Nick Kolakowski to Bring “Jake Halligan” Trilogy to Rock and a Hard Place!

Re-release of Boise Longpig Hunting Club and Rattlesnake Rodeo in 2024; new Jake Halligan book, Righteous Trash, coming in 2025

If you’ve read noir or crime fiction in the 21st century, you’ve read Nick Kolakowski. There’s no way to miss the guy; he’s appeared in everything from Anthony- and Edgar-nominated anthologies, BAMS, and venerated periodicals of the genre like Thuglit and … ahem … Rock and a Hard Place Magazine to his own prolific series(es) of books. Sneeze, and chances are Nick put out a book in the time it took you to close and open your eyes. He’s got 60 credits to his name on Goodreads. And if you thought — maybe, just maybe, I’ll give the genre a break and try some nonfiction fare, there he is again, in The Washington Post, or NPR. He’s everywhere.

In 2018, Nick released the first of his “Jake Halligan” books, Boise Longpig Hunting Club, detailing the exploits of a bounty hunter, his gun-running sister, and a secretive cabal of elite predators. Jake and company were back again in 2020 for Rattlesnake Rodeo, running from the aftermath of the first book. But there’s still one more story to tell …

At RHP, we’re delighted to be along for the ride for the third in the “Jake Halligan” trilogy, Righteous Trash, as well as re-releases of the first two books in the trilogy. We caught up with Nick to discuss the move to RHP, and what we can expect next.

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RHP: We’d start off by welcoming you to the Rock and a Hard Place family, but this isn’t your first rodeo (no pun intended) with RHP. What other RHP projects have you been a part of?

N: I’ve been fortunate to appear in a few of RHP’s magazine issues. It’s always been a joy because I feel like RHP is using crime fiction as a lens to examine the most pressing issues facing us as a society, from social inequality to police brutality, and that aligns perfectly with what I want to do as a writer.

RHP: Why do you think the Jake Halligan trilogy is a good fit for Rock and a Hard Place Press?

N: RHP is really interested in charging the proverbial barricades and using fiction to tackle issues of social justice. This trilogy takes place in a Deep Red state, wrestles with some thorny political issues in between its massive firefights, and positions a bunch of hideous billionaires and politicians as the main villains. How is that not a meeting of the minds?

RHP: Let’s catch the readers up, without giving too much away: at this point, there have been two books, Boise Longpig Hunting Club and Rattlesnake Rodeo, both of which are getting a reissue from Rock and a Hard Place Press. Can you give us a brief synopsis of what happens in each?

N: Jake Halligan, the anti-hero of both books, is a bounty hunter in Boise, Idaho. He’s a veteran, a father, and someone who does his best to uphold the law… at least at first. His sister Frankie is a vicious gun runner, and her philosophy is the exact opposite; she sees society as fundamentally corrupt, and her ultimate aim is to make a buck however she can. In Boise Longpig Hunting Club, they become ensnared in a plot with ties to their long-deceased father, an Idaho cop who pissed off some very powerful people by busting the wrong kid for drugs. By the end of the book, they’re trapped in the wilderness, doing their best to survive against a horde of rich pricks armed with the latest weaponry.

Rattlesnake Rodeo picks up a few months later. It leverages the events of Boise Longpig, so I can’t go into too much detail without ruining the plots of both, but Frankie and Jake find themselves facing off (yet again) against a bunch of amoral, ultra-wealthy, hideously connected operators who want to take them down for very personal reasons. Fortunately, Jake and Frankie have their own tricks and tactics that make them very hard to kill.

RHP: Can you give us a hint about where you are taking Jake and company next? When can we expect to see them next?

N: The next book (which I’m writing right now while juggling a newborn—never a dull moment!) is titled Righteous Trash and picks up a few years after the previous two books. Jake and Frankie are low on cash, which forces them to make some very bad decisions which snowball, in the best noir tradition, into a lot of fire and death. Jake is still trying to hold onto his values, despite everything he’s seen and done, but that’s getting harder by the day. Frankie feels like she’s getting too old for this shit, but how do you ‘retire’ when you’ve spent your life as a killer and criminal?

RHP: Did you always envision this to be a trilogy? Or is there a chance that there could be more Jake stories to tell after Righteous Trash?

