The side door to the church opens just as Shawn A. Cosby, the best-selling crime novelist known as S. A. Cosby, finishes describing his current main character’s sexual kink.

One of the church trustees, a model of the kind of female efficiency that has powered Black churches like this one since emancipation, bustles in. This is Emmaus Baptist, Cosby’s home congregation in Mathews, Virginia, nestled between two roads not far from the Tidewater cities of Williamsburg and Gloucester, where Cosby now resides. Inside, the Cosby name is everywhere. Just minutes before, Cosby’s fingers had traced a simple pencil drawing in a back room behind the pulpit. The illustration, by his niece, depicts the church’s family tree, which overlaps with his own. The names of the founding fathers, who organized the church a few years after the end of the Civil War, top the lattice of angular branches. Cosby’s great-great-grandfather Gabriel, a once-enslaved carpenter, built this house of worship.

After a minute of warm chitchat, the trustee turns and says, “I always knew he would do something great, because he sacrificed to take care of his mama.” That sacrifice—dropping out of college to attend to his sick mother—didn’t come easy. It slowed his trajectory as a writer, one that in the past five years has hit warp speed, landing him accolades aplenty along the way: a 2020 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, for his breakout novel, Blacktop Wasteland; a Dashiell Hammett Prize, which honors literary merit in crime writing, for 2021’s Razorblade Tears (which also made it onto President Barack Obama’s summer reading list); multiple spots on the New York Times bestseller lists; and kudos from his idol Stephen King. He’s scored million-dollar book advances and, most recently, a three-book deal that begins with King of Ashes, which his publisher, Flatiron Books, is using to launch its new Pine & Cedar imprint. And while King doesn’t come out until June 10, Netflix has already snagged the rights for the novel, thanks to a bidding war won by Michelle and Barack Obama’s production company, alongside Steven Spielberg (who was reportedly so keen to acquire the book that he personally weighed in on negotiations).

Even so, leaving college still evokes mixed emotions. Looking back at that time, Cosby, who is now fifty-one, says both filial devotion and the subtle coercions of kinfolk played into his decision. He now recognizes that having a choice doesn’t always equal freedom—despite the frequent conflation of the two concepts. His parents had what some call a “country divorce,” where they lived separately, down the road from each other, without legal formalities. His older brother was doing his own thing. The baby brother somehow became the responsible one. “I still have trouble when I think about [becoming a caregiver] because [my mother] encouraged me to drop out. I think she was getting afraid because of her mobility issues.”

His mother—a teacher’s assistant who eventually had to use a wheelchair full-time—died in 2021, but she always stoked his boyhood imagination. She made her two sons solve riddles and told them vivid myths. Her brilliance both contained and structured his creativity, as did his family’s reading habits. He learned such words as tumescent from his grandmother’s Harlequin romances; consumed his aunt’s Stephen King paperbacks and issues of Bronze Thrills, a tabloid for Black readers chockablock with slightly tawdry tales of bigamy and promiscuous preachers; and lingered with his uncle’s copies of classics by Chester Himes and Raymond Chandler. The characters in Cosby’s novels reflect those influences—a Black father and a white father avenging the murders of their married sons; a Black sheriff wrestling with what it means to be the Man; a fixer who wields righteous violence to protect the innocent when the law fails or declines.

Sitting on a red-cushioned pew at Emmaus, Cosby recalls that his mother “would say that I would complain about the plot holes in the fairy tales. ‘Why didn’t all the three little pigs just build all their houses out of bricks in the first place?’ One day, she got frustrated. She’s like, ‘You know what? Write your own story!’” When he did and read it to her, “that look on her face, when she realized I had written it by myself—I do think I’ve been chasing that look.” She was also a poet, and Cosby pauses for a beat. “There was a moment where she realized that I had a talent for writing,” he muses. “I think she felt…I don’t say envious. But there was a conflict there.”

Fittingly, familial duty too drives Cosby’s latest and fifth novel, King of Ashes—Cosby acknowledges it contains a soupçon of autobiography. And if history repeats itself, the novel will become another summer smash for the author, who has garnered a reputation for pushing crime fiction out of urban landscapes and into the rural, Black South.

Despite his relatively newfound acclaim, Cosby remains modest to a fault, sporting a uniform of a hat pulled low on his brow, flannel button-downs, jeans, and a single chain around his neck. That humility has endeared him to his crime-writing peers, even as his improbable literary ascent has become a sometimes-tiresome legend of its own. Take, for instance, the time a progressively drunk book-world person kept approaching him at a literary gala to ask: “You never went to college?” “You grew up in a trailer?” “You don’t have an MFA?”

All that is true. Cosby is an autodidact writer who learned from reading (John Berendt’s dark Savannah epic, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, is a central text for him). He is also the working-class son of a commercial fisherman, who is still alive and has all his son’s books. He did grow up partly in a trailer. After he left college, his husky build landed him a job loading at Lowe’s, where over a decade he moved up the hardware store’s ladder to become a manager, and then he began working at a funeral home his family owned.

