dash is, so as part of. of the whole journalism thing. For a long time, I was a celebrity interviewer and like an entertainment journalist. And so I spent a lot of time in LA and Vegas like interviewing celebrities and doing that whole circuit. And you end up running into a lot of PR people and a lot of fixers and a lot of people who aren't necessarily on Dash's level in the sense of like they're sent into like clean up really nasty problems as they emerge. But they're definitely people whose job is to manage and shape imagery and you know all that sort of kind of sometimes vaguely scuzzy stuff associated with like as the entertainment industrial complex for one of a better term.

Yeah like crisis PR that we've been hearing about more this year. Exactly. And so like a lot of Dash is a lot of those people mush together. And in fact, there's one story that Dash tells about how he got into the business where he has a friend at the L.A. DMV. And he ends up paying, paying. that guy to help him get celebrities, driver's licenses renewed without those celebrities having to come into the DMV and causing a scene and things like that. And that's a true

story. That's based on something that somebody told me. So there's little details like that, but he's, he's kind of a mashup of that. He's a little bit of a traditional detective, hard-boiled California hero, like kind of like a Ross McDonald type.

Yeah, kind of more of an aggregation, but Madeline's based on me, essentially. I love that answer. I wouldn't have guessed that. Just the aspects of it, yeah. If I had a million, if I had a million guesses. Yeah, she was cool, though. I loved.

Tanya, you're talking about her impulsivity too, though. There's a little bit of it where she's acting not to be gender conformative, but a little bit more like a man than just like the helpless damsel who needs to like ask Dash for help. She definitely had her own agency in figuring out what happened. try not to say spoilers i wanted i wanted i mean the thing about her that was sort of and i think if i go back through my notes when i was outlining it i think this would be i think it's it's the word feary or anger that's been like underscored and like this is somebody who's father disappeared um who's who's angry about a lot of things that aren't necessarily her fault that that have

happened to her throughout her life and so her in addition to like the navy great code and so on like her rage or her anger is her way of kind of bulldozing through all of that um and in a perverse way as she and dash kind of progress on this case it helps dash because dash is not a person who is he's he's he's he's the match after it's been lit he's like a burned out cinder on a stick and i think that her anger helps act as fuel to help power him and that's sort of the dynamic between between the two of them as it emerges um and then because the cases the the case that they're trying to to uncover is figuring out what happened to her father whose bones are discovered in a barrel in a dried up lake and up you know north of l a obviously as that case gets resolved it

fixes something more fundamental in her was what i was kind of going for but anger is definitely like her her driving emotion um yeah yeah so that was that was not entirely surprised that i loved her is why i'm laughing now um yeah so the like plot-wise What was your inspiration for this story specifically? A couple years back, there started to be these news stories emerging of how climate change was causing all these. And also water management issues are causing all these lakes to dry up at West like Lake Mead in Nevada and so on. And as those lakes were dry enough, they started discovering mob informants who had been like tossed in there 30 years ago or whatever, which is a great kernel for a mystery. And so I always kept that in my head.

And that was kind of the origin of it. And then the rest of it was I've never ran a detective novel before, but I kind of had ideas bouncing around like using, you know, kind of some of my background as a journalist and so on. So I kind of wanted, I wanted to use the body and the barrel idea. I wanted it to obviously have a generational trauma aspect and have it, you know, kind of be a very personal thing for whoever was investigating it. And then I wanted to throw in sort of like the Hollywood level to it, kind of the climate change level.

I mean, there's just a lot of themes I kind of want to do. But the bodies coming out of the dry to place was the origin of it, like these real life news stories about it. Yeah. It is crazy. It was reminding me I watched Bones a lot, a TV show, when it was airing. And there's one like that in Nevada. I can't remember if it's a lake that dries up or something like that though where it's like these like places where a lot of like mob related people were just getting dropped off in the

middle of the desert and you are just like it's kind of creepy to think about like that's stuff there are definitely places all over the place where we haven't even found people there's so I used to I mean I live in New York City and I used to live in and for those who know New York City I used to live in Park Slope which is this neighborhood in Brooklyn it's called Park Slope because it's like the highest hill, maybe in like the surrounding region, but the bottom of that hill is called the Gowanus Canal. The Gowanus Canal in the 19th century, which originally supposed to be this massive artificial waterway that was going to allow all the warehouses and so on in Brooklyn to put all their goods on barges and send those barges into New York Bay where ships, blah, blah, blah,

