Blacktop Wasteland

Nice and noir was Nyren’s description of my first novel when he turned it down for Putnam (before it was taken by S. A. Cosby’s publisher). This is nice and noir in various ways. It is the story of a wheelman’s final job (or so he hopes and thinks). Beauregard ‘Bug’ Montage is up against it. His rural Virginia auto repair shop is losing business to an upstart local who won the lottery, built his own place and is underselling Bug. His son needs braces; his daughter wants to go to VCU, he’s behind on his mortgage payments on his business and his mother is about to be evicted from her nursing home. Bug doesn’t want to follow in his fondly-remembered ne-er do well father Anthony’s absentee footsteps but he needs big bucks and he needs them now.

The gig that presents itself—the takedown of a jewelry store—and the escape across backwoods Virginia will involve Bug with some unreliable dental-challenged hillbillies and take him down a path with more curves, hard turns and bumps in the road than he could ever anticipate. The question that looms over the book is: will he survive? Will he survive intact? What will happen to his family, already consigned to a double wide in the boonies? We know from the get-go that they’re not going to strike it rich, extricate themselves with impunity, walk away with the swag and move to pastures new. The tone and texture tell us that; they also tell us to buckle our seat belts.

I was reminded here of several of my favorite stories: Don Winslow’s THE WINTER OF FRANKIE MACHINE, the story of a one-last-gig mafia hitman who discovers that things aren’t quite what they seem; and two great tales of the results of easy money: A SIMPLE PLAN and NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN. That’s the league we’re dealing in here, with fascinating characters, a stark setting, dazzling plotting and eternal themes.

I won’t spoil the ending but I’ll tell you what I was expecting and hoping for. When James Ellroy, the master of what he calls ‘tragic realism’, approached Dick Contino and told him he’d like to write his story Contino asked him what it would be about. ‘Heavily-compromised redemption’ was Ellroy’s answer.

Bottom line: this book is being hyped to death, in part because the emergence of a black writer with great chops is always headline-worthy. There are racial themes running through the story, of course, but the book succeeds because of the author’s skills and because of his ability to plot like a bandit and tell a story that never depends on race for its deserved plaudits. Enjoy it, but gird your reader loins. This is not going to be a Sunday drive in the country.

Five stars.

SA Cosby is an extraordinary writer. I can be sitting in my living room reading a book with my body but my mind is completely in the story with the characters, feeling the adrenaline and the tension and the terror. Nothing in my life is remotely like the plots of his books but he makes me feel like I’m there.

The first couple of chapters ease the reader in slowly. You learn about the main character, his problems, his love for family, his violent history. By a third of the way in, you’re trapped - there’s no way you’re getting out of this book without reading it to the end. The first action sequence is mind-bogglingly good and it just gets better and better.

Cosby writes action that doesn’t let up. Everything is clear not just in terms of plot but in logistics. I fear I’m not articulating how bowled over I was by this book.

If you strip away the action and mystery, what’s left is an aching diatribe on the state of the Black man in white America. It’s a scathing rebuke.

Truly fabulous book. I hope Cosby keeps writing and writing and writing. He’s a literary treasure.

Blacktop Wasteland is a heist novel that centers on the wheel man, the getaway driver, like a more realistic version of Edgar Wright's Baby Driver but just as exciting. I don't know anything about S.A. Cosby, but I assume he must be a car enthusiast because his descriptions of engine mechanics and driving seem to come from a place of personal knowledge rather than just research.

Cosby builds the novel on the classic noir setup. Beauregard "Bug" Montage, got off to a bad start in life doing petty crimes as a teenager until a job gone wrong ended him up in juvenile detention. By the time Bug got out, his father, Anthony (aka "Ant), had disappeared, never to be seen again. The only thing Ant left Bug was the souped-up Plymouth Duster they both loved. Bug turned it into a legendary street-racing machine and had the chops to drive it like no one else could.

After the stint in juvie, Bug went straight. He bought an old garage and turned it into an auto repair shop. He remarried. (The first marriage had long since dissolved; they were both teens at the time.) And he had a successful business until a rival shop run by a franchise called Precision moved into town and undercut his prices.

Because he couldn't beat Precision's prices, he lost customers and fell behind on his mortgage payments. Meanwhile, his son Darren needs glasses. His other son Javon had to get braces. His daughter Ariel, from the first marriage, is smart enough she could go to college and make something of herself if only she could afford the tuition. To top it all off, his mother is in a convalescent home, and he's just learned that there's a discrepancy with her Medicaid policy for which he now owes the government $48,360.

Bug is in desperate straights financially when Ronnie Sessions shows back up in his life. Ronnie is a redneck drug addict and career criminal who's always looking for the next score. He's also the screw-up who masterminded the job-gone-wrong that put Bug in juvenile detention way back when. But this time he's got a foolproof scheme. Ronnie's girlfriend Jenny is working at a jewelry store that is going to be temporarily holding $500,000-worth of uncut diamonds, and with her help they are going to take advantage of that window of opportunity to steal the diamonds. Reggie knows a guy who can fence the goods, giving them a clean $250,000 which Ronnie, Bug, and the gunman on the team, Quan, can split three ways. Eighty thousand dollars would go a long way toward solving Bug's problems.

But he quit the life. He has a wife and two sons he loves, a daughter he rarely sees but cares about, a difficult mother to take care of, an employee (and childhood friend) named Kelvin... he can't blow it all by getting caught or killed in a holdup. Bug's wife Kia tries to convince him, instead, to sell the beloved Duster, which is legendary in the county and would bring a very high price. Bug can't let go of that link