An interview with Nick Kolakowski

Author of "The Man Who Hated Dogs"

Nick Kolakowski’s The Man Who Hated Dogs is the tale of an ex-pat American journalist living in Capri who finds himself asked to investigate a possible murder. If the details in this story seem especially vivid, it might be because Nick himself was once an ex-pat American journalist dispatched to Capri. (We can only assume the murder is of Nick’s own invention...)

Read on to learn more Nick’s experiences in Italy, his biggest challenge while writing this story, and how a ferry crossing the East River might have been just the inspiration he needed.

Spoilers ahead.

One of the things I loved about this piece was the setting. Capri is luxurious, and yet we meet the narrator in the city’s equivalent of a dive bar. What were your own experiences like in Capri? How did they inform and shape this story?

A long time ago, I was dispatched by a luxury magazine to cover a boating regatta in the Bay of Naples. It was a totally ridiculous affair, featuring all these scions of European fashion and banking fortunes showing off their mega-yachts. Meanwhile, I was stuck in this little hovel of a hotel on the backside of Capri, accessible only by foot, and my per diem from the magazine would barely buy a gelato. There were a few other journalists and photographers there, and we eventually found our way every night to a bar like the one featured in the story, a weird joint filled mostly with rich Russians. An interesting atmosphere, in other words, and of course my impulse is always to try to transform an interesting atmosphere into fiction in some way; it just took me around fifteen years to find the right narrative frame.

Where does a story like this begin for you? Do you start with a character, the crime, or something else entirely?

Not to go too much into spoilers, but I’d always wanted to write a mystery involving identical twins. When I was a kid, my parents had a pair of friends who were twin sisters, and they (the sisters) used to routinely prank people by pretending to be the other one. Somewhere around that time, I also learned about the Krays in 1960s London and how they used their twinhood to craft alibis for their crimes. Those are the kinds of ideas that stick with me.

I’m not quite sure why I ended up grafting together twins and Capri—I’m a big believer in the idea that one’s subconscious is constantly fiddling with things—but most of the story popped into my head fully formed one day when I was on the ferry crossing the East River. Maybe a part of me was worried the boat was going to sink underneath me, and my subconscious decided that was the moment to offer up what it’d been working on.

What was your biggest challenge writing this story? How did you find your way through it?

With mystery stories like this, there’s often a moment when an authority figure—a detective, usually—steps out from behind the curtain and explains the entire plot, showing how the crime was committed, revealing motive, and so on. This story has a moment like this, with someone stepping forward to explain a complicated scheme, but because it’s a short tale, time is also of the essence; your character explains things for too long, and it’ll bog down the pacing. I had some trouble shaving down that expositional element while ensuring it remained coherent, which was somewhat of a balancing act—I cut too much on an earlier draft, and only realized later that I was missing some vital pieces. Solving it was ultimately a.) a matter of having a beta reader with fresh eyes go through it, and b.) reading it aloud a few times to see how it flowed and timed.

What’s your revision process like? How far into that process is the central mystery and its solution more or less “settled?”

With this story, the central mystery was largely settled from the first draft, which was a bit of a relief—I’ve written other stories where I was tinkering with logistics, realizing that I needed to add this detail here or clarify that point there, until the pages were virtually ripped out of my hands. In general, I like to write a second draft where I make sure everything works from a story perspective, and then I’ll do two or three more drafts where I tinker with emotion, dialogue beats, length of exposition; it’s the equivalent of lightly shading in parts of a drawing once you’re done with the broad strokes. On my last draft, I try to pluck out the issues that inevitably creep into everything I write, like excessive repetition of certain words.

Your narrator could have just been motivated by money, but instead he sees the cash as a chance to write the “great ugly American novel.” How do you think about motivation as it relates to your characters?

Every character has a dream, just as we do. A character might be trying to get through the day and achieve a short-term goal, but they’re likely harboring a far grander fantasy in addition to that. Crime fiction is filled with aspirational folks who are willing to fight, steal and die because they want to become something magical. So, I always try to give my characters a big goal or dream that they want to achieve, something longer-term they’re working towards; it can give even the worst people a bit of sympathetic texture.

Did you do any additional research for this story, or did your experiences in Capri give you most of the background you needed?

I researched a little bit into the best way to scuttle a boat, but in the end, I didn’t need to rely on those details too heavily—the scuttling is reduced to a few lines. I’d say the story is largely based on my lived experience; fortunately, I constantly jot down details in notebooks I keep on me, so I was able to find my notes from Capri (stained with wine and cigar ash) and weave them into the narrative.

This story opens with a third-person account of the yacht accident before it transitions to a first-person narrator. I thought the effect was great—first the mystery hooked me, then the narrator’s voice. I’m curious how you came to structure the story this way.

That first section was written last. My first draft opened in the bar—it was a very traditional detective-story kickoff, the amateur gumshoe sitting there when someone walks through the door and delivers an exposition dump. When I re-read it, though, I felt like something was missing, that we needed more context on not only the crime but also Capri and its luxurious but vaguely seedy milieu. I knew that writing a section in the third person with an omniscient narrator, then shifting to the first person, would likely make a creative writing professor’s head explode, but I also told myself that the narrator is a writer and perhaps this first section is something he’s imagining/writing, which makes it a bit more layered and meta.

Will we see any more stories about these characters?

That’s a good question! I’ve written a few other short stories based in Italy—I lived in Florence for a very short time, and I visited a few other times over the years for work—and I suppose there’s always the chance I could bind them together at some point into an overarching “super narrative” of sorts.

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Nick Kolakowski is the author of several crime novels, including “Where the Bones Lie” and “Payback is Forever.” His work has been nominated for the Anthony and Derringer awards, and his short story “Scorpions” appeared in The Best Mystery and Suspense 2024. His short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, including Mystery Weekly, Shotgun Honey, Rock and a Hard Place Press, and more. Find him at nickkolakowski.com or right here on Substack.