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The Book Review
S.A. Cosby on Writing Southern Crime Fiction
00:37:13
In S.A. Cosby’s latest thriller, “King of Ashes,” a successful and fast-living financial adviser is called suddenly back to the small Virginia hometown he fled, where his family runs the local crematory and his father is in a coma stemming from a car crash that may not be as accidental as it seems. Cosby himself is from a small Virginia town, and on this week’s podcast he discusses the allure of homecoming, the tricky emotional terrain of complicated families and the reason he keeps revisiting the rural South in his fiction.
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- [00:00]
Stephen King
New from legendary storyteller Stephen King. Never Flinch, a riveting new novel where vengeance has two faces. A killer on a twisted mission to murder 13 innocents and one guilty in the name of justice. A stalker in pursuit of a feminist icon. Two electrifying storylines and an unforgettable finale with fan favorite Holly Gibney caught in the crossfire. The New York Times says King raises the stakes and the body count as the twin plots converge with when the addiction is to murder. Never Flinch. Never Flinch. New from Stephen King, available in bookstores and online.
- [00:43]
Gilbert Cruz
This is the Book Review Podcast and I'm Gilbert Cruz. This week I have on SA Cosby, Sean Cosby, the crime writer behind all the Sinners Bleed, Blacktop Wasteland, and Razor Blade Tears. His new work is King of Ashes, and it's set in the state of Virginia, where Cosby is from and where his previous books have all been set. Sean, welcome to the Book Review podcast.
- [01:08]
SA Cosby
Thank you guys for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
- [01:11]
Gilbert Cruz
So to state the obvious, crime novels, thrillers, very hard to talk about because the plot, the twist, that's the whole thing. You don't want to mess it up. I don't want to mess it up for readers, so I'm going to have you do it. Tell us, who is Roman? Who's Roman Carruthers, the main character here in King of Ashes? And why does he need to go back to his hometown, Jefferson Run?
- [01:32]
SA Cosby
Roman Carruthers is the eldest child of the Carruthers family. He's the older brother to his middle sister, Nevaeh and his baby brother Dante. At the beginning of the book, he's living a pretty fantastic life in Atlanta. He's a financial advisor. He's living a very fun, exciting, hedonistic life far away from the ashes and flames of his family's business, which is a crematorium, an industrial crematorium back home in Virginia, Jefferson Run. At the beginning of the book, he gets a call from his sister Nevaeh that their father, Keith has been in a car accident and he's in a coma. So of course, Roman goes home. And once he goes home, he finds out that the accident may not have been an accident, and he learns that his brother Dante is involved with very dangerous criminals who's put the entire family at risk.
- [02:12]
Gilbert Cruz
Roman flees Jefferson Run. We learn later on in the book various reasons why, and of course, the way you write it, I understand why someone would want to leave this particular town, which we could talk about. But I found there's also Something universal here, which is the desire to want to leave home. And then the futility, perhaps, of trying to escape your family, of trying to escape your past, of trying to escape that place that you came from because you have become a success.
- [02:40]
SA Cosby
Yeah. And I think Thomas Wolfe said you can never go home again. I think there's some truth to that. But I think also you can go home again, but home is not what it was when you left. It changed, just like you've changed. But then in other ways, people still have preconceived notions about you when you come not even from a small town, just the place that you've known, the place of your birth. And so for Roman, it is a sort of difficult sort of journey to go back into the past, to go back into this place. Like you said, he escaped. That's a very good way of putting it. But he feels like he must because he loves his family. There's the duty and honor and love of family that drives him and draws him home. But, yeah, it's definitely a place where I think sometimes home can be very claustrophobic. And I grew up in a very small town. And the great thing about a small town is everybody knows everybody. And the terrible thing about a small town is everybody knows everybody. So those two things are dichotomous in the way that we experience life. And so Roman definitely is feeling all of that when he comes home.
- [03:37]
Gilbert Cruz
There's a quote in your new book. Someone says Jefferson Run used to be the number one producer of mason jars. Now all we make is orphans and widows. I'd love to hear about Jefferson Run, this small town in particular, and what in your mind, it evoked about other small towns in Virginia or places you've been to.