He would write on his breaks, but finally caught one when a belly-dancer friend connected Cosby with Todd Robinson, a bartender and the founder of the now-defunct crime fiction journal Thuglit. At that point, Cosby wrote using a jacked-up word processing program “with bonkers formatting” because he couldn’t afford better software. Despite that, Robinson saw promise in Cosby’s prose—and in the noir fodder available at the mortuary—right away. “There was a bit of rawness to the writing,” he recalls, “and a clear talent” that other editors and agents might not have perceived if they didn’t look beyond the messy manuscript. Plus, in Robinson’s view, Cosby’s writing challenged a genre playing it a little too safe.

The Southern noir that ruled then “had no dirt under its fingernails,” Robinson says. The story Cosby submitted was grimy with it. And so Robinson published Cosby’s “The Rat and the Cobra” in 2014. The tale follows two brothers, one a killer who once snapped a man’s arm “like a breadstick” at a carnival, and one keeping a secret from his wife (named Joyce, like Cosby’s mother). But before he did, as Cosby remembers, Robinson reached out and reassured him: “Hey, just so you know, you ain’t got to write about white people if you don’t f **king want to.” (“The Rat and the Cobra” remains Cosby’s only “story about two white boys”—in part a strategy to help get the story published.)

Robinson demurs when people say he took a chance on Cosby; Cosby credits Robinson with giving him the entrée he needed, as well as friendship and frank editing. When Thuglit ceased publishing in 2016, Cosby was in the last issue, having finally gotten a foothold in the industry. An indie outfit ended up publishing his first crime novel, My Darkest Prayer, and during a panel at 2018’s Bouchercon mystery conference—at which Cosby gently but firmly admonished a woman who praised the antebellum South—he drew the attention of a New York literary agent, Josh Getzler. Cosby gave Getzler the beginnings of Blacktop Wasteland. He was on his way.

In King of Ashes, the protagonist, Roman Carruthers, reluctantly returns home to the fictional Jefferson Run, Virginia, after a suspicious car accident renders his father comatose. In the Black bourgeois mecca of Atlanta, Roman had carefully tended to the fortunes of the city’s rap riche as a financial adviser. But he’d neglected his family and its crematorium business, operated by his father and sister, Neveah; he seeks absolution from the guilt (and pleasurable pain) from a Buckhead dominatrix. Indeed, Neveah resents Roman’s absence and the assumption she will take care of everything. That includes managing their younger brother, Dante, an affable man-child whose attempt to prove he’s not just mooching off the family legacy lands the siblings squarely in the crosshairs of Jefferson Run’s own Cosa Nostra: the Black Baron boys, led by brothers Torrent and Tranquil Gilchrist. In the eyes of the drug lords, Dante’s debt amounts to a family obligation. In dealing with them, Cosby says, Roman has to decide whether he’d “rule in hell rather than serve in heaven.”

Jefferson Run is part Mathews, but more based on Petersburg, Virginia, a city just south of Richmond and one as plagued by gang violence as, say, In the Heat of the Night’s fictional Sparta, Mississippi. As industry divested from Petersburg, drug traffickers moved in, and by 2020, the city of thirty-three thousand had the highest homicide rate in the state—and particularly brutal ones (one 2018 victim had been drywall-taped to his porch, but the crime scene evidence stretched for a block). Stories from a funeral biz colleague there fired Cosby’s imagination; one family, Cosby heard, had paid for a memorial with blood-speckled cash. The Petersburg gangsters provided the foundation for the Black Baron brothers and their diabolically inventive and byzantine torture methods (King of Ashes finally allowed Cosby to use an idea about a victim being fed human chitterlings, the intestines of a relative).

As Cosby drives slowly through Mathews in his black bullet of a Dodge Challenger, he points to the landmarks of the place that made him. The pizza parlor where he hung out after school. A gold-painted lowrider of a house where his Uncle Buck used to live. The canary-yellow trailer, which he prefers not be photographed. A lopsided cross still hangs in what was his mother’s bedroom window there, reigning over a seemingly prehistoric mulberry tree.

A few miles down the road, a trio of statues stand sentinel across from the local middle school: one of an oysterman, one of a Civil War widow, and one of Donald Trump, avatars of times past and a present of political animosity. If King of Ashes ups the ante on violence and moral ambiguity, it’s because Cosby acutely feels that this moment has bred a pandemic of dangerous, weaponized meanness. He’s felt it in Mathews, a town roiled over its Confederate soldier statue and a stuttering economy. As a result, he’s shifted away from his previous novels’ usual ideas of justice and protagonist gunslingers who are “good people doing bad things for good reasons.”

If it all sounds Shakespearean—dueling families, rotting kingdoms, missing mothers, positively Freudian parent-child relationships—that’s no accident: Cosby is a fan of the Bard’s theatrics and penchant for preventable tragedies. “A lot of Shakespeare—Lear, Hamlet—hinges on people not talking to one another,” Cosby says. “And a lot in [King] would’ve changed if people had just said, This is what happened.”

