#15 Nick Kolakowski 1 on 1 with Mark Atley

Apr 05, 2025

Nick Kolakowski is the author of several crime novels, including “Where the Bones Lie” and “Payback is Forever.” His work has been nominated for the Anthony and Derringer awards, and his short story “Scorpions” appeared in The Best Mystery and Suspense 2024. His short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, including Mystery Weekly, Shotgun Honey, Rock and a Hard Place Press, and more.

Hello everyone, and welcome to "1 on 1 with Me!" In this series, I highlight a new author and engage in a thoughtful conversation about who they are, what they care about, and their perspectives on various topics. I start with standard questions and then move into tailored follow-ups based on their responses.

I find the format to be conversational, and I truly enjoy it. My primary focus is to highlight the author I am interviewing.

Who am I? I am an author known for creating crime fiction, with a particular focus on complex characters, engaging dialogue, and narratives centered around crime themes. I genuinely enjoy listening to people and letting them share their stories.

If you are interested in being a guest, please reach out to me on social media or email me with the subject line: "Author Interview." This initiative is my way of giving back to the writing community. The guests you’ll hear from in these interviews come from diverse backgrounds, and they may or may not be familiar voices in the writing community. That’s the beauty of this platform on Substack—it's free!

My values

—Everyone matters.
—Be positive.
—Gratitude in everything.
—Default action is compassion.
—Empathy. Always.

HELP ME HELP THESE AWESOME PEOPLE!

Share these interviews on social media. That’s the best way for others to find this series and enjoy the words of wisdom these people will bring to your life.

Subscribe to my Substack or follow me on social media such as BlueSky, Threads, X (Twitter), and Instagram.

Share links. Share posts. Share thoughts.

Remember to always choose positivity over negativity.

Get the app

Check out my books and drop a review. Like RedBull, reviews give author’s wings.

Mark’s books!

On to the interview!

I’ve been following his social media for a while and have seen some of the free shorts he’s released online. I remember the Twitter disputes he’s had, and he was always open about sharing his opinions on the latest controversies. How does he manage to remain outspoken in the writing community while still being considerate and, in my opinion, fairly neutral?

I asked him this and many other things because I made a decision a long time ago, during the COVID pandemic, to focus on promoting positivity. This determination is what inspired the creation of this series.

Who are you and can you tell me a little about your work? What drives you? What do you hope to accomplish?

I’m Nick Kolakowski. In simplest terms, I’m a horror and crime-fiction writer who lives in New York City. I’m here to entertain anyone who picks up my books. I don’t think my work can add anything deep or philosophical about the nature of life itself—that’s something well-covered by other writers. But if I can give someone a good time for a few days, then I consider it mission accomplished.

How do you see your relationship with the reader?

People work hard for what they earn, and if they’re plunking down their ten or twenty dollars for one of my books—or getting it out of the library, which is also excellent—then I feel a responsibility to deliver unto them a hefty dose of tension, comedy, and drama. I’m a huge fan of genre-blending, jumping between crime and horror and other genres, and I’ve always wanted my books, even the short ones, to give a full experience to whoever opens one up. Ideally, I’ll have a hypothetical reader laughing at one moment and riveted the next.

How do you view your characters? What has changed over time, and what has stayed the same? How do you develop complex characters?

I always have some sympathy for my characters, even the worst ones. Precious few people wake up in the morning and think they’re the villain, even those who commit evil acts. I try to give every character a few moments that opens them up as a human being, even if they’re a relatively minor henchman who only has a short chapter to live. That’s the smack-the-easy-button technique for layering complexity, and I think to think it’s worked for me.

And I’ve always taken that approach to character. Over the years, as I’ve worked on improving my skills, I’ve also tried to blend more nuance and subtlety into my fictional cast, especially the protagonists. If you read my earlier novellas like “A Brutal Bunch of Heartbroken Saps,” everyone is rendered in pretty broad strokes; but with my upcoming novel, “Where the Bones Lie,” I tried to finely shade more of my characters with grief, regret, and other emotions that are harder to capture.

What is your version of success? Has it changed during your writing journey? How so? What’s different now versus when you started?

Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to be a pulp writer. I grew up on the greats like Hammett and Chandler; when I was a teenager, I was a huge fan of Jim Thompson and then-newer writers like John Ridley. I was raised around novelists and knew from the beginning that, unless you were a very rare and colorful bird, chances were good you’d never earn enough off book sales to live an extravagant lifestyle—so from the outset, my goal was to build a strong, reasonably sized cluster of fans, the type who’d turn out for book after book, then pass their battered copies of my latest along to their friends. I always assumed I’d work a day job on top of a writing career.

