An interview with Nick Guthrie
Author of "In the Ruins"
Hello, Callers! Thanks for being here.
Today, we’re very pleased to welcome Nick Guthrie back to Cold Caller. Since the last time we spoke, Nick’s been busy with projects like back-to-back stories in Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen and signing a two-book deal with No Exit Press. We talk about those successes, plus rejection, amateur detectives, and more.
One of the things that struck me about this piece was how well you managed the scope. This is a relatively small cast of characters in a very specific place and time, but set against the massive events of World War II. How conscious were you of balancing these elements while writing this story?
I’ve always loved trying to find the smaller-scale personal stories embedded in major events. When I write science fiction, I often tell very personal stories set against the backdrop of world-spanning, or even galaxy-spanning events. When you look at news stories, I think it’s always the accounts of individuals struggling to survive war, famine, or whatever else awful thing is happening - those are the stories that resonate and stay with you. So for this story, yes, I was conscious of this contrast in scale, and particularly interested in exploring how people lived their ordinary lives - be it policing, earning a living, or being a murderer - while their home city was being bombed.
In the “amateur detective” subgenre, one of the great pleasures is seeing how an ordinary person is forced to play sleuth. Your protagonist, Lenny Tunnicliffe, is a great example of this—his injury, his duties at home, and his sense of justice all push him into this murder investigation. I’d love to know which came first, the character of Lenny or the central mystery? How did plot and character develop together?
I don’t know if it’s something that’s particularly prominent in crime fiction as opposed to other genres, but our protagonists tend to be damaged people - the cops with failing marriages and drink problems, investigators with attitude problems, characters who are, when it comes down to it, quite dislikeable. So when I hit on the idea of a murder victim very nearly being overlooked in the chaos of war, the kind of character who might be determined not to let this go started to take shape, and it just naturally developed into a young man damaged by war, torn between feeling worthless and being determined to see justice done. As often happens, all these elements started to take form as part of the same process.
How important was historical research for this story? Is this a time period you were already familiar with?
It’s a period I’m quite familiar with already. I know enough about it for the story to have emerged, and for me to realise all the bits I didn’t know! Before I wrote the first draft, I did a fair bit of research into very specific aspects: what an Air Raid Precautions warden would wear, for example - this story takes place around the time when they started to get flimsy overalls distributed; before that, it was just an armband. I found out a lot about what kind of people served as ARP wardens, and who served in the police when all the young men were at war. There are lots of good documentaries on YouTube that cover this kind of thing. Once I had enough detail that I felt comfortable with the setting, I wrote the first draft, and as I did so I made notes of all the things I’d need to look up later, like what they covered windows with during blackout. In fact, I was so taken with the characters and setting that I immediately started developing ideas for how this story could become the opening of a novel... and then a trilogy, and I did a lot more research as part of this process. I usually let a story sit for a while after “finishing” it, so by the time it came to submitting it, I had another go through it to bring in some of this new research. (I don’t think the trilogy will ever get written. I love the idea, but I came to realise it was too similar to other books that have already been written.)
Since our last conversation, you’ve signed a two-book deal. Can you tell us more about that? How did that come together, and what are you writing?
This is all very exciting. I had a fabulous few months over the winter of 2025-26. Obviously there was the acceptance of this story by Cold Caller, but there were a few other short fiction acceptances too. Then I had back-to-back-to-back stories in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine: a story in the Nov/Dec Hitchcock’s, then one in the Jan/Feb Ellery Queen’s, and then back to Hitchcock’s with a story in the Mar/Apr issue. And while all this was happening, yes, that two-book deal. This is for the opening two books in a police-procedural series set in a fictional town on the east coast of England. I wrote the first novel on spec, and handed it over to my agent to handle, but I did mention to her that Maxim Jakubowski had taken on the No Exit Press line of crime fiction, and we should try him. Maxim has published a few of my short stories over the years, and I hoped he’d be interested - and he was. The first, The Custodian, will be out in November, although it’s already available for pre-order at Amazon, Barnes and Noble and most other booksellers. I’m currently working on the second, which should follow about six months later.