commerce doing its thing. But in the 19th century, they never had enough money to excavate it fully. And so it's a toxic waterway because there's no current clearing things out. And for decades and decades and decades back when that whole area was an industrial hellhole and then a post-industrial hellhole, it was a place where the mob like dump guns where presumably they also dump bodies and things like that. And so every day when I was going over the teeny tiny little bridge over the Guana's Canal, I would have that thought. Like, oh my God, like they actually started excavating down here. They'd find an arsenal. And then they would find like probably all sorts of other bad stuff under there because it's, It's so easy just to like pause on that bridge and just like toss things over.

But yeah, I mean, I always had that creepy thought too where it's like, what's under here? I think it's just it's a natural inclination. Right. Yeah. Especially if you read and watch lots of crime fiction, you're like thinking about it in those moments. Also, there's even in the synopsis, it's described as darkly humorous. And that is like one of my favorite things in like to pair like dark humorous. humor with like action or crime or whatever.

We actually just saw the movie Novocaine last night. And it was like so good like better than I expected. Nice. Good. And it like really married to those two together. And like literally when we walked out, I was like, I just love action and comedy together. So what was it like kind of like building that voice for this book as well?

I feel like you need humor in especially when you're doing kind of like darker mysteries. And that's because, I mean, if you read books, some authors can carry this. Some authors can pull this off where you have kind of the same dark note throughout the book that you're just hitting again and again. But if you're not one of those, I think relatively few people, at risk becoming monotonous really quickly, like just like hitting the grim dark note repeatedly until the button falls off. Not great. Yes.

So because you need to vary it, I mean, humor is obviously the natural way to do that. And it also just makes things lighter. It makes the pace faster. It makes it enjoyable to read. and you need that you can't just sort of like grind through, you know, and expect that the reader is going to stick with you the whole way. The interesting thing that happened with this book is that in the earlier draft, so when the book begins Dash for completely misguided reasons,

is trying his hand at stand-up comedy, which a lot of people I know in L.A. in Brooklyn and so on have also tried their hands at. And he's, the reasons become clear later in the book from a psychological perspective why he's doing it. But when I was originally writing it, I tried to make Dash actually genuinely full. funny. And one of the early drafts I passed to an editor at a fairly large crime imprint. And he was like, I read first he was like, I'm not going to pick this book up because I only had one slot this year. And Stephen King took it. And I was like, okay. You can guess. You can guess who this. You can probably guess who this editor is. Um, yeah. And then, but he was like, I really like the book. The problem is that Dash isn't funny at all. And so I'm sitting there looking at the manuscript. I'm like, well, humors. For You get defensive as a writer.

So my first impulse was like, well, humor subjective, like blah, blah, blah. And then I sort of realized like, okay, I get where he's coming from in the sense that this isn't like, you know, Tignitaro levels of comedy that we're reading here out of this character. And that would probably be distracting. So I was like, okay, what if Dash is really not that great at comedy, at least on stage? Because then it creates this interesting thing where he's clearly failing at this and he needs to. transition to a different thing, transition to a different line of work, which then opens the door for the whole detective thing. So there was that impulse to it too. And so like that was kind of dash's humor level. I was sort of toying with all the way through and kind of playing with the

idea that him not being funny actually could help to a certain extent. With Madeline, I think again, I mean, because anger is also perversely, it can be a great driver of humor. I mean, like, I was for her like when she's funny it just kind of came out just because like I don't know it's just like maybe it's because it's stemming from part of my personality but her humor was very easy to write she's much funnier than he is oh yeah yeah so I mean there was that aspect too but humor is humor is so difficult to like really dial in um I feel like in books that's a little harder too than like tv or movies like you like you can do so much visually uh that can be funnier or faster it's a little harder with books. I've, I've written some columns for McSweeney's, and I have never sweated more

