In a groundbreaking crime novel, Black lives matter in the rural South

When you ask S.A. Cosby, one of the most exciting crime novelists I’ve read this year, what inspired him to become a writer, his natural storytelling ability quickly becomes apparent. “Blacktop Wasteland,” Cosby’s first novel with a major publisher, continues to perfect his highly original voice and perspective, dramatizing the complexities and contradictions of rural Black life. “It’s a character study within the framework of a crime story,” Cosby said of the novel. This is the territory of James Lee Burke and Ace Atkins, as well as Cosby’s personal influences: Joe R. Lansdale, for his ability to extract humor from the uniqueness of small towns, and Daniel Woodrell, whose “Winter’s Bone” Cosby admires for finding pathos and suspense in the close contact of rural life. It’s like an Alfred Hitchcock film, where suspense comes not from a bomb that kills two people in a café but seeing the bomb under the table, ticking away, and the two characters don’t know it’s there, but you do.” While drawing on that tradition, Cosby also wants to advance Black characters that are more nuanced than the stereotypes that provide comic relief or serve as “magical Negroes” — a phrase popularized by Spike Lee to describe characters whose only function is, as Cosby puts it, to “offer a beautiful piece of wisdom to help the white character on his or her journey… There are very few strong Black Southern characters that stand on their own two feet and create their own destiny in crime fiction.” By imbuing Beauregard and other characters in his fiction with the ingenuity, heart and steely resilience of the Southern Black men Cosby knows so well, he is building a new brand of Black masculinity that transcends place and genre.