Jordan Harper calls King of Ashes operatic in its ambition. Cosby and Harper, a Los Angeles TV writer whose credits include CBS’s The Mentalist and the author of the award-winning novel She Rides Shotgun, have a literary bromance that began at a Bouchercon. They bonded over the desire to push crime fiction into less-traveled places, literally and figuratively (Harper comes from the Ozarks and set some of his early work there). The two call each other just to read a banger of a sentence, conversations in which the famously humble Cosby allows himself a little braggadocio to say, “Listen to this!”

“Shawn is always pushing toward a mythic mode of storytelling,” Harper says, “where these characters feel very human but also larger-than-life. But it’s not just the content of the book that is ambitious; it’s the desire to switch modes and forms. He’s done the heist novel. He’s done the revenge book. He’s done a more traditional mystery. Now he’s [doing something] completely different. This big family crime story in the mode of The Godfather.” As Harper says, there’s a certain skill to nailing down a style as a writer and sticking to it. And there’s yet another in not writing the same book over and over again.

As we rumble through Mathews, kids gesture to Cosby’s muscle car, a 2023 birthday gift to himself. As they point at it, he points at the old apartment building where he once escaped through the woods to avoid a contretemps with a paramour’s boyfriend. These days, he’s about to move into a new house. Then he’s headed to Savannah, where he’ll guest-teach a college class about dialogue. He no longer writes in coffee shops. Fans follow him at literary conferences.

None of his success, however, has diminished Cosby’s drive—or his memory of how long it took, and how many challenges he had to overcome, and how many book proposal rejections he faced (more than sixty) to get here. White male “grit lit” writers dominated crime fiction in the Dirty South for decades, before Cosby and Attica Locke, a Houston native who wrote an acclaimed series about a Black Texas Ranger, changed the scene. The Mississippi-born writer Kiese Laymon helps puts the dearth of Black Southern crime writers like Cosby in perspective, explaining that those in the publishing industry often urge Black writers to stick to realism. But, he continues, “there’s something about folks not believing [Black people] read crime fiction when it’s literally something we love.” He argues, for example, that Richard Wright’s seminal book Native Son “is essential crime fiction.” For his part, Cosby has noticed more Black readers at his events (he chuckles disbelievingly recalling one woman who swooned at his voice).

In 2020, Booklist, the American Library Association’s book review journal, featured an image of Blacktop Wasteland—the jacket of which includes a Black man—on the cover of its crime fiction issue. Readers balked at the image being paired with the headline “Spotlight on Crime Fiction,” concerned that it reinforced negative stereotypes, and the magazine reprinted the issue with a new cover. Cosby later wrote in the American Library Journal that even his family’s copy of Alex Haley’s Roots didn’t picture a Black person on the cover, and he realized his novel was “a bit of an anomaly. It’s a crime novel set in the rural South, written by a Black man. There is a Black lead character who is fully realized and complicated, not a magical amalgamation of virtues and vague platitudes.”

Then there’s the editor who refused to believe “all this stuff that happens in any of your books.” Nothing happens in small towns, according to big-city bias. But “everything that’s going on everywhere else” is happening in the hamlets and the hollers, Cosby says, and it’s often amplified because of proximity and familiarity. Everybody knows your cousin, if they aren’t your cousin. And your cousin might be like one of Cosby’s, a low-level drug dealer who took a teenage Cosby along for the ride when he went to collect a debt.

The relative later told Cosby he wouldn’t be invited on a second errand. Cousin “Books,” he knew, had a different future ahead.

True Grit

The author’s essential reads, along with his new novel

My Darkest Prayer (2019; reissued 2022)

One need only pick up Cosby’s debut novel (first released by an indie publisher, then reissued by Flatiron Books once Cosby hit it big) to confirm he’s been galvanizing the genre since he began. He delivers all the trappings of noir—corrupt lawmen, crime lords, a minister with a sordid past—with ruthless, gripping prose.

Blacktop Wasteland (2020)

On the sun-softened asphalt of rural Virginia, the author’s sophomore effort upends the life of wheelman-turned-mechanic Bug Montage. Not defined by his past but hauntingly beholden to it, Bug slips behind the wheel for one more con job. Steely and surprisingly heart-wrenching, it’s fiction as a vehicle for truth (and it won a Los Angeles Times Book Prize).

Razorblade Tears (2021)

There’s no easing into this story about two fathers on a grisly revenge quest, united by little more than a capacity to wield grief like a blunt object. The plot is all gas and no brakes, but meditations on discrimination and parenthood amid the fray earned the author top billing on a host of “best of year” lists.

All the Sinners Bleed (2023)

This Anthony Award–winning thriller is helmed by Titus Crown, the first Black sheriff of Charon County, Virginia, who is tracking a serial killer through crumbling back roads and humid swamps. The book’s treatises on race and religion don’t pull punches. As Cosby said of this book, “To paraphrase James Baldwin, because I love the South, I reserve the right to critique her honestly.”

King of Ashes (2025)

Cosby’s forthcoming novel may be his most cinematic. Taking cues from crime epics like The Godfather and already slated for a Netflix series, the novel ensnares three siblings in a web of strained family ties. Eldest son Roman knows how quickly things—money, relationships, a life—can go up in smoke. To save his family, he’s willing to light the match. —Grace Roberts

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