Meet the Author: Nick Louth

Nick Louth is the best-selling author of the DCI Craig Gillard crime series, the UK No.1 pandemic bestseller Bite, and a number of other standalone thrillers. Nick's latest release is The Body in Nightingale Park which was published by Canelo Crime. You can find Nick's books on our catalogue and in our e-book collection.

Who were your influences as you were growing up and did you have books around you as a child or use a library?

I grew up in a council house in Coventry with a wood opposite that stimulated my imagination and filled my dreams. The house was full of books, and my mother used to take my brother and I down to the library at least once a week. I was immersed in words as early as I can remember. I do remember my first day at school, when the teacher wanted to listen to each pupil read, she listened to me for less than five seconds before moving on to somebody else. I was really upset, and didn’t realise it was a compliment.

When did your interest in writing really develop and what was your journey to publication?

I wrote imaginative stories all the way through school, including one that was serialised in the magazine of my junior school. But strangely enough by the time I went to university I was heading in a different direction, I took a degree in economics at the LSE, and not getting a sufficiently good class of degree then became a computer programmer. I was probably the worst programmer in history. Everything I touched turned to dust, and one of my first programs brought the entire computer system for dozens of people to a grinding halt. After leaving ICL, where my bosses gave a huge collective sigh of relief, I did various minor editorial jobs including helping set up an economic service on Prestel, a precursor to the Internet. Writing and publication was still years in the future!

Before you became a novelist you worked for Reuters for 12 years interviewing business figures like Bill Gates and Jack Welch. What do you remember from that time?

I had a wonderful time. Reuters is like commando training for the rapid deployment of the English language to describe and explain news. I worked as a financial specialist in London, Amsterdam, Hong Kong and New York, involved in stories where you are timed to the second against competitors and which moved markets by the billions of pounds. On the busiest days I’d write 3,000 words, fitted around interviews and phone calls. It was exhilarating but stressful. By contrast, thirty years later, a deadline to produce two 85,000 word thrillers a year is almost relaxing.

Bite was ahead of it's time when you published it in 2007 ahead of the COVID pandemic. Where did you get the idea from?

I was covering a tropical diseases conference for Reuters in Amsterdam in 1991, and noticed that I was the only international journalist there, even though malaria alone killed 2 million people a year. The previous week I’d been at the AIDS conference, in the same city which was packed with journalists, and with pharmaceutical companies all of whom were jostling to try to find treatments for the relatively well off 50,000 or so people a year who were killed by it at that time. It seemed unjust the drug industry wasn’t interested in the bigger killer, and it was because the customers couldn’t afford to buy a life-saving product. I filled my contacts book with the details of the scientists I met, and thought to myself: ‘I’ll come back to this with a novel.’ It took more than a decade for that book to see the light of day, but it became a UK number one bestseller even though it was self published

Your DCI Craig Gillard books have been a big hit in Suffolk. How did you feel when you completed The Body in Nightingale Park?

The Body in Nightingale Park is the twelfth and (probably) last in the DCI Gillard series. I felt I needed to move to pastures new, particularly because the titles were beginning to get in the way of the mystery. Sometimes you want the location of the body to be unknown, and other times there is no body at all. Gillard was based in Surrey which makes it ideal for stories about the wealthy, but it hasn’t got the country’s best scenery. A move to Devon seemed to be in order!

Is there anything you can share with us about your new series for 2024 with DI Jan Talantire and when can we expect to start reading them?

I’ve deliberately made Jan Talantire quite different from Gillard. She is younger for a start, and actually made an appearance in book 3 of the Gillard series, The Body in the Mist. The fact she is female and I’m a male author brings its own level of challenge and complexity, but it’s one I relish. Fortunately I have a full set of female beta readers to put me right, as well as my wife Louise! For example, I now know exactly how to get my make-up off in a hurry when leaving a date to rush back to work. The first book in the series, The Two Deaths of Ruth Lyle, is slated for publication in May 2024.

We are always looking for good book recommendations. Aside from your own work what have you read recently that you really enjoyed?

I have to confess that I do not read as much crime fiction as I should, because I have a fairly heavy load of non-fiction research material on top of my own writing. However I have always enjoyed the work of Gillian Flynn (Sharp Objects is brilliant), the late Mo Hayder (do read Tokyo) and Erin Kelly (He Said/She Said).

Can you tell us one thing about yourself that your readers may not know?

I'm a county-strength chess player.