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Nick Kolakowski

Nick Kolakowski's work has appeared in The Washington Post, McSweeney's, Washington City Paper, Thuglit, Shotgun Honey, North American Review, The Evergreen Review, and Rust & Moth, among other venues. He lives in New York City.

A Primer on Richard Stark’s Parker, Crime Fiction’s Most Brutal Thief

By Nick Kolakowski

March 31, 2022

When Donald Westlake adopted the pseudonym of Richard Stark and wrote the Parker novels, which follow a master thief through a series of bloody heists and betrayals, he pulled off a magic trick. The novels reveal precious little about Parker—not even his full name, much less a detailed family history—and yet he remains a compelling…

Featured Excerpt: Payback is Forever by Nick Kolakowski

By Nick Kolakowski

March 30, 2022

Excerpt   As hiding places went, you could do worse than the Village on a rainy Tuesday night. The bartenders at McSorley’s Old Ale House, on East 7th Street, liked to point to the dusty wooden chair tied to the ceiling and claim Abraham Lincoln had sat his bony ass in it a hundred years…

Second Shot: Bringing a Character Back from the Dead for Love & Bullets

By Nick Kolakowski

November 29, 2021

Saying goodbye can really suck. Way back in ye olden days of 2017, I wrote a noir novella titled A Brutal Bunch of Heartbroken Saps. It featured three central characters: Bill, a sarcastic and luxury-loving conman who wasn’t nearly as smart as he thought he was; Fiona, a hard-driving mob assassin (and Bill’s on-again, off-again…

Rattlesnake Rodeo and Risking Fanged Death for a Novel Thriller Idea

By Nick Kolakowski

October 27, 2020

It’s easy to panic when you realize that a five-foot rattlesnake is swimming a few feet away from you. My wife and I had agreed to let a good friend of ours take us on a hike through the wilds of eastern Oregon. The hike itself, we’d been assured as we loaded up the SUV…

Rattlesnake Rodeo by Nick Kolakowski: New Excerpt

By Nick Kolakowski

October 26, 2020

Excerpt On the three-hour drive to Boise, we said little, our attention locked on the radio crackling news reports every twenty minutes. No word of famous people disappearing, or shootouts in the woods. During the hunt, we had set part of an abandoned town on fire, and I supposed that smoke from the inferno would…

4 Novels That Combine Science Fiction and Mystery

By Nick Kolakowski

November 5, 2019

From a writer’s perspective, the mystery genre is often a rigid one—someone committed a crime that needs solving, and the protagonist will methodically work through the clues to do so. And while that rigidity might seem downright restrictive, it’s also played into the hands of authors who want to introduce outlandish concepts and worlds: the…

Bad Ride: An Excerpt from Maxine Unleashes Doomsday

By Nick Kolakowski

In order to transport goods between heavily fortified cities, companies hire convoy escorts. Maxine is the best of these new road warriors: tough, smart, and unbelievably fast. But she also has a secret: She’s the niece of New York’s most notorious outlaw, a man hunted by what’s left of the nation’s law enforcement.

The Edgar Awards Revisited: A Dance at the Slaughterhouse by Lawrence Block (Best Novel; 1992)

By Nick Kolakowski

September 27, 2019

Lawrence Block published A Dance at the Slaughterhouse, the ninth book featuring his iconic detective Matthew Scudder, in 1991 (it won the Edgar in 1992). It takes place in an increasingly unfamiliar world to modern readers. Scudder, a recovering alcoholic and former cop, regularly stalks the “Duce,” as they used to call the pre-gentrified stretch…

How Gentrification May Force Crime Novels to Change

By Nick Kolakowski

February 9, 2019

Seven a.m. in early December is the best time to visit Times Square. The hordes of holiday tourists have yet to descend; the stores and theaters are closed; the costumed “performers” won’t show up to hustle the passersby for another few hours. Sure, you have to deal with the visual offense of building-sized screens flashing…

Setting Up a Hunt for the Most Dangerous Prey

By Nick Kolakowski

August 13, 2018

Like most people, I first read Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game” in a high school English class. Its plot is straightforward: a big-game hunter, Rainsford, is marooned on a jungle island where he meets a mysterious man named General Zaroff. The General proposes a peculiar diversion: he’ll hunt Rainsford for three days; if Rainsford…

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