over a piece of writing than like the 700-800-word McSweeney's things that I've done because it's just so, I mean, I've run into writers to say comedy is easy because comedy is inherently formulaic, and you have the formula, and then you plug in certain things, and then what's spit that, the human brain is sort of programmed to respond to certain patterns. patterns in certain ways. And I get that. But when you're actually sitting in front of your blank screen trying to be funny. I mean, it's it's it's it's difficult. My hat's off to um like late night writers rooms and like yeah sitcom writer rooms where you have to like come up with 30 minutes of material constantly. It's just it's horrifying. Yeah. Yeah. And it yeah, because it needs to be like

if something happened the day before you've got to like incorporate it like yeah. Yeah. That's got to be a whole other writing environment. It sounds like, so your experience as a journalist was kind of, kind of told you about L.A. or kind of is what informed that. Was there anything else about, like, writing as a journalist that either informs this book or just like helps you and you write novels too? So a lot of the physical path that the two of them follows, they go out of L.A. and they head north into the fictional town of San Douglas, there's based off Santa Yines and so on. Every step that they take throughout the book from the very beginning

up into the Hollywood Hills through going north and then back down through Santa Barbara and so on is sort of an aggregation of different places I've been in the course like doing like travel stories in that whole area and doing entertainment stories. So that kind of all plugged in together. More broadly, I've used a lot of, of what I've done as a journalist to inform fiction, mostly in the context of locations.

I don't like writing about a place. I don't like putting my fictional characters in a place unless I've actually been in that place. And the lucky thing for me is as a journalist, I've traveled to so many different places that I can kind of plug in the reality, or at least a version of the reality into there. A couple years back, I had a book called Love and Bullets on an indie crime label called Shotgun Honey. It's a doorstop of a book. I could say it's like 800 pages. And the characters are this married couple, these con artists who go from New York to Oklahoma to Nicaragua to Cuba.

They do this whole jaunt across North American, Central American before ending up back in New York. And that's a lot of that is based on like all the locations there were places I'd actually been. So, I mean, that was useful. in that sense. Yeah. Oh my gosh. I love cons too. So now I need to read that one.

I used to, so I don't smoke. But at one point I got stuck running a cigar magazine for a little bit. Like a long time ago, about a long, long time ago, like 15 years ago. And so I ended up in like Mexico and Guatemala and Honduras and Cuba and so on repeatedly. And so the characters in that book end up in that whole region because they're fleeing a bunch of people in the U.S. So it helped for that. Yeah. No, I mean, it definitely comes in useful. Wow. That's so cool. I love that.

The other thing with the story that was going on, it sounds like the barrels in the drying up lake were inspiration. Was there anything else like current events-wise or anything else about Hollywood and its underbelly that like inspired parts of this? Yeah, the whole, the whole toxic. celebrity thing that's been emerging. I mean, obviously, with the Me Too movement and all the horrible things with Harvey Weinstein, like, is an undercurrent here. And there's a lot, I think a lot of crime fiction and crime, nonfiction, crime novels and so on are like kind of digesting a lot of aspects of kind of what went on in terms of that. And then the, in the very beginning of the book, Dash is sent by his former employer to find a Hollywood star who's sort of lost their mind. And

and run off to who knows where with with another star. And that was based a little bit off Ezra Miller, a little bit off other kind of Hollywood stars who have sort of lost their mind recently. That was, I mean, it just seemed, especially when I was writing at the time, it seemed like there was a bunch of news stories around there. So that became that fuel for that,

that almost pre-credit sequence where he's hunting this person up in the hills. But yeah, I mean, I just, I mean, for a long time, there was a lot of bad behavior. and I don't think the reckoning for a lot of that behavior is perfect, but it's definitely going on now. And it definitely kind of informed a lot of things that are going on. And the thing about this book that, the thing about books in general about fiction is that you can achieve a little teeny tiny bit of catharsis, which perhaps isn't present in real life necessarily. You know, the people who do bad things, unfortunately, don't always get what they deserve.

But the good thing about fiction is that, and you see this in many crime novels, is that fortunately there's there's a chance for that sort of small level of payback in so yeah yeah it is it's nice like feeling not revenge retribution or whatever for for their actions even if it's just fictional it's fun oh yeah no that opening part two when he was having to basically chase someone who had just lost their mind was it reminded me so much i hadn't even thought of the show in forever of entourage and the like their manager Ari that was my first I think that show was my first introduction into like the way that managers are actually working and like how they're going to actually have to handle like Hollywood personalities. So it's totally reminded me that and Ray Donovan also came after that. That was so good.