- [03:58]
SA Cosby
I think, for me, the biggest thing that I wanted to evoke with that, especially in small towns in the South. Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama. Towns where especially towns that were on rivers were big manufacturing hubs all through the south. They were places that made glass and windows and rubber and steel and textiles were huge in the South. And from what I've observed and the research I did, and just my own natural observations as a citizen is once manufacturing moved out of these places, these rural places, there was nothing left to replace it but crime. Crime is America's great secret industry. It's our great secret empire. And when the legitimate, quote, unquote, businesses leave, nature aboards a vacuum, so crime steps in to fill that place. And I wanted to talk about cities like that. Jefferson Run is based on a city in My home state, Petersburg. But Petersburg is not unique to states in the south, former industrialized or manufacturing hubs. I just wanted to talk about it in a way that I thought was sympathetic to the people that still live there. And also, I think, very honest about the pitfalls of gentrification, but also the incredible difficult way that poverty can infest your life, especially in a small town.
- [05:12]
Gilbert Cruz
I was watching the other day a panel discussion that you did, and you said, in reference to the attempt by others to put you in particular categories, you said, when you talk about Southern noire, I think it's just. This was great, you said. I think it's just this idea of crime fiction that takes place in a place where you can't get away from the people that you hurt. I thought that was a beautiful way to put it. And it seems like Jefferson Run is one of those places.
- [05:39]
SA Cosby
I do believe that about the difference between pastoral or rural crime fiction and metropolitan crime fiction. Again, I'll use New York as an example. I can get in a bar fight in Brooklyn and go into the Bronx and nobody will know what happened. Nobody will know anything about it. You're in a small town, there's only two or three bars. So if you get a bar fight at the bar on one side of town, by the time you get to the other side of town, everybody knows it. And you have to bear the weight of that. You have to bear the weight of people you hurt. Or let's say, let's take it outside of a bar setting. I knew of a case in my hometown where a very respected teacher had a car accident and she hit a little girl. It was a little girl's fault. She ran into traffic. But that teacher was never able to recover from that. The town made a judgment, even though the police didn't say it was her fault, even though the courts didn't say it was her fault, even though the little girl's parents acknowledged that it was her fault, the town collective decided that she was guilty. And in many ways it ruined that woman's life. You know, someone who had 20, 30 years as a pillar of the community. And because of the small town dynamics and because of the sort of. The sort of asphyxiating, claustrophobic tapestry that wounds itself around us in small towns, she was now pariah. I don't say that with any joy, but I did. As a writer, I like to examine that. I like to examine the idea of a town's collective memory of you. For me, that was really pertinent to what I was trying to say about the book and about small town life.
- [07:02]
Gilbert Cruz
I imagine as a writer too, it's very fruitful because it means that your characters constantly have to ping pong off each other and they can't just hit the road and head west.
- [07:14]
SA Cosby
Yeah. You're forced to develop coping mechanisms when things like that happen in an area that's small, in an area where everybody knows everybody, where everything is so interconnected. It forces you to develop an understanding of how to compartmentalize things. And that can be healthy and maybe not so healthy.
- [07:34]
Gilbert Cruz
This family, the Carruthers, are messed up. They're real messed up. And in part because they have hidden away stuff in the recesses of their mind, because they have compartmentalized things. Tell me about what it was like to write this particular family and the dynamics that they have. You have one son who became a success, went off to Atlanta. You have another son, he's a real screw up, stayed home. And then you have the sister who was the one who was burdened with keeping on the family business, this crematorium.
- [08:08]
SA Cosby
My friend Jordan Harper, who's a great novelist, he says to me, a lot of times, he said, you're an Old Testament writer. There's good and evil and there's right and wrong. And my previous books, it was much easier to write even the dark characters because there was a very strong line of delineation between these are the good guys and these are the bad guys. Even if the good guys are doing bad things, like with Black Dot Wasteland or Raised by Tears, where people are using violence to find information and blacktail wasting. The Bug is a very violent person, a very violent character, but he's doing it. There's almost this moral flexibility you could have with somebody like Bug as a writer, where he's doing really violent things, really dark things, but he's doing them for an ostensibly really good reason, try to protect his family, take care of them. Roman and Dante Nevaeh are trying to protect their family, but they're also psychologically very damaged people. There's a traumatic, and I don't think this is a spoiler. When they were kids, their mom disappeared. And in the small town, everybody thinks their dad killed her because she was having an affair. And he runs a crematory. So people put one and one equals two together. And so this is something that stained them their whole lives. And like you said, they, all three of them, are not dealing with it in very healthy ways. The challenge was to enter that headspace and enter a place that was truly morally Great. I get called a morally great writer a lot, but this is the first time where I felt like it was really apt. Because, you know, as you read the book, all three of these characters do things that push them further and further out of the gray and into the dark. And so it was very challenging to go into that space every time I sat down to write because I didn't have the comfort of my proximity to righteousness that I have in other books. All of A Sinner's Bleed is an incredibly dark book about serial killer, small town. But Titus is a good guy. He's the sheriff. He's the lead character. And so there's this sort of feeling I can do these really dark, horrible things because Titus is going to make it right at the end, or Bug is going to make it right at the end, or Ike and Buddy Lee are going to make it right at the end. And with this book, that's not possible. There's so much complexity, so much interconnectivity between these three siblings that making it right for one person would make it horrible for the other. It was all really a tightrope I had to walk to write it.
