The LineUp #author Nicholas Timms

 A killer on the loose. A surfer out of his depth ...

Bo Curren was once a champion surfer. Now, at twenty-eight, he’s all washed up – unable even to set foot near the ocean.

Instead, he spends his days alone in his apartment, drowning his sorrows in whiskey and watching surfers on his laptop via the 24-hour surf webcam.

Then one day he sees something he shouldn’t. A camera trained on a deserted Byron Bay beach picks up a murder right there on the sand.

The police dismiss his report, and no bodies are found. Yet Bo knows what he saw.

And he has a clue: the murderer’s distinctive surfboard. If he can track that down, he’ll catch the killer.

But is he ready to dive back into a world where the rules are unspoken, outsiders aren’t welcome, and where secrets can be as dangerous as the waves?

Author Nicholas Timms ... a mystery writer and lifelong surfer. Raised in Byron Bay, he spent his teenage years competing in boardriders comps and honing his writing.

To connect with Nicholas ....
https://www.instagram.com/nicholastimmsauthor/
https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-lineup-9781761358746 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Good morning, Nicholas Tims. Welcome to Yellow Shelf.

SPEAKER_01 0:07

Hello, thank you so much for having me.

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Ah, my pleasure. Congratulations. Debut author. I love supporting debut authors. Your book is available right now for pre-order, but pretty much next week will be available on the shelves. Congratulations, the lineup. Tell us all about it.

SPEAKER_01 0:25

No, thank you so much. It's very exciting. So the lineup, yes, is my very first uh you know fully published novel. I've obviously had a few in the in the bottom shelf practice and stuff, but this is my uh my first proper one, my first attempt at a crime novel, which has always been my my passion point. Um and it kind of combines my two passions of, I guess, you know, crime or mystery fiction with surfing. So I grew up as a uh as a young surfer in Byron Bay. I grew up as a competitive surfer there, um, entered a lot of local competitions, did pretty well for myself as a teenager, um, but you know, didn't ever really make like the pro leagues or anything, but it was just a big sort of part of my life. Um, so it's just a book about a um uh a crime in the world of surfing. So essentially it's about Bo Curran. He is a former washed-up pro surfer, and he now kind of spends his days watching the live surf webcams. They're a very common thing in the surf world where you can kind of check out a break live. Um, and as he's watching one of those surf cams one day, he witnesses a murder on the sand. So it's a little bit like that rear window kind of uh, you know, bystander seeing this murder they can't do anything about. And so he sees this distinctive pattern on the killer's surfboard. And so because he's seen that and he couldn't see any other identifying features, nobody believes what he saw. He has to go back to his old hometown of Byron Bay in order to uh find whoever owns this surfboard and and hunt down the killer. So uh it's a really fun story. There's a lot of tension, there's a lot of uh lot of, I guess, you know, um hunting down suspects and and high-intensity ocean scenes, and and this this character who's lost his passion for surfing and is now afraid of the ocean, having to get back into the ocean in order to hunt down the killer. Um so it's this it's it's a really, really fun crime story in a kind of setting that's not usually there in crime stories. Um and uh and it's also just really nice celebration of of uh of grief finding yourself again after after a traumatic event. So yeah, really love the story and I'm really excited for it to be out.

SPEAKER_00 2:23

Yeah. And it's been described as a suspenseful thriller with themes of um, you know, aggression, even tribalism in that um, you know, surf culture. Um uh I live on a coastal town, so I feel like I know a bow. Do you know that washed up surf bar? We all no matter where we are watching, if we if we uh live in the coast, there's there are those characters. We know those people.

SPEAKER_01 2:52

100%, yeah. And it's the same for me growing up in Byron. So surfers have this kind of you know, this classic vision of the kind of laid-back guy with the long blonde hair and they're and they're chill and they're and they're calm, but it can actually be a very aggressive culture. Like when I was growing up in Byron, you'd always see um on the rock face of the past, which is one of the main point breaks there. Uh, you know, like spray paint job, like being like locals only, you know, like and you kind of see that a lot of beaches, this this intense localism and and kind of slight hostility towards out of towners. Um, and I myself was threatened with violence every now and then in the ocean, even though I was I was local myself. So it does happen. So I really liked this idea of kind of showing off a bit of that aggression. It is definitely a thing in the surfing world in some beaches. Um, so a lot of the villains or the suspects that Bo talks to have that kind of dark edge behind the chill surfer facade, which I really really thought was cool.

SPEAKER_00 3:44

Yeah, great. And Nicholas, do you want to tell us a little bit about you? So you mentioned there's there's previous work sitting on a shelf, not necessarily published. Sounds like you you've always loved writing. Do you want to tell us a little bit about what inspired you to dive in as an author?

SPEAKER_01 4:00

Yeah, of course. So I think I always want to be one from you know, like eight, nine years old when I was, you know, reading Goosebumps books in the in the school playground. Like I think, I think that's what's kicked off my love of sort of suspense and kind of the more horror type genres. Um, and then you know, just became an avid reader throughout my teens. I always wanted to be a writer from there, and I was always kind of writing short stories. I remember I had this um this little like how to write horror stories kit that I bought when I was like 10 years old that had like a little pen looked like a skeleton fingers, and it taught you all about how to write dialogue and how to how to write stencil scenes and things. So I think it's always been baked in there. I did kind of lose the passion for, not passion, but like the drive for creative writing as I entered the professional world. I started working as an advertising copywriter, um, which is work I really love. Um, and it does allow you to kind of write creatively on a day-to-day basis. Yeah. Um yeah, but but I think I I kind of focused on that for a few years in my 20s and then and then kind of let the dream of you know authorship fall by the wayside. Um, but then I I kind of fell into a job where I honestly didn't have much going on throughout the day. So I was just like, I need a bit of a creative outlet. I've kind of lost that creative outlet. So I I I didn't write during work, but after work, I was like, gosh, I just need some sort of outlet. So I I started writing one book and and um then I wrote another book, and then while I was writing that, I came up with the idea for the lineup. I was like, oh my gosh, that's like that's like a big idea. So I kind of I kind of parked that other novel and and after work again, I just I just you know crack at a thousand words a day, just keep going. Um and eventually got there. It all just came from a place of I remembered that that passion I used to have and that idea of wanting to be a writer as a kid uh that I kind of lost when I when I became an adult. And and it just took a bit of a job to remind me I kind of needed.

SPEAKER_00 5:44

Yeah, what a wonderful journey story to to to get to being first-time uh debut now published author. Amazing, Nicholas. Nicholas, do you want to tell us if we're watching anywhere in the world, if we're curious about you, curious about the book, I follow you on Instagram. But do you want to point us in a direction of where we should go to check you out?

SPEAKER_01 6:06

Yeah, look, I think I think Instagram is the best. Uh Nicholas Tim's author is the tag, uh, and the same tag on TikTok as well. Uh you know, I I kind of use those as my two-man channels. I like to share little updates about the writing journey when the book's coming out. I like to share little just observations like how how bad Microsoft Word can be sometimes. Just like little observations about the writer's life. So um, yeah, that's probably the best place if you want to see updates about the book and see when things are coming out, when events are coming up. So that's the best place for sure.

SPEAKER_00 6:35

Fabulous, Nicholas. Thank you for sharing with Yellow Shelf. I'll put those links in the show notes to make it easy for anyone to connect with you. Uh, enjoy this journey of first time author. I know, I have no doubt you'll keep writing. And if you if you would like to, you're always welcome back on Yellow Shelf sharing future work.

SPEAKER_01 6:53

Thank you so much, Joe. It's been a blast. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 6:55

Cheers.