N: I originally intended Boise Longpig Hunting Club as a one-and-done book. But months after I finished, Jake and Frankie were still speaking to me… especially Frankie, who has an irascible sense of humor that mirrors my own. Then I took a trip out to Eastern Oregon that went very bad—let’s just stay that getting stuck in a remote canyon with a bunch of rattlesnakes and only one way out is nobody’s idea of a good time—and poof, the plot elements for Rattlesnake Rodeo slammed together in my noggin.

The journey to Righteous Trash was a little more winding. It was originally set outside of Idaho and the main action took place during a hurricane. I couldn’t quite make it work, and many of those secondary characters and plot elements ended up incorporated into Hell of a Mess, the fourth book in the Love & Bullets series, which came out a few years ago. So I set it aside for a while, and Frankie started speaking again—an idea here, a cool line there—until the latest plot started to coalesce.

RHP: You’re primarily a city boy—how easy or hard was it to write about the backwoods of Idaho or Oregon? How important is locale to the Jake Halligan stories?

N: My wife’s from Idaho and we’ve spent quite a bit of time there over the years. Virtually every location in all three books is based on a real place, and Jake and Frankie are aggregates of real people (some of them in my family). Of course, you heighten things in a novel for drama and suspense, but I’m proud of how the books are built on a real-world foundation.

And the Idaho/Oregon locale is another character in these stories. As I mentioned, I initially played with the idea of Righteous Trash taking place in Louisiana—in fact, I wrote about 20k words of that book—but it just didn’t work. Jake and Frankie are Idahoan to their core.

RHP: How do your own social justice leanings affect the writing in the Jake Halligan trilogy?

N: I get really angry about things like civil asset forfeiture, police brutality, book banning, political corruption, and all the other issues impacting our society so heavily at the moment. I often feel like it’s all hopeless, that no matter what I do as an individual, I can’t actually do much in terms of solving those issues for the better. Whether or not that’s true, I find it’s cathartic to use my fictional characters to set things right in a showy, sometimes bloody way.

When it comes to these matters, Jake and Frankie are yin-yang, with Jake wanting to engage productively with society, to stay within the lines; Frankie, by contrast, is the pseudo-Nietzschean who wants to burn it all down. Some days when I sit down to write, I’m more Jake; sometimes I’m more Frankie. Blowing things up comes with its own satisfaction, but ultimately I think we all need to work toward something a bit more productive if we’re going to make it as a society.

RHP: Gun enthusiasts are notoriously fastidious about weapons details in fiction. How did you get the information right? Have you gotten any shit from the aforementioned community for getting something wrong in the previous books? Are we correcting it in the re-issues?

N: I make a point of firing almost every gun I’ve featured in my books, with some notable exceptions (such as the rocket launcher that appears briefly in Boise Longpig Hunting Club; the ATF takes a dim view when you’re blowing stuff up for ‘research’). I had a gun-enthusiast friend read both Boise and Rattlesnake for accuracy, and he had no issues. If you write noir, knowing a few folks who love guns can come in handy for all kinds of reasons.

A very long time ago, I messed up on my armament facts in a short story—I think I mentioned a pistol having a six-shot capacity when it was only five—and yep, I got two polite-but-terse emails from gun fans within a few days. I believe it was John D. McDonald who said you could slap ‘modified’ as an adjective onto any mention of a gun, and firearms enthusiasts would overlook any subsequent inaccuracies with that weapon. It’s a fun anecdote, but I don’t think it works like that; you stray too far from the truth and you’ll be called on it. As it should be.

RHP: You’re one of the most prolific writers working in noir today – every time we blink, there’s another Nick Kolakowski story or book out there. How do you maintain the pace, and do you think you might slow down a little bit with a new baby vying for attention?

N: The pace comes through discipline: for years, I had an unbreakable habit of sitting down every night at around 7:30 and writing until 9 or so, which was usually good for around 1,000 words per day. But even when I’m not writing, I’m constantly noodling with ideas in my head, so by the time I actually sit down in front of the laptop, I have a good sense of what that day’s production will look like. I like having two or three projects going simultaneously, so I’m rarely blocked—if I slow down, I’ll switch to another project.

I’m now on the baby’s schedule, which is great, but it also means that writing time has fractured into little bits and pieces throughout the day. My most productive period has actually shifted to lunch at my day job, when I can chew and type for ~40 minutes before getting back to work. When the tyke goes down for a nap, I can snatch 15-30 minutes of writing here and there, too. I’ve slowed down, production-wise, but I’m still grinding on.

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