- [10:20]
Gilbert Cruz
Yeah, there definitely was a point early on in the book where one of the main characters does something, and I was like, wait a second. I thought I was going on this journey with this person, and now all of a sudden, this changes the whole thing.
- [10:34]
SA Cosby
Yeah. And it's funny, I get asked a lot, you know, how do you write such dark stuff? And I can process it pretty well. I was on a panel once with Dennis Lahane, and I'm paraphrasing, but somebody asked him that question. He said, yeah, I got to decompress and get away from the shadows when I finish writing. And actually, I just play with my cat. It didn't bother me usually, but this book, King of Ashes, was the first book where, yeah, I felt mentally drained. I felt very. I just felt like I had to step into the light a lot because it was just. And I used to work dark a lot, but it is. It's not just dark as a visual cue, but darkened tone and darkened sentiment, and it's a tragedy. That's not a spoiler either. And I'm a fan of tragedy. I love Shakespeare. But it's definitely a tragedy, and it definitely had more of an effect on me than I thought it would.
- [11:19]
Gilbert Cruz
The Carruthers family, as you noted, they own a cremation business. And there was one line here that, to me, was fairly evocative for reasons that'll be very obvious. Slushies were what their father called bodies in an advanced state of decomposition. Tell me about what you had to learn about this line of work and how maybe it was informed by work you have done in your personal life.
- [11:44]
SA Cosby
Yeah, so I. At one point, I worked around a funeral home, and I learned some of the lingo that the police officers use. And that's one of the things that police officers will say they'll call a body in advanced decomposition inside a body bait or slushie. And for reasons that I don't think polite conversation should involve. But there's stuff that happens to a body as it decomposes, and that would evoke the idea of the word slushy. I'm fascinated with the idea of secret cultures of, like, construction workers and brick masons and doctors and people who do physical stuff, but in a way that is so separate from the rest of society. And so I like the jargon that comes with it. I like the linguistic sort of gatekeeping that exists in those places. And so for me, it was really important to sort of evoke that. When you're talking about crematories or when you're talking about, like, with blackout ways and talking about cars, there's this certain shorthand that people that are into that sort of world use. And for me, to make it feel more realistic, to make it feel more natural, I wanted to invoke that and use that language and use that terminology. Like I tell people all the time, I don't need to know everything about a subject I'm writing about. I just need to know enough that it makes it sound realistic. I need you to believe me. I don't need you to write a dissertation on it. I just need you to think that I know what I'm talking about. So I just like to learn. And pepper enough in there that it feels familiar that you realize the characters are really in this world. It's not just affectation.
- [13:13]
Gilbert Cruz
I would imagine that a funeral home in a small town or a smaller town is the center of life in many ways.
- [13:21]
SA Cosby
It can be. I think in the past, it was more. I think as time has gone on. I don't work at a funeral home anymore, but I think as time has gone on, it has shifted to more of a utilitarian place. But it's still a place where you see people in their worst moments and everybody handles it differently. I think one thing you taught me before I left was a great deal of empathy for people. And not just empathy. When people are crying, everybody handles Grief differently. It's easy to be empathetic to someone who's crying on your shoulder. It's harder to be empathetic on someone who's acting out in rage, or someone who's angry or someone who's being very frustrating. But those persons still deserve empathy as well. So I think that's something I learned working there.
- [14:00]
Gilbert Cruz
That's exactly what I was going to ask, which was, what did you learn about people from working in a place like that?
