Wednesday, August 11, 2021

Can an ex-offender go straight in a corrupt world?

 I’ve just read two mysteries back-to-back, one a cozy set in France and Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosbywhich is more thriller than mystery and set in Virginia. The experience gave me an opportunity to think why I enjoyed Cosby far more than the other.

True, I am comparing kumquats to cherries here. The cozy’s protagonist is a middle-aged English woman who buys a house in France and immediately finds a body in the swimming pool. This leads to an enormously complex puzzle involving feuding families, WWII betrayal, a dead card shark (whose decayed remains the protagonist finds on the house’s property), and a psychopathic villain who has been an innocuous minor character.

Cosby’s protagonist Beauregard (Bug) Montage is a middle-aged black man who spent five of his teen age years in juvenile detention for vehicular manslaughter and several years out of it as a getaway driver. He’s a master mechanic and a peerless driver (as police who tried to catch him could testify). Better even perhaps than his father who had to vanish after a job went sideways.

He’s gone straight. He misses the high of escaping from a job (it’s better than alcohol, better than drugs, better than sex), but he and his cousin are partners in a struggling auto repair shop. He’s married and the father of two sons. 

Unluckily, he’s behind on the shop’s rent which he will lose if he doesn’t raise the cash; his bitter, angry mother will be evicted from the nursing home to live with Beauregard, his wife, and the boys in their doublewide if cannot pay for her support; and his daughter by a teenage girlfriend needs college money. What does a former criminal do in such a situation?

In chapter one, Beauregard and Kevin participate in an illegal street race. Beau wins, but it’s a scam, he loses the $1,000 he brought to bet to fake county deputies, and he’s able to recover—with some violence—only $750. 

The chapter accomplishes several things seamlessly: We learn that Beauregard needs money. He can tell by the sound a car has a bad valve. He’s lightening on wheels. He’s able to recognize a rent-a-cop even with a gun in his face. He knows he’s been scammed. He knows where scammer would go to celebrate. He has no compunction about jamming wrench into the cheater’s mouth like a gag. He retrieves his $750 and doesn’t kill the guy. But now he’s $250 further behind.

Again, what does an ex-offender do in such a situation? One last job.

Beauregard teams up with a small-time white criminal who’s learned of a treasure of uncut, illegal and untraceable diamonds in a suburban jewelry store’s safe. Ronnie’s girlfriend knows how to turn off the alarm and the combination to the safe. Quick and out with Bug waiting in the car as the getaway driver. What can go wrong?

It should not spoil the book to tell you that things do go wrong, but thanks to Beauregard’s planning and exceptional driving skill, they escape unscathed. Ronnie’s fence buys the diamonds. Ronnie gives Beauregard his $80,000 share. He uses the money to satisfy the bank and save his business, to pay the nursing home, and to give his daughter enough cash for a year of college. And they lived happily ever after.

Spoiler alert: They don’t.

Last year, Cosby told a Los Angeles Review of Books interviewer, “I grew up in Mathews County, Virginia, on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay. While the setting of Blacktop Wasteland, Red Hill County, is not Mathews, it shares many of the same features. Red Hill is like a lot of towns in the rural South. Most of the jobs have left town on the first thing smoking. There is an unenforced social segregation. There is a black part of town and a white part. A wealthy part of town and a poor part. But the geographic details are important to the narrative too. Miles and miles of cornfields that separate you from your neighbors. Single-lane gravel roads that connect you to the main part of town like arteries where the light dies quick once the sun goes down. Red Hill is a dying town bleeding people.” This sense of place permeates the book. 

More significantly and what sets the book apart from the cozy are the characters. Cosby said, “I wanted Beauregard to be as fully formed a character as he could be.” He is. “I wanted to show that we are all multifaceted and full of different faces that we show to different people in different situations. Too often I think black characters are forced into supporting roles as either ‘magical’ characters long on wisdom but short on depth, or strong silent types that exist only as plot devices.”

Unlike the cozy in which I felt the author was moving pieces around the board to set up and work out the puzzle, Blacktop Wasteland’s story grows out of the place, the situation, and the characters’ response to their circumstances. The book is filled with violence, which, in my opinion, skirts with overkill, but the violence does grow out of what we know about these people and who they are.

Cosby has won honorable mentions in Best Mystery Stories and an Anthony Award for short fiction. Blacktop Wasteland is an impressive debut novel. I look forward to his next.

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