Nick Kolakowski
Where the Bones Lie
For 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.
The Writer’s Dossier 3/3/2025 – The Nick Kolakowski interview
DOSSIER: You’ve written a truckload of material from articles in The Washington Post to material for WebMD. (Paging Dr. Kolakowski!) Based on this fascinating topics you’ve covered, is it fair to say that every article you’ve written has involved some kind of research that made you think, “Something like that could go into a book!”?
GUEST: Not all of them, but many! I’ve been lucky enough to cover a lot of interesting things—and visit a lot of interesting places to do so. A ton of details from my reporting have ended up in books and short stories in some way; for example, my crime epic “Love & Bullets” features real-life locations in Nicaragua, Honduras, and Cuba that I’ve written about. Details on everything from cigar-smoking to gun cleaning that I’ve picked up while writing nonfiction has helped lend color to fiction.
The one downside is when I do an article on something so cool it seems to demand fictionalization, but I can’t find a way to make it work, and I’m driven mildly insane as a result. Many, many years ago, I did a story on rockcrawling, which is when you take a (heavily modified) vehicle and try to drive it up seemingly impassible cliffs and hillsides—it’s such a fascinating subculture that I wanted to do a story on it for years, maybe even a novel, but never found a way in. Still bothers me, though.
The novel in your head
DOSSIER: For your new mystery noir novel, Where The Bones Lie, Dash Fuller investigates a case involving a notorious smuggler and murderer who’s found in a barrel at the bottom of a dried up lake. Did you rip that from the headlines and go from there or did that kind of scenario simply come out of your brain one morning over coffee?
GUEST: Several years ago, I started seeing news reports about lakes drying up around Las Vegas, exposing the bones of mobsters who’d disappeared decades ago. I thought it was a pretty cool idea for a story, but I couldn’t quite figure out the right angle on it, so I slotted it into a file drawer in the back of my mind and moved onto other things.
A little while later, I got the urge to finally sit down and tackle a lifelong challenge: writing a detective novel. I came up with my sleuth protagonist—Dash Fuller, a former Hollywood fixer who’s trying to make it, however improbably, as a standup comedian—but I needed something for him to investigate. My mental file drawer popped open and ejected the bit about long-dead mobsters in dried-up lakes. I knew that, as long as I could give it some personal stakes, it was a concept strong enough to power a book.
Big cat attack
DOSSIER: Where and when do you like to write? Are you hanging out in the back booth of a seedy bar or in a cozy writing nook at home surrounded by eight cats who still seem to ignore you?
GUEST: I wish I had a back booth to write in! I have a nook with an antique desk, slotted somewhat awkwardly between a heating pipe and a bookshelf. Because my back is to the wall, I can see my two cats—a pair of irascible but loveable felines the size of bobcats—approaching from any angle. They appreciate me because I feed them, but if the apocalypse ever hit, they’ve made it clear they’d use me for sustenance.
Flying private with Craigy Ferg
DOSSIER: You wrote a piece on former late-night TV host Craig Ferguson where he sounded pretty funny. Was there anything interesting that you really wanted to fit into the article but didn’t make the cut?
GUEST: Yes! So… at the time at least, Craig Ferguson was really into planes and earning his pilot’s license. Soon after that interview ran in The Washington Post, a glossy magazine for private-jet owners wanted me to interview him again about his career and experiences learning to fly. To sweeten the setup, my editor at that magazine convinced Cessna to let Ferguson (and me) go airborne in the company’s latest single-engine plane.
I get to Van Nuys airport along with the magazine’s photographer, and I spend a little time talking to Ferguson while the photographer shoots some spreads for the issue. Then we climb into the plane along with a Cessna employee and Ferguson’s girlfriend. I should mention at this juncture that even back then, when I was on the road three weeks out of a given month to interview people and cover stories, I wasn’t totally comfortable with flying, much less in a plane with a cabin the size of a shoebox.
We’re aloft, and the airspace around Van Nuys is like the final 30 minutes of ‘Star Wars’: little planes and helicopters zipping everywhere. I’m in the back seat, clutching whatever I can find and pouring sweat, when Ferguson cheerfully announces: “I haven’t practiced stalling yet for my pilot’s license. LET’S DO SOME STALLS.”
I’m in full-on panic mode and trying desperately not to show it, because plunging thousands of feet toward the earth is not my idea of a good time. However, I also know I can’t say anything because I’m just the journalist, and my job is to ask questions and let Ferguson do his thing. Before my head can explode like the nuke in “Oppenheimer,” though, Ferguson’s girlfriend makes clear just how much she hates the idea: “No,” she tells him. “No, no, no, nononono.”
Ferguson gives up on the stalls. Reluctantly.
I included that mini-adventure in the article, but the magazine itself collapsed soon afterward and I don’t think many people (if any) read the issue. Anyway, it remains one of those weird stories I can deploy if need be—the time when I almost plunged out of the sky with a late-night host at the airplane’s stick.
Forced into plotting
DOSSIER: Do you have any breaking news or special announcement you’d like to disclose in your Dossier?
GUEST: I used to be a “pantser” when it came to writing fiction, meaning that I would write without a detailed outline or even much structure. Then I tackled a detective novel and realized the best way to spin out a complicated plot with double-crosses, big flips and multiple timelines is to plot it out beforehand, because otherwise you risk the whole thing imploding on you like an undercooked soufflé. I’m now a dedicated “plotter,” flipping my writing style completely. If you’re going to stick around in the writing game, it really pays to evolve as much as you can.
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