- [14:07]
SA Cosby
The thing I took from learning about people is how resilient we all are. I lost my mom in 2021. And, you know, one of the things that my brother and I did was to tell funny stories. My mom was a character. She. And so working around a funeral home, you saw that. You saw people deal with that. Be resilient through comedy, through humor, through song, through just the hidden asides that we have within a family. That comes around to what inspired me to write King of Ashes, because King of Ashes, at its core for me is a family drama. It's a crime novel, but make no mistake, you know, trigger warnings are bound, but it's a family drama. And it's really a family drama about the hierarchy that exists in families and the roles that we're given. And sometimes roles we're given against our will. And so you see that in a funeral home, you see that, but you can also see that at a barbecue, you can see that at a reunion. But those roles exist. That hierarchy is real. And if anybody out there doesn't think so, talk to a family that has a bunch of kids and you'll see that really exists. And sometimes that can be something that doesn't affect us at all, or I should say, to a minimal extent. And sometimes it can be something that is really difficult to deal with. And I really wanted to talk about that. In a way, of course, I'm putting these siblings in an extreme situation, but I think if you plucked the Carruthers family out of King of Ashes, out of the crime genre, and just dropped them in any other literary genre, you would still have that sort of push and pull between the three of them trying to define themselves and trying to find their role within the family dynamic.
- [15:37]
Gilbert Cruz
The brother relationship here between Roman and Dante, it reminded me slightly of the relationship between the brothers of your last book, a little bit different, because as we said, Dante is a major screw up for reasons that are both his fault and not his fault. But how do you think about, maybe not in a diagrammatic way, but thinking about sibling relationships, they are so fruitful. In fiction, you can put so much in there, but really thinking about, okay, how do these two interact? And then these two and then the other pair, what is this triangle that I'm dealing with here?
- [16:15]
SA Cosby
That's an interesting question, because the brothers in all the Sinners Bleed are Titus and Marquis. Their relationship is very different than Roman and Dante. Marquis is, I would say, more of a near do well, but he's a person that can handle himself. Titus helps him, Titus protects him as much as he can. But you never feel. I never felt like Titus had to take care of Marquis. When you meet Marquis, he's already beaten up two people for talking trash about Titus. And there's a dynamic between him and Titus where they don't always get along, but they love each other in a way that's bereft of pity. They don't pity each other, they don't feel sorry for each other. They see each other as equals. And later, in all of a sudden, you see them talking on the porch and they're passing the moonshine jar back and forth, you feel that sort of sense of equality, that equanimity. With Dante and Roman, it's very different. Roman sees Dante as a burden in many ways. He loves his brother, but at the same time, he realizes that he's very damaged while not acknowledging his own damage, while running away from his own damage. But at the core of their relationship, even though sometimes Dante feels like a burden and Roman sees him as a burden, they love each other. They do. And all great tragedies only work if there's an actual feeling of love between the characters, between the people in the story. Dante and Roman love each other. And I did a thing in the book, and this is not a spoiler, at different moments, I had each brother talk about the other brother in a very positive way. Dante talks about how smart Roman is, how intelligent he is. Conversely, Roman talks about how charismatic Dante is, how easygoing he is, how he could just talk to people he's never met, a stranger, so to speak. So you see that even though they have a difficult and very fraught relationship, they love each other. And the two brothers fiercely love their sister. They love Nevaeh, they care about her. But it's also in a very sort of complicated and ultimate unhealthy way, because even though they love her, they feel like she's fragile, when really she's the strongest one among the three of them. So again, for me to design that sort of storyline, I had to get to a place where I Had to accept that these siblings love each other, but they love each other in a way that's not healthy and that's difficult to write about without slipping into a treacly sort of pitying narrative. And I didn't want that. And I tried really hard not to fall into that trap.
- [18:30]
Gilbert Cruz
There's another pair of siblings in this book. The villains in the book, the brothers who runs a local crime gang. The crime gang. That sounds weird. Is there something that. Is there a gang that's not a crime gang? Anyway, they run the local gang, they run the local outfit, and I have no idea if they love each other at all. One of them certainly loves his dogs. How do you write good villains like these guys?
