Meet Bryan Gruley

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Bryan Gruley. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Bryan below.

Alright, so we’re so thrilled to have Bryan with us today – welcome and maybe we can jump right into it with a question about one of your qualities that we most admire. How did you develop your work ethic? Where do you think you get it from?

My work ethic probably comes from my parents. My dad was a hard-working engineer who left a nice job with one firm to establish his own, and it became a huge success. It’s funny that dad worked so hard–not just on his company, but on our house and our lake cottage in northern Michigan–because one of his favorite sayings was, “This working shit is never gonna be popular.” My mother brought up six kids and managed my father, who at times was a seventh child. Through grade school, high school, and college, they encouraged me to work hard because, they promised, it would pay off. It did. And still does.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

After 41 years as a journalist at The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Businessweek magazine, The Detroit News, and a few smaller publications, I retired in 2020 and now devote my working time to writing novels. I’ve published six since 2009, am about to finish a seventh for publication next year, and have written two other novels that did not get published. I’ve also written a couple of fictional short stories that were published in small journals last year.

My novels are mystery/thrillers that I like to think are driven less by plot than deeply drawn characters. All the novels are set in fictional towns in Michigan, most of them in the northern part of the Lower Peninsula where I’ve spent a lot of time and now live with my wife, Pam. My latest, BITTERFROST, tells the story of Jimmy Baker, a former minor-league hockey player who quit the game after almost killing an opponent in a fight. Thirteen years later, he’s the Zamboni driver for an elite amateur team in his hometown of Bitterfrost, Michigan–and the prime suspect in a brutal double murder. Reviews of the book have been my best ever (4.6 stars on Amazon and 4.2 on Goodreads, plus a positive review in The Washington Post).

I’ve been writing since I was a second-grader at St. Gemma Elementary in Detroit, where I grew up. I always yearned to write novels, but I wasn’t ready when I graduated from the University of Notre Dame. I lacked the skill and, even more important, the life experience. I took a job covering just about everything for a small weekly newspaper in Brighton, Michigan, and gradually moved up to The Wall Street Journal in Washington, D.C., and Chicago. I shared in the Pulitzer Prize the WSJ won for coverage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. By the time I moved to Chicago in 2005, I was deep into the writing of my first novel, STARVATION LAKE. After twenty-six rejections, Touchstone Books at Simon & Schuster signed me to a three-book deal. The book was short-listed for an Edgar Award–the mystery/thriller equivalent of the Pulitzers.

Few things give me as much rewarding pleasure as writing a good scene, moving a story forward, even editing and rewriting (I love rewriting; many writers I know do not). I’m never going to be a NYT bestseller, a millionaire, or a celebrity, which is fine. As one of my good friends said to me recently, “You get to do what you love.” Amen to that.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

Curiosity was enormously important to my journalism: the ability and desire, actually, to question the world and dive into complex subjects with no prior knowledge and come out knowing things I never thought I’d know or care about. Examples: steel tariffs, tractor manufacturing, day trading, and of course the guy who guards hockey’s Stanley Cup when it travels from player to player in the offseason. Oh, and the guy in Manistee, Michigan, who killed a buck with his bare hands and a brown leather belt.

Journalism also taught me skills that have transferred nicely to novel-writing: Economy of words; Observation skills useful to drawing vivid scenes and characters; Editing skills that enable me (most of the time, anyway) to leave me ego behind and mark up my fictional tales with a ruthless belief that I’m making them better even as I’m tearing them apart.

I’m proudest, perhaps, of my perseverance. After reading the first third of my latest novel, BITTERFROST, my agent told me it was unsellable. I pushed on, encouraged by a number of beta readers who thought I had a great book. I sold it on my own to UK publisher Severn House, and they’ve since signed on for a sequel that’s due out in June 2026.

The most important thing to my journey, though, is the people who helped me, pushed me, criticized me, encouraged me, and taught me along the way, not least of all my wife, Pam. So many people to thank, going back to my mother, the first person to encourage to write; my seventh-grade teacher Sheila Brice; my college advisor and lit teacher, Bill Krier, through the many people who hired me and believed in me in my career.

Advice? Believe in yourself. Actively seek out people who believe in you and will help you swing for the fences. Don’t chase money; chase what you love. You’re gonna spend a lot of time doing it, might as well enjoy it.

Any advice for folks feeling overwhelmed?

I make lists. Really. When I think I have too much to do, I take a breath, sit down, and make a list of what I need to do soon, what I can do later, what I don’t need to do. Then I get going on those tasks. Making a list simplifies things. Often when I make such a list, I realize I wasn’t as overwhelmed as I thought. I do small lists every day. The real beauty isn’t what’s on the list, but what’s not on it, what I can confidently put off, knowingi I’ll get to it.

Contact Info:

Image Credits

Don Rutt (took the photo of me in a parka).

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