But with with Hollywood and like all the egos and stuff, how do you? what do you think makes Hollywood so good for crime fiction as well? Because, I mean, there's, there's, it's a cliche, but there's the whole level of, you know, you kind of get the, the, the, the, the incredibly manicured imagery. And then behind it, the sheer amount of trauma and so on necessary to kind of keep that, the blood that keeps that machine turning, um, yeah, in a certain way. And I mean, that, that, that's an old story. I mean, that goes back all the way to when LA was, you know, a dusty intersection.

And, you know, Hollywood was a couple of people in a warehouse in like 1915 or whatever. I mean, that's always been sort of the story of it. The thing that, so when I was in an entertainment journalist, I would, like I said, I mean, I would regularly kind of interact with like kind of the R.E. level managers, but then also, you know, the PR people, the assistants, kind of all the people who help keep the machine running behind the scenes. And the thing that's a huge driver, and this isn't unique to Hollywood. This is the same thing you find in New York publishing. It's the same thing you find to a certain level in government, sort of runs on fear. And fear that, you know, something's not going to work out. Fear that you're going to lose your job because of something.

Fear that if you produce a certain movie and it fails like you're going to end up back in Tulsa or something like that before the week is out. And fear makes people do terrible things. fear will make people instantly overrun any ethics that they thought that they had and do something absolutely terrible. More so probably than any other emotion and so on. And I think that's sort of a big driver of it. And I kind of with the book, I wanted to layer that fear in to a certain extent, not make it too overt, but just like the sense that everyone's kind of panicked. You know, and everyone's nervous. Yeah.

Even the sharks at the top of the. Yeah. Right. Because it's like someone could turn off. you because like even yeah even if you're at the top you're probably with other people who are at the top that know things it really is because like blackmail or a gosh even what we've seen with like the ditty trial is that same thing where it's like you can get people to come over and like have fun and then you have power over them and it's like that's that's not great yeah and you got to

imagine that there's like just the sheer amount of blackmail on on the hard drives and everything like and the leverage from that is freaky. There's a great, great, great book that I heartily recommend it to everybody. And it's Jordan Harper's everybody knows. I read it right after I read years. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, that book is amazing in terms of that sort of excorched nerve kind of fear level among everybody. And it's funny because in terms of that book, that book almost made that book almost deep six, this book.

Because what happened was, so I was right, I knew, I mean, I'm, I know Jordan, not, we're not like super friends or anything like that. Yeah. Like, we're friendly acquaintances. We've read in the same lineups at events and things like that. And so I knew he was working on something in kind of a Hollywood context right around the time that I was starting to write this. And then I was probably about 50% of the way through the manuscript when everybody knows came out. And I bought it on the first day and I read it. And Jordan is such a peerless master of wordsmithing and world building and everything else.

And so I read this book and all of a sudden, I have like a math. I never have writer's block. But like all of a sudden, like I completely, like the gears completely freeze up. I'm like, oh my God. Like the plots are completely different. It's not. There's nothing. Yeah.

They're very different. Yeah. But there's something about the milieu that he covered that was like, oh my God. Like this is sort of like the pinnacle of like this sort of Hollywood underbelly like, I can't deal with it. So I froze up for about two weeks. And I was reading at a noir at the bar at Shade, which is a bar in the village in New York that hosts crime fiction writers on a regular basis.

That sounds cool. Todd Robinson, who's not only the manager of Shade, but also the great, great editor-in-chief of Thuglet, which is a crime fiction magazine. It's no longer around, but it gave a lot of people like me and Jordan and Sean Cosby and so on their star to short story writers. Oh, wow. I'm up on, I'm up there on stage and before I read from what I was reading at the time, which was a completely separate horror novel, you know, I'm like, oh, like, I'm writing

this is a techno. I just got frozen up because I read Jordan Harper's book and like, you know, who could possibly compare to that other than like maybe James Elroy. Yeah. And Todd, who's a huge dude, comes like just muscular, like, just like, he also has been a bouncer. Like he's just like a massive guy comes marching out from behind the bar, like sticks his finger in my face and like yells like your thing is perfectly good like Jordan is doing your his thing.