- [18:55]
SA Cosby
So here's the thing about villains, and you hear this a lot, that villains think they're the hero in their own story. I don't believe that. I think villains know they're bad people. They just don't care. They're able to justify their bad behavior. I don't think villains tell themselves. Some villains do, but some villains will tell themselves, I'm doing this for the greater good. I like villains that are artists. I'm doing this because I like money. I'm doing this because I like power. And the Gilchrist brothers, Torrent and Tranquil, who are the villains? The main villains are very honest about why they do what they do. But even, like you mentioned, one of them loves his dogs. That creates a sense of humanity in them, that they're villains. They're probably sociopaths or borderline sociopaths, but they care about certain things and their relationship. While not outwardly affectionate, they do care about each other. And I wanted those brothers to be a mirror image of Dante and Roman. But I think for me, the secret of writing good villains is the villain has to be, or think he is as smart as your hero. Your hero is only as good as the challenge the villain presents. And you can't have villains that are just running around frothing at the mouth, the Snyder whiplash twirling, the mustache thing. Real villains, real human beings make real good villains. Because every villain I try to write, there's a moment where you would think, I hope you think, well, he's not so bad, or, she's not so bad. And then they do something horrific. Oh, God. That little sense of humanity, that little sense of revulsion that comes from seeing them as a person is what I think makes those villains come alive.
- [20:27]
Gilbert Cruz
We'll be right back.
- [20:43]
SA Cosby
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- [21:12]
Stephen King
New from legendary storyteller Stephen King. Never Flinch, a riveting new novel where vengeance has two faces. A killer on a twisted mission to murder 13 innocents and one guilty in the name of justice. A stalker in pursuit of a feminist icon. Two electrifying storylines and an unforgettable finale with fan favorite Holly Gibney caught in the crossfire. The New York Times said King raises the stakes and the body count as the twin plots converge when the addiction is to murder. Never Flinch. Never Flinch. New from Stephen King. Available in bookstores and online.
- [21:49]
Gilbert Cruz
Now that you are doing this for firmly for a living, I'm curious if you find yourself reading crime fiction thrillers differently. Not for pleasure, say. Although of course you read for pleasure all the time. But can you help yourself when you're reading a book? It's like, all right, the plot mechanics here, they did this with this character or this is how this writer parceled out this information, this reveal, this twist.
- [22:16]
SA Cosby
I still read for pleasure. I'm a fan of reading. I've been reading. I remember reading my first book when I was 4. So I love to read. I don't review books with a critical eye. I want to like them. I want to enjoy the story. However, I have been noticing in myself when I read a book that has a really good line, right? Or I read a book that has a really good plot set up because I'm the worst person in the world to go see a mystery movie with because I always figure them out.
- [22:39]
Gilbert Cruz
So when a book can fool me.
- [22:41]
SA Cosby
Yeah, I want to see I'm ruined. Glass onion for a group of friends that we want to see it and they were not happy. But. And I was right.
- [22:48]
Gilbert Cruz
It's a guy who goes to see the Sixth Sense in the first half an hour.
- [22:52]
SA Cosby
You're like, yeah, But I do enjoy when a book can fool me. I enjoy watching a write a writer like a magician, watching him set up the trick or set up the trick. I don't get envious. I find myself challenging myself when I read a really good Book like when I read Everybody Knows by Jordan Harper. I read Little Secrets by Jennifer Hillier. I read Missing White Woman by Kelly Garrett. Reading those books, these really interesting, good crime books that are doing multiple things that are crime books, but social commentary, sociological commentary. I find myself saying, okay, I gotta step my game up. Because the person I, you know, I respect is doing this at a high level. I want to be at that level. Okay. It makes me push myself, and not in a competitive way, but more, wow, that's really interesting what they're doing. I want people to feel that way about my book. So it's not a competition. It's more of a. I don't know, a camaraderie. But, yeah, I definitely see myself when I read books feeling that sort of, oh, this is really good. I gotta try to do something similar to this or on this same level.
- [23:55]
Gilbert Cruz
Like when people think of crime or thriller writing or they talk to those authors, they ask, you know, about plot, they ask about character. But I think often about what Stephen King wrote in On Writing. He was talking about a conversation he had with Amy Tan, author of the Joy Luck Club. And he said that she said, no one ever asked about the language. They asked about all the other stuff. Tell me I came up with this plot twist. Tell me I came up with this character. No one ever asked about the language. Maybe because it's harder to ask about the language. How did you write this sentence? But how do you think and how do you go through. The drafts of this sentence can be five times better. So I need to write it five more times.
- [24:38]
SA Cosby
I'll be honest with you. I hate revising.
- [24:40]
Gilbert Cruz
I thought writing was rewriting.