Here’s a little blurb for The Custodian:
Severed fingers delivered in the post, old and tragic memories stirred… someone is stage-managing the reopening of long-forgotten cases, manipulating the victims’ families’ grief decades after their loved ones went missing. And DI Bolam, newly appointed to the town’s Serious Crimes team, finds himself in the thick of it, in a job he had never wanted, in a town that holds only sadness for him and reminders of all he has lost.
A police procedural mystery, full of twists and turns, following DI Bolam as he attempts to unravel the dark history of the town where his late wife grew up, even if it means tearing apart what remains of his own family.
Details, and bookseller links, can be found at: https://nickguthrie.co.uk/books/
How do you handle rejection? And, a related question, how do you know when to be persistent with a story and when it’s time to trunk it?
Frequently! It goes with the territory, doesn’t it? When an editor says they liked a story but just didn’t have a slot for it at that time, they usually mean it: they get far more good stories than there is space available. You have to learn not to take it personally, and not to sulk about it - not for too long, anyway. I’ve very rarely given up on a story. If I think a story is good enough to submit, then rejections don’t usually persuade me that it’s suddenly worse than I had thought. I’ve had well over a hundred short stories published under various writing names, and I think probably only three or four which never found a home. And even now, if I spot a market that looks right, I’ll at least think about sending those stories out again.
How do you approach writing a mystery like “In the Ruins?” Do you know what “really” happened all along, or are you discovering things alongside Lenny as you write?
In the early days I used to plot quite tightly before sitting down to write a full draft, but I trust the process more these days. I still need to have a strong opening scene in mind - one I can really visualise; and I nearly always know how it ends, although occasionally I’ll just write and see what emerges. One of my favourite parts of writing, though, is when something surprises me as I write; usually that changes the route to the ending, but sometimes it will change the ending itself.
I’d love to hear about your revision process as well. Are the bones of the mystery pretty well in place after the first draft, or is that something you continue to refine in draft after draft?
If the story is short enough to write in one day, I’ll do that. If the writing extends over two or more days, I’ll usually start subsequent days by rereading, and inevitably revising, what I’ve already written. So on the one hand I’ll have a complete story that then goes through multiple rewrites, while on the other, by the time I’ve finished a draft it might already be quite polished. I’ll usually do some more research after writing that first draft, looking for the details of things I didn’t know when I was writing it. At some stage in all this I’ll step back and look at the overall structure and pacing, and will make any big changes like adding or cutting scenes, but I like to think I have a pretty good sense for structuring my stories: so by the time I’m writing a draft, at least somewhere in the depths of my subconscious, I have an understanding of the shape a story is going to take.
What other projects have you got coming up?
The DI Bolam series is the big thing for me at the moment, and I’ll be working hard on the second book through until about August. I will be looking for opportunities to write a few more short stories while I’m doing that, though, so do keep an eye out for my name in the magazines. Two short story sales I’m particularly pleased with are: “Old Friends”, which will be published in July in an anthology of stories written by members of the UK’s Crime Writers’ Association, Guilty Secrets - I’m really pleased to be appearing alongside my peers in that one; and “Thirty-three Percent”, a DI Bolam prequel story, appearing in Merry Murders on Bedford Square in October, an anthology Maxim has put together with stories from writers at No Exit and Bedford Square Publishers.
I’m quite active on social media, and I do like interacting with readers and writers. The best way to find me is through my website at www.nickguthrie.co.uk - there are links there to my Substack mailing list, too, where I post a variety of useful and, I hope, useful things!
Nick Guthrie is a crime writer based in East Anglia, in the United Kingdom. His DI Bolam crime series is published by No Exit Press, and his short fiction has appeared in top magazines and anthologies around the world.
Under other writing names, he’s the author of more than twenty books. His work has been shortlisted for various awards, and optioned for the movies, and for his young adult work he’s been described by the Sunday Express as “The king of children’s horror”.
Smashing interview, top writer.