Nick Kolakowski's Blog - Posts Tagged "crime"

Coming August 2: a book of my noir short stories titled “Somebody’s Trying to Kill Me.” Most of the tales have been published in various crime-fiction venues (including Thuglit, Shotgun Honey, Crime Syndicate Magazine, etc.) over the past few years, but the title novella is all new, all weird, and hardboiled through and through. If you’re looking for late-summer beach reading, it’ll be out in Kindle and paperback.

Here's the description, from Amazon:

A bounty hunter tears through the underworld in search of a pair of stolen assault rifles. Somewhere in the Southwestern desert, a college dropout trades textbooks and keggers for ripping off mob dealers. Up in Harlem, a liquor-store owner gambles with his life during a high-stakes robbery, while down in Brooklyn, a penniless novelist finds himself tangled in a mystery involving tattooed freaks, damaged supermodels, and hipsters who can’t shoot straight.

SOMEBODY’S TRYING TO KILL ME features seventeen adrenaline-charged noir thrillers, including the titular novella. Some of these dark tales have been published in Thuglit, Shotgun Honey, Crime Syndicate, and other crime-fiction magazines; more are all new; and every single one of them is guaranteed to keep you turning pages until dawn.

Kindle edition is available for pre-order; paperback will release August 2.

Over the past few years, I’ve published several hardboiled tales of mayhem and murder in a handful of publications: Thuglit, Shotgun Honey, Crime Syndicate Magazine, etc. Now I’ve collected them together along with an all-new novella set in Brooklyn. “Somebody’s Trying to Kill Me” is now available in paperback and Kindle:

Here's the Amazon description:

"A bounty hunter tears through the underworld in search of a pair of stolen assault rifles. Somewhere in the Southwestern desert, a college dropout trades textbooks and keggers for ripping off mob dealers. Up in Harlem, a liquor-store owner gambles with his life during a high-stakes robbery, while down in Brooklyn, a penniless novelist finds himself tangled in a mystery involving tattooed freaks, damaged supermodels, and hipsters who can’t shoot straight.

"SOMEBODY’S TRYING TO KILL ME features seventeen adrenaline-charged noir thrillers, including the titular novella. Some of these dark tales have been published in Thuglit, Shotgun Honey, Crime Syndicate, and other crime-fiction magazines; more are all new; and every single one of them is guaranteed to keep you turning pages until dawn."

(And if you've read down this far, you'll learn that we're doing an Amazon giveaway tomorrow, because why not?)

So the Amazon pre-order for my new noir novel, “A Brutal Bunch of Heartbroken Saps,” is live. Here’s the description:

Bill is a hustler’s hustler with a taste for the high life. He pulls off big scores for one of New York City’s more vicious gangs…until he suddenly grows a conscience. However, living the clean life takes a whole lot of money, and so Bill decides to steal a fortune from his employer before skipping town.

With a bag of cash in the trunk of his car, Bill heads west, ready for a new life. But all that money makes him a tempting target for some bad people he meets on the road—and if that wasn’t dangerous enough, some old friends are close behind him, and they intend to make a trophy of his head.

Pursued by crooked cops, dimwitted bouncers, and a wisecracking assassin in the midst of a midlife crisis, Bill will need to be a quick study in the way of the gun if he wants to survive his own getaway. Who knew that an honest attempt at redemption could rack up a body count like this?

‘A Brutal Bunch of Heartbroken Saps’ is a gonzo noir journey into obsession, violence, and the power of love.

Release date is May 12. Pre-order for the e-book version will go live before that.

Hey everybody!

Over at Crimespree Magazine, I wrote a (brief) blog post about the use of technology in crime fiction. Specifically, I talk about how tech can (and often does) serve as a MacGuffin (“We must find the USB drive with the incriminating photos on it!”), an effective Deus ex machina (“My hacking skills will let us escape this impossible situation!”), and, in the case of a lot of thrillers and mysteries, a horrifying or hilarious way to kill people.

So if you're looking for a little Friday reading, check it out:

http://crimespreemag.com/hackers-and-...

In that posting, I also included a YouTube clip that inspired one of the wilder sequences in "A Brutal Bunch of Heartbroken Saps."

You know what humankind needs? Another newsletter. Seriously. Everyone's email inbox is far too empty these days.

Fortunately, I have a solution. I promise - pinky swear! - that I will only fire a newsletter into your inbox once a month, and that it will be filled with only the most delicious content and links. That means not only my stuff (articles, upcoming books, chapter excerpts, etc.) but also things I've found interesting (other folks' books, music, etc.).

"A Brutal Bunch of Heartbroken Saps" is finally (finally!) seeing the proverbial light of day!

We're out in every medium; here are some easy links to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.:

Paperback: https://goo.gl/SYmhSl
Amazon Kindle: https://goo.gl/XUgk92
B&N Nook: https://goo.gl/PAZiO9
Apple iTunes: https://goo.gl/kBSclb

And if you *do* pick up a copy, I'd greatly appreciate it if you left a review either here on Goodreads or Amazon; it'll help spread the word.

Happy reading!

N.