- [24:43]
SA Cosby
That's what everybody says, but I don't think so.
- [24:44]
Gilbert Cruz
Okay.
- [24:45]
SA Cosby
I'm a very instinctual writer. My first draft is usually not markedly different than my last draft. And I usually only do two or three drafts. I got stuff to do. But I will say this. There is something in the writing. There's something in the way a sentence sounds in your head versus the way it sounds when you say it out loud, that there's a space between those two things. And the better the sentence is, the closer that space becomes. And the better you make it, the closer that space become until it's imperceptible, there's no difference. So for me, a lot of my writing and rewriting is writing a good sentence, hearing it in my head and then talking it out loud, saying it out loud and finding the tone, finding the cadence and trying to replicate the cadence in the Written word, which is hard. And I use. I do little grammatical tricks. I use a lot of ellipses for pauses. I use commas. I want the writing to come off the page when you read it in your head, sounding like the way people really talk. Now, conversely, because I do a lot of third person omniscient narrator, I don't know if this is a trick or anything, but when I have people talking to each other, I use a lot of colloquial language. My dialogue, hopefully it's very realistic. And when I mean realistic, I mean it flows naturally, has a nice rhythm. But when I'm doing third person omniscient narrator, I purposely use very florid, almost purple prose. Because what I want to do, especially in the last two books, I want to separate the events that are happening real time in the book from the narrator watching it. I want you to feel like you're being told this story, this epic story of something that happened a long time ago. I want you to feel like you're sitting around a campfire. And so I want the narrator air quotes, the omniscient narrator voice to sound epic. Yeah, but when the people are talking to each other, it's important that they talk to each other the way people really talk to each other. I love being in a bar or a restaurant or any group of people and just listening to how people talk. Not so much what they're saying, but how they say it. And then I do my best to try to replicate it on the page.
- [26:49]
Gilbert Cruz
To use a word that you just used. Does crime feel epic to you, or are those the type of crime stories that you want to tell?
- [26:57]
SA Cosby
I often say that crime fiction is the gospel of the dispossessed. And calling it the gospel lends a sort of biblical epic credence to it. You read, I don't know, Darkness, Take my Hand by Dennis Lane.
- [27:08]
Gilbert Cruz
Right.
- [27:09]
SA Cosby
That book feels epic. That feels like a saga that's being told over the course of a long winter in Boston. You read Devil in the Blue Dress. These stories that I find the most captivating, the Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler or the chill by Ross McDonald or if you holler let him Go by Chester Hines. Books that really move me, that really touch me. They feel axiomatic. They feel like legend that are being handed down from one generation to another. And I strive for that. That sounds very egotistical or whatever, but I do. I want the story. When you finish it, I want you to feel like you've been told an epic tale. It's not The Iliad or Odysseus. But I definitely want to evoke that sort of multigenerational feeling, like something you won't forget for a while, and you reach for that. A lot of times that reach exceeds your grasp. But I don't think the joy is in achieving it. I think the joy is trying.
- [28:04]
Gilbert Cruz
You wrote an intro to a collection of work by Chester Himes, the great crime fiction writer who wrote many books set in Harlem. We excerpted that at the New York Times Book Review. And in that essay, you said this thing that you just said, which I did want to ask you to enlarge on, which is crime fiction as a gospel of the dispossessed.
- [28:24]
SA Cosby
The way I explain it like this, I love to read everything. For me, crime fiction is the great equalizer in literary fiction, right? So you can read American Stain by Philip Roth, and you may not understand or relate to an Upper Northeast professor who's passing for white. Or you can read A Thousand Acres by James Smiley, and you may not relate to a family that owns a huge farm in Nebraska. But those things have crime fiction elements in them. Because everybody understands what it's like to be afraid. Everybody understands what it's like to lie and to be lied to. Everyone understands what it's like to have this sort of sense of anger or rage and wanting to react and act out. Even if you're not someone who's ever been in a fight, you still get angry. And a crime fiction touches on all those things. The idea of calling it a gospel. For me, the gospel is not necessarily something that's true, but it's something that feels true and something that feels true in your soul. It's something that feels true in your very being. And for me, crime fiction speaks to people who are lost. It speaks to people regardless of your economic background or regardless of your social status. Crime fiction stories are about people again at the worst time of their lives, when their back is pressed against the wall, when they feel like they have no choice. And so when you read a crime story, people living that out, and it gives you something to relate to. And ultimately, crime fiction can be hopeful, it can be optimistic, even if it ends in tears. If those tears are earned, then it's just like I said, it has this evangelical feel to it. And it's this idea that I'm telling you this story as a parable. I'm telling you this story as a gospel. I'm telling you this story as a thing to give you wisdom that I've earned through blood. I Feel there's this idea that crime fiction is not literature or that it's not literary or whatever that means. Honestly, I feel like genre designations are just for bookstores. Because if you read Devil in a Blue Dress, you read, like I said, anything about Hayne, anything by Elmer Leonard, you read anything by Garth and he would. Or like books like that. You can't tell me that's not literature. You can't tell me that's not great writing. You can't tell me that's not a story that moves people. I had an interviewer ask me one time, are you doing great with the crime section? When you gonna write a serious book, though? And I'm like, I don't know, man. My crime section is pretty serious.