Because I had reasonable expectations, I haven’t been that disappointed. Occasionally, I’ll have a friend break through onto the bestseller lists and I’ll think, “Hey, I can do that, too!” Or I’ll have a novel or novella optioned for TV or film and I’ll wonder, “Hey, what if this is actually made? It’ll open up a whole new world!” So that dreaming I consciously denied myself as a kid will sometimes come roaring back, and I’ll entertain it for a few minutes. It’s the literary equivalent of buying a lottery ticket and then daydreaming about your newfound riches (until they call the numbers, and you snap awake).

What type of reader are you? How do you view books you read, and how do they affect you and your writing?

I’m a voracious reader. Back in the day, my reading diet was purely fiction, with an emphasis on thrillers, but in recent years I’ve shifted considerably toward nonfiction. I think both fiction and nonfiction illuminate the world in ways that no other medium can easily match—fiction giving you insight into the emotional side of the human condition, nonfiction giving you a view of something within the real world.

While I’m often inspired by the fiction I read, I find that nonfiction has a much larger influence on my books. Characters will analyze and talk about something I’ve recently read a nonfiction account of, for example, and use that to influence their decisions. I’m midway through reading a book called “Smoke and Ashes,” about how the 18th century British Empire used the opium and tea markets to remake Asia, and I’m using some of the theory in there as the justification behind one of the villains in the novel I’ve just started to outline.

How do you find readers? What works and hasn’t worked for you? What resonates with you when readers share thoughts about your work? And where do you see yourself in the writing community and publishing world?

I think word of mouth is how I find readers. People chatter online; they come to your readings, or a multi-author reading like a Noir at the Bar, and then tell their friends about what they heard.

When it comes to building an audience, you need to keep all channels—your social media, your newsletter, your live readings, talking to book bloggers—open simultaneously. Not all of those routes will yield results, but because all authors seem to disagree over which are most effective, and because different things work at different times, it’s important to keep as many proverbial fires burning as you can. Social media seems to be decaying in real time—nobody uses Facebook, Twitter is a dumpster fire—and so newsletters seem to be the best way to communicate directly with an audience that’s receptive to what you’re preaching.

When a reader writes to me and says they found comfort in my book while going through a hard time, such as their house burning down or a divorce, I take enormous heart in that. Writing is fundamentally a lonely profession, and for someone to tell you that you’ve helped them is absolutely the best thing. I’m not sure of my position in the writing world, and it sort of doesn’t matter so long as I deliver for readers.

—Please provide a brief blurb about yourself, and feel free to promote your recent book or work.

I'm a writer and editor of crime fiction and horror. My short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including (most recently) House of Gamut, Rock & a Hard Place Magazine, and Best American Mystery and Suspense '24. I'm also the author of a few novels and novellas, including "Where the Bones Lie," coming out from Datura Books in March 2025.

—Tell me something interesting about yourself that these questions stimulated thought about. And tell me something you want others to know.

I’ve been lucky enough to make a living as a journalist, which has fueled a lot of my fiction writing. For example, I spent a few years as a travel writer for glossy magazines, visiting places like Cuba and Rome—and I subsequently blended many of those locations into my fiction. Or you learn something for an article like how to break a pair of flex-cuffs, and then you give your characters that bit of knowledge to use at an opportune time. Being a journalist, especially a freelance one, is a good way to learn a lot of esoteric stuff very quickly that comes in handy when you’re writing books.

You mentioned the origins of your desire to write, but where did that motivation come from? What fueled your passion? Were there any individuals in your life who encouraged you as a writer while you were growing up? Conversely, was there anyone who discouraged you or pushed back against your writing?

I was very lucky to have parents who encouraged me from the very beginning. I can’t say where the motivation to write came from—it’s always been a compulsion, something unstoppable. For years, I carried a little notebook in my pocket and I’d write whenever I wasn’t doing anything else, and it’s the same thing today, only with the Notes app on my phone as opposed to physical paper.

I guess that’s the big question for all writers—is it nurture or nature?—and I imagine that other types of artists wrestle with it, too. Painters, people who draw, people who shoot photos—they just can’t stop. Over the years, I’ve run into people who’ve said that writing isn’t a serious pursuit, or that I’m not very good, and I’ve never paid it much mind; I don’t think I could quit this if I tried.