You're doing your thing. Like I want you to like get back on this book like blah, blah, blah. He's just like giving me this like full metal jacket pep talk in the middle of this bar. And that helped break up the the mental log jam. That's so cool. Which was nice. Yeah. But that book, that book kind of completely froze me in my tracks for a two weeks. It's so good though. Yeah. I was making me laugh is I have a friend Hallie Sutton and she's on the podcast. podcast every now and then. And she wrote a really good, a really great noir called The Lady Upstairs that also takes place in L.A. So she and I are always talking about, she lives in L.A. too. So we're always talking about Hollywood, noir, like all of that. And she read everybody knows sometime last year. And she like got on the podcast and she's like,

it's so good. And she was like, I'm just so mad that a man was able to write this. She was like, how, like, why was it mind this good like she was talking about all this so i'm it's just like fascinating to me too that this is just happening to like authors that i'm talking to they're like yeah that book just fucked me up for a couple weeks but it was it is fantastic and i love noir so much so i i read years and i think i read something else but i'd had it on my radar where i was like i want to read this one too and then i read that and i was like i'm just lucking out with noir this year but you're not the only one who has mentioned that about his book he's and he's about to do it again too. I belong to a writer's discord and a couple people in there have been reading his,

who are his early readers, I've been reading the next one, which is a sequel to everybody knows. And like, the devastation starting all over again. Like one of my friends was like, I'm so glad I finished writing my book before I read this because otherwise I would like throw my laptop out the window. I'm like, he just, I mean, there's, there's so many authors who consistently deliver with every book and he's one of them. Yeah. Yeah. No, it just, it's true. Well, it's. Well, it's. And it makes sense, even going back to what we were talking about at the beginning with tropes is like you, there are tropes that I always, that I always enjoy, almost no matter what, like, unless the writing itself just isn't connecting with me. But it's like, you do have those tropes that like, I don't know how many mysteries I've read that take place in Hollywood and how many noirs I've read. And so you do gravitate towards the sameness. But then when you're writing, I'm, I'm working on a book that takes place in Hollywood.

I've had the same moments where I'm like, there are so many books like this already, though, like, who needs another book like this? But it's, I'm glad you have the people in your life that are like, well, your take on this trope is like what you're wanting to write right now. And it's like, I need to remind myself of the fact that even as a reader, I'm like, I'll still read books that have similar stuff in it. But it's so we were talking about it. I hear my friend Steph and I were talking to about like, sometimes it's even hard

when you finish a book and like are writing a review because you're like how do you understand or how can you tell the things that are going to click with you and then sometimes they just don't and you're like this was supposed to click with me but it didn't so there there is just like all the different varieties of a trope that can be made yeah i mean it's it's sort of like i mean Sean Cosby's all the sinners bleed which is which is a great serial killer novel and i mean it's it's especially ever since Thomas Harris wrote Silence of the Lambs, I guess is, you know, 40 years old at this point or something along those lines,

you start to ask yourself like how many different variations of a serial killer story can you do? Like how many different ways can like somebody who's cracked in the head, like murder somebody in hilariously inventive ways? But I think with Sean's book did a really interesting thing of kind of filtering it through the contemporary Southern experience and tackling, you know, racism

and the politics and all these other issues and kind of using the serial killer in that as an avatar almost to to tackle those issues. And there's always, I feel like there's, there's, well, maybe not 100% of the time, but 90% of the time. You know, despite all the tropes and however many times other people have kind of tread over certain territory, there's probably some new angle. It's just that becomes the hard part is finding that thing. And Sean's very good.