- [30:34]
Gilbert Cruz
No. What? Come on. Someone ask you that question? Yeah, that's a bad interviewer. That's a bad interviewer. I would never ask you that question.
- [30:42]
SA Cosby
I haven't taken a second interview with that person.
- [30:44]
Gilbert Cruz
I would never ask you that question. That's a terrible question. When you did the book reviews by the book series a few years ago and were asked, which subjects do you wish more authors would write about, you said, the fear of success and how family members can instill that fear in you. There's an existential malaise that can come with chasing your dreams. After you grab the brass ring, what do you do with it? That really stuck out to me and I wanted to know, was that from a personal place that you were answering that? Tell me more about that.
- [31:17]
SA Cosby
I am very aware that despite how hard I work, I do work hard at writing. Writing is fun for me. It's something I enjoy. It comes easy to me, but it's not easy, if that makes sense. So I do feel like I've worked at it, but I'm also aware that my career is very much the recipient of luck. Everybody is. Everybody's career is luck. You know Stephen King, we mentioned him earlier, who's a huge influence on me as a writer, but also as a person. He's lucky that somebody pulled the manuscript to carry out of the trash. I come from a very blue collar background. I was very poor growing up. There is such a thing as imposter syndrome. There's moments where I'll see something about myself or I'll get a good review or what have you, or I'll get a good royalty check, let's be honest. And I'll sit there and tell myself, wow, that really earned this. The people in my family, my father and my uncles, people that I knew they had Real jobs, they're working in sawmills or working on fishing boats and so on and so forth. And for a long time I had a lot of difficulty dealing with that, processing it. And I was very self deprecating in interviews to the point almost of toxicity. And a friend of mine, Jordan Harper, he said to me, he said, hey, man, I heard an interview. You did some interview I did. Well, I was very negative about myself. He said, stop doing that. Stop doing that. If what we do was easy, everybody would do it. What we do is special. What you do is special. Accept that. He said, don't do yourself a disservice. Don't do a disservice to your talent. It was very difficult for me to sort of deal with it. I did feel like the dog who chased the car and caught it. Now what do I do? And it was very challenging. Razor Blade Tears was my first, like, New York Times bestseller. And so when I went to write, all of a sudden this bleed, I struggled. I struggled psychologically. I got depressed because it was like, it's got to do what Razor Blade did. It's got to do a Razor Blade did. And a good friend of mine, Eric Pruitt, gave me a good piece of advice. I've never forgotten it. I have it written on the wall in my office. He said, this next book, it ain't got to be as good as Razor Blade. It just got to be good. And I've tried to take that forward with me as a writer, as an artist. But on a personal level, money doesn't change your character. It reveals the character of people around you. That's what I've learned. So it's been very difficult in ways, don't get me wrong, my family, my extended family have been very supportive of me. But there are also people in my extended family who think, oh, well, now you're a New Time bestseller. Well, buy me a car or do this for me or whatnot. And I've also, I've had difficult conversations with friends, fellow writers who came out the same time. We're in the same graduating class in a way. And it's been difficult. It's been difficult. And nobody ever comes out and tells you, I'm jealous of you. I don't think you deserve it. It's not that. It's not the conversation you have. The conversation you have is, wow, you could print your grocery list now everybody will buy it. It's sort of that sort of passive aggressive.
- [33:57]
Gilbert Cruz
Yeah.