How does your family perceive your writing? How do you balance family life with writing pulp novels?

The family’s generally been pretty supportive. They’re all big readers, albeit with different tolerances for fictional violence—I’ve had more than one tell me they’ve had to avert their eyes from the page at certain moments. Balancing family and writing is always a challenge; at a certain point, I think you resign yourself to writing when you can, in 20- or 30-minute bursts. I’m lucky in that I’m a pretty fast writer, so even with just a half-hour I can make solid progress on whatever I’m working on.

What inspires you to write the novels you create? They tend to jump from subject to subject, so I'm more interested in the type of subjects since the following one is about the inspiration.

I love to write what I love to read, which means a heavy emphasis on crime and horror fiction. I also have an extremely short attention span; my mind’s like a greyhound; I know I’ll get bored if I stick too long to any one thing, so I tend to jump from subject to subject between books and even within the same book. My horror novels like “Absolute Unit” tend to mash terror with significant crime-fiction elements, and the crime novels tend to have a tinge of old-school horror to them.

That’s a bit of a roundabout way of saying I’m not sure what inspires the writing of a particular book over another. Generally I have a few ideas simmering at any one time, and at a certain point I’m just seized with the urge to take at least a few of those and make a book or screenplay out of them. I’m a big believer in the subconscious doing a lot of the driving, rather than anything deliberate on my part.

Let’s discuss Where the Bones Lie. I’m always interested in where the story ideas originate. Can you share how those ideas began and which ones you envisioned first before starting the book? Did all those concepts make it into the final version? What was left out?

In “Where the Bones Lie,” one of the omnipresent threats is a mysterious figure in a skull mask, lurking at the periphery of the book. As the narrative goes on, the figure’s meaning becomes a lot more clear (and a lot deadlier to some of the characters). When I was sorting through my archives the other day, on the hunt for a separate piece of writing, I realized I’d been tooling around with a similar character for years—he pops up again and again in fragments. So that was one idea bouncing around in my head, clearly ready for its big moment.

There were some other ideas, as well. A couple years back, there were news reports of lakes drying up out West due to climate change, revealing the bodies of mobsters who’d been tossed in there a couple decades ago. That seemed like a great idea to structure a mystery novel around. I’ve also been obsessed with the idea of wildfires—I’ve written about them as a journalist, almost been stuck in them twice—and I wanted to do something in which fire emerges as a huge threat in addition to any human dangers. Last but not least, I’ve always wanted to write a detective novel, particularly one in which someone figures out how to actually be a detective—a “Batman Begins”-style narrative, in a certain way.

All those core concepts survived to the book’s final iteration. Along the way, just to add a bit of veracity, I also tossed in a bunch of real-life things, such as stories people told me out in LA about the underbelly of the entertainment industry. The original version of the book had a lot more backstory to Dash and Madeline, my detectives, but a lot of that was either cut or transformed into expository conversation in order to save time; most of all, I wanted to write something that was intensely speedy.

I’ve been following your social media for a while and have seen some of the free shorts you've released online. I remember the Twitter disputes you had, and you were always open about sharing your opinions on the latest controversies. How do you manage to remain outspoken in the writing community while still being considerate and, in my opinion, fairly neutral?

It’s critical to have an internal compass and to call out things that are unabashedly wrong. If a publisher isn’t paying its writers, for example, or someone’s spreading disinformation, I’m absolutely happy to call that out. At the same time, it’s important to not get distracted by anything that happens online; you see too many folks who get into brawl after brawl, when they should be focused on writing.

I ask this because I made a decision a long time ago, during the COVID pandemic, to focus on promoting positivity. This determination is what inspired the creation of this series. What brings you positivity? What helps recharge your energy?

Reading other writers is what recharges me and makes me feel better around the world. Whether it’s a short story or a novel, if I read something that proverbially blows my socks off, that makes me fall in love with language all over again—there are few better feelings in the world. I love the sense of community that writers bring, particularly within genres like crime or horror, and how so many of them are pushing hard to create new and interesting things.

Mark Atley is known for writing crime fiction, with his works often characterized by complex characters, engaging dialogue, and narratives that build tension towards explosive climaxes.

Atley's approach to writing often involves creating intricate plots where characters' histories and motives are deeply interwoven, providing readers with both entertainment and a commentary on crime and morality. His work has been featured on platforms like Audible for audiobooks, indicating a broad reach in the crime fiction genre.

Mark Atley also engages with his audience through social media, where he can be followed for updates on new releases and insights into his writing process