I mean, Sean, you know, has done like the heist novel, which has also been done to death. That was Blacktop Wasteland. He did the revenge novel, which is Razor Blade Tears. And like in every case, he's managed to sort of revitalize it by filtering it through that Southern Virginia experience. Yeah. He's a good example of like how to revitalize something that you would think has been done completely to death. Yeah. And his voice is so unique as kind of what you're talking about too.

like some authors, their voices, you can feel it in all of the books, even if they're doing different stuff. And sometimes that's what attracts you to it or like keeps you locks in with the story as well. Yeah, like, like Ivy Pichata, have you read her stuff? Like these, these girls, right? And like sing her down is the newest one. Like she's one where when you think about it, like for example, with sing her down, that book is all build up. Like there's some action in it, but like really not all that much. But like her voice is so compelling and her voice is so, she's like Jordan and Harper's.

Like she's another one where the voice is so compelling and so strong that the voice could carry it through no most no matter what happens. I mean, there's a lot of action and suspense in that. But there is. Yeah. Yeah. And it was like it's kind of an old school Western, but it's not like it was following that. But I still remember with that one being. just so impressed with the way that the character arcs

I'm trying not to spoil it but the way things come together at the end I was like oh my gosh that's what she was setting us up for this whole time yeah yeah it's so well done she's I mean also her short stories too but her voice is like so strong it's really amazing yeah yeah that's so cool yeah well you've kind of mentioned some books that you loved but I do always ask at the end if there's anything you've read recently that you've loved. So is there anything you haven't talked about that you

read recently? I mean, speaking to Sean Cosby, I just finished reading an early copy of King of Ashes, which is his next one. And that's in terms of what we were talking about revitalizing trips, is revitalizing like the Godfather crime family trope like in the context of that. And that one's really good. I think that one is dropping in June, I think. I think so. I think it's summary. It's when that that one's coming out. And then, I'm trying to think of other stuff that I've read. That was the most reason. I've been reading a lot of nonfiction lately.

So last night I just started that new book by that former Facebook PR person to that's like, it's blowing up the bestseller list. It's about like she tears apart everything behind the scenes. Yep. I know what you're talking about. And it's funny because it's on my Kindle right now. And I'm, um, why is it not popping up when I.

Oh, careless people. but Sarah Wynne Williams I'm only like I mean I didn't get very far to I'm only about like 15% of the way through after last night but like in terms of in terms of real life we're talking about fictional crime and everything else and like fictional skull drudgery but like in terms of like real life

you know kind of whether it's true or not I mean obviously Facebook would say that this is all a pack of lies but in terms of like kind of like the real life things that tick behind the scenes that maybe are completely on the up and up I think it's a really, it seems like it's going to be a really good example of it. I really like her prose style is really good. So I would definitely consider that one if you're in the mood for like a nonfiction

book. Yeah. So those two. Yeah, I think those are the ones that I've just plowed through in like the last week or so. Yeah. Those are, I'm interested in that. I need to maybe get it as an audio book. I tend to do better on fiction as an audio book. And I can't do fiction as an audio book. So that's fair. It's just how it rolls. I can't, I can't, it's funny with, I mean, I'm the book club that I belong to, we read a lot of nonfiction. I always do it as art just because you can like do other tasks too, like,

you know, wash dishes or build furniture, I'll listen to it. But fiction I have a hard time with and I can't, I can't listen to my own, like where the Bones lie has an audiobook. I can't listen to my own audio of other people read my stuff. And it's nothing against them.

Like they're all like wonderful actors who like do it really well. I just can't. I have this block. I can listen to 30 seconds and then like, I just something in me like just seizes up completely. I can't, I can't do it. so I love audiobook.

as a format. Yeah. I feel the same way that you can, I feel like I can do other things while I listen to nonfiction. And what I've landed on with fiction is like, you have to be building the image in your head. You're not just like learning something. And I think that's, I end up not building the image. And all of a sudden I'm like, wait, how are we here? I totally see that. Yeah. And like, the other thing too is like, if something's occurring like, while the audiobook is playing, you miss, kind of deletes all of that because you know you're not yeah obviously you have one attention channel and it's only focused on one thing at a time so totally yeah well i loved your book everyone go read it especially if you love all the things that we talked about uh where can people

follow you to stay up to date uh nick kulikowsky dot com yeah is my website and then on that website is all the links which are usually some variation of nick kolokowski to like twitter and Instagram and so on. So yeah. Awesome. I'll put that link in the show notes. And thanks for chatting with me about your book. Yeah, this is awesome. Great questions. Thank you so much.