- [33:58]
SA Cosby
Dismissal of the hard work. You know, when you say that it's you don't realize I'll be up till 3 o' clock. I used to work a job at a hardware store where I had to get up at 6 and go to work. So I'd write on my lunch break. I'd write at night again. It's just one of those things. It's human nature. Not everybody's like that. And the people who are really, I think, close to you, the people who are really your friends, celebrate your successes. Somebody told me one time, envy is me wanting what you have. Jealousy is me wanting what you have and thinking you don't deserve it. And I've had more people that are friends that are happy for my success than people who think I don't deserve it.
- [34:35]
Gilbert Cruz
I've often thought one of the worst things that could happen to you is winning the lottery because all your relationships are screwed forever. It's like no matter who's in your life, every family member, every friend, there's going to be something that goes on or they want money or they want something, or they're looking at you a different way.
- [34:52]
SA Cosby
It's funny too, because when you do have a successful book or a successful series of books or what have you, it almost feels like people take. They think you don't have the right to complain about stuff anymore. Like you can be in a bad mood or you're in a bad mood for it. When you on TV the other night. Yeah, but my cat threw up all over my kitchen and now I got to clean it up. I'm still that person, but at the same time, I am very. I'm incredibly grateful for everything that's happened to me as a writer. I never thought my books would have the level of success they had. I always thought I would get published though, because I'm too stubborn to quit. But I'm very grateful to readers, to other writers who have. Have mentored me and shepherded me and writers that. Here's the thing I'm gonna say about that. What I've learned is when you meet a really successful writer, especially one in your genre, they are the coolest people in the world because they understand how hard you're working to get there. And so they extend that hand down to pull you up real quick. I just wanna tell two real quick stories.
- [35:45]
Gilbert Cruz
Sure.
- [35:46]
SA Cosby
One, there's a writer named Craig Johnson who writes the Longwire series. And I had a book come out, an independent book come out a few years ago called My Darkest Player. I didn't know Craig Johnson at the time. I never met him. But Somehow that book got into his hands. And he talked about on his website, he said, I don't know this essay Cosby dude, but this is a really good book. You should search this out. He didn't know me. He didn't have to do that. I'll never forget that. And then Walter Mosley didn't know who I was, didn't know me from a hole in the ground, gave me one of the best blurbs for Blackout Wasteland. And he legitimately, years later, I talked to him. He said it was a good book. I really liked it. And I've tried to do that. Now that my books have done, has had some level of success, I do that. I try to reach and pull other people up. Because the thing is, you think publishing, before you get into it, is this finite pie with a limited number of slices. And once you get into it and you see just how much money is actually flowing through the publishing world, you realize it's a cake and it's a slice for everybody. You don't have to hoard your slice to keep it for somebody else. And also, I'm selfish. I'm a reader. I like good books, so I want other people to talk about them.
- [36:50]
Gilbert Cruz
You have talked about how your mother was a writer, but obviously she needed to raise her family, so she didn't have the time to devote to it. I'm wondering what, if anything, you learned about writing from her.
- [37:06]
SA Cosby
It's so funny. There's this idea that when you get rejected, you sort of have to lick your wounds and take from the rejection what you can, the positives, or maybe I need to work on that. My mother had a very healthy ego about her writing. And when she would get a poem rejected, she was like, they're going to regret that. They're going to regret it. And I don't think I have that level of ego, but I do have a level of. I think I'm pretty good at this. I think I'm not as good as other people. There are a lot of people I think are better, but the things I do well, I think I do them pretty good. And if you don't publish my book, especially when I first getting started, I felt, if you don't post my book, yeah, you're going to regret this, because this is pretty. This isn't. I'm not saying I'm Shakespeare. I'm not saying that I'm Thomas Wolf or anybody like that, but it's pretty good. I think that you're making a mistake not to publish them. She gave me that. She gave me that sense of self. Not to be braggadocious, but just to understand. This is your thing, being able to put words together in a cohesive way. Not everybody can do it. So, you know, you don't have to toot your own horn, but you can definitely blow a harmonica every once in a while.
- [38:19]
Gilbert Cruz
You know what, Sean? I think your books are pretty good. I think your books are pretty good. Thank you for joining the Book Review Podcast to talk about your new one. It's been a pleasure.
- [38:27]
SA Cosby
Thank you all for having me. This was great. Really enjoyed it.
- [38:32]
Gilbert Cruz
That was my conversation with SA Cosby about his new novel, King of Ashes. I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review. Thanks for listening.
- [38:52]
SA Cosby
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