We have a Goodreads giveaway going for "A Brutal Bunch of Heartbroken Saps: five signed copies that'll go to lucky winners. Check it out.

The next book in the 'Love & Bullets' trilogy is (finally!) out in the world. Check it out via whatever paper or digital method you prefer.

Here's the synopsis:

"'Slaughterhouse Blues' catches up with Bill and Fiona, the chattery and gun-happy anti-heroes of A Brutal Bunch of Heartbroken Saps, soon after they’ve escaped the Rockaway Mob, the criminal enterprise from which Bill 'borrowed' several million dollars.

"Holed up in Havana, Bill and Fiona know the Mob is coming for them—it’s just a question of time. But they’re not prepared for who the Mob sends: a pair of assassins so utterly amoral and demented, their behavior pushes the boundaries of sanity. Seriously, what kind of killers pause in mid-hunt to discuss the finer points of thread count and luxury automobiles?

"Forced on the run (again), Bill and Fiona will venture from the crumbling streets of Cuba to the steaming jungles of Nicaragua, and finally back to the mean streets of New York City. If they want to survive, our fine young criminals can’t retreat anymore: they’ll need to pull off a massive (and massively weird) heist—and the loot has some very dark history…

Praise for SLAUGHTERHOUSE BLUES:

“Dark, bleak and in-your-face, take-no-prisoners prose, everything you want in crime fiction.” —Frank Bill author of 'Donnybrook' and 'Crimes in Southern Indiana'

If you've been meaning to read 'Boise Longpig Hunting Club,' my neo-noir Western (or maybe it's a neo-Western noir?) that landed some extremely solid reviews when it rolled out in 2018, Amazon is selling the Kindle edition for $0.99 for a limited time.

For those who've never been properly introduced to 'Longpig,' here's the summary for ya:

When you want someone found, you call bounty hunter Jake Halligan. He’s smart, tough, and best of all, careful on the job. But none of those skills seem to help him when a shadowy group starts taking his life apart piece by piece.

First Jake comes home to find a dead body in his gun safe. He thinks it’s a warning—and when you drag people back to jail for a living, the list of people who want to send that kind of message is very long indeed. With backup from his sister Frankie, an arms dealer and dapper criminal, Jake plunges into the Idaho underworld, confronting everyone from brutal Aryan assassins to cops who want his whole family in jail.

But as Jake soon discovers, those threats are small-time compared to the group that’s really after him. And nothing—not bounty hunting, not even all his years in Iraq—can prepare him for what’s coming next. Jake’s about to become a player in the most dangerous game ever invented…

Boise Longpig Hunting Club is a wild ride into the dark heart of the American dream, where even the most brutal desires can be fulfilled for a price, and nobody is safe from the rich and powerful.

Meanwhile, the sequel, 'Rattlesnake Rodeo,' is slated to drop from Down & Out Books on Oct. 26. I'm not going to post the summary here, just because it contains mild spoilers, but if such a thing doesn't bother you, you can head over to Amazon for the full description; it's also for sale via Barnes & Noble, your local favorite indie, and everywhere else. (Right now, you can pre-order various e-versions, but the paperback pre-orders should be imminent.)

Last but certainly not least, if you're in a podcast mood, I'm on the latest episode of the Reading and Writing podcast, discussing "Lockdown" (the charity anthology I co-edited for Polis Books) as well as the difficulties and unexpected upsides of writing and editing during a pandemic. Check it out!

When the pandemic started, I spent a lot of time playing around with a software platform called GPT-3, which generates text based on whatever you input into it; newspapers such as The Guardian have experimented with using GPT-3 to produce articles, for example. I uploaded ten years’ worth of my writing into the system, curious if it could imitate my style.

The answer to that question turned out to be “yes.” However, the output was also surreal, dreamlike; as it turned out, GPT-3 could mimic my writing style and word choice, but it had no idea how reality, physics, or human beings actually worked. The result was sentences like this:

“To the kid he was the fat man, sometimes acting like a moron in the heat of battle, blasting what appeared to be nails and a pumpkin at civilians, helping the dead back into the truck.”

Interesting, yes… but I don’t think any writer needs to fear for their job quite yet.

While I was playing around with GPT-3, I was also in the midst of writing a novella that was an homage to Richard Stark’s Parker novels. It was set in the 1960s and involved a master thief named Miller fighting to survive in the wake of a botched amusement park robbery. If you’re a crime-fiction fan, you’ve read that kind of tale before; the Parker novels have spawned hundreds of imitators. I struggled with how to give the proceedings a new twist.

You probably see where I’m going with this: I figured out how to blend my work with GPT-3 into the novella, which is titled “Payback Is Forever,” and comes out today from Shotgun Honey (paperback is available on your favorite bookselling sites and the Shotgun Honey website, while Kindle is via Amazon). It’s not the first book at least partially written with the assistance of an A.I.—almost forty years ago, William Chamberlain used a software program called RACTER to write “The Policeman’s Beard Is Half Constructed”—but I like to think I’ve stumbled on a particularly organic way to blend man and machine.

If you read it—and I sincerely hope you do—you’ll have to let me know which parts you think were written by me, and which were written by “synthetic me.”