THE MAN BEHIND THE RIPPER FILE
Nick Rippington
From Fleet Street to fiction.
Nick Rippington is the author of the Boxer Boys London gangland crime series — a fictional world surrounding the Dolan family and spanning more than fifty years of feuds, relationships, crime and consequences.
His books combine gritty British crime with family dynamics, suspense and characters whose pasts have a habit of catching up with them.
From headlines to hard-boiled crime
Before writing gangland thrillers, Nick spent much of his working life in British newspapers.
A national sports journalist with decades of experience, his career took him to the Daily Star and eventually to the News of the World, where he became the newspaper’s last Welsh Sports Editor.
Then everything changed.
Then his newsroom became a crime scene.
Nick was away on holiday with his wife Liz and their one-year-old daughter Olivia when news broke that Rupert Murdoch was closing the News of the World.
Nick had joined the newspaper long after the events that sparked the phone-hacking scandal, but the consequences ended his dream job almost overnight.
The offices were designated a crime scene.
Nick was never allowed back inside.
There was no final walk around the newsroom.
No clearing his desk.
Instead, he arranged to meet a colleague in a Wapping car park.
Everything Nick had left at work was handed to him there.
In a black plastic bin bag.
It was an extraordinary ending to one career.
And, eventually, the beginning of another.
And then came the Boxer Boys.
Independent and digital publishing were beginning to open new opportunities for writers.
Nick decided it was time to start the novel he had long wanted to write.
That book became Crossing the Whitewash.
Published in 2015, it introduced readers to Gary Marshall, Arnie Dolan and the Boxer Boys.
The book gained strong reviews and an honourable mention in the Writer’s Digest Self-Published eBook Awards.
But it wasn’t supposed to become a series. Nick had intended Crossing the Whitewash to stand alone.
The problem was that there were too many unanswered questions, unexplored relationships and characters with more story left in them.
So Nick went back.
Spark Out explored the Dolan family’s earlier history.
Dying Seconds continued the story.
Bare Lies took the Dolans to Spain.
And now Clearing the Table returns to Sly Dolan as a new generation threatens to drag the family back into danger.
Alongside the main series, The Jagged Scar takes readers into early-1970s Soho and younger versions of characters whose influence will be felt decades later.
Nick has also left the Boxer Boys universe entirely for Rabette Run, his standalone psychological thriller.
A journalist’s eye for detail.
A crime writer’s instinct for what gets buried.
Nick’s background has always been storytelling.
Newspapers demanded observation, pace, an eye for human behaviour and the ability to find the detail that makes somebody want to keep reading.
Crime fiction gives him somewhere very different to put those instincts to work.
The Boxer Boys may inhabit a fictional world, but the relationships at its heart — families, friendships, ambition, resentment, loyalty and betrayal — are recognisably human.
Because beneath the gangsters, violence and suspense, the question is often the same:
How far will somebody go for the people they consider family?
Praise
What They Say About Nick
“Evocative, original, unfailingly precise and often humorous.”
Writer’s Digest eBook judges
“Dirty, visceral, occasionally violent and yet engaging and strangely compelling. The author has a great street voice.”
IndieBrag Award judges
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Nick Rippington
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