S.A. Cosby set out to be the next Stephen King. But he soon turned to a life of crime writing, and his latest noir caper, Blacktop Wasteland, may have pulled him in too deep to let him out.
“I love writing about crime because it’s something everyone can understand,” Cosby says. “The platform makes it palatable. But I’m trying to talk about identity, tragic and toxic masculinity, the unfortunate inheritance of violence…the way race and class is intertwined in small-town America and how that affects your choices.”
In Blacktop Wasteland, we meet Beauregard, a getaway driver trying to go straight. He’s a husband, a father, a legitimate businessman. But his circumstances have made him a criminal, and he needs just one more heist to pay his debts and clean up his act.
The conceit may sound familiar—“tropes and clichés are foundational narrative devices,” Cosby says—but in the deft hands of the author it takes us new places. While crime noir is often set in big cities, Cosby brings the genre to his own frame of reference, the rural South.
Big cities offer anonymity, Cosby says. In small towns, characters bump each other over and over. The narrative pressure builds. The climax explodes.
“Small towns have just as much intensity and just as much drama,” Cosby says. “People in small towns get taken for granted, but there is an intensity that is living in a small town, an uncomfortable intimacy.”
Cosby, who’s written one other crime novel and a handful of short stories, will present on two panels during the virtual book fest. On March 14, he’ll delve more deeply into his thoughts on rural settings for crime fiction. And on March 20, he’ll sit down for a chat with one of his heroes, Walter Mosley.
“I was in the audience for a lecture he gave about eight years ago,” Cosby says. “His two pieces [of advice] were, when you write about a crime, your characters need to be doing a lot of other things besides the crime. And, you need to write every day. I took the advice. Now, me and him are doing a panel. Man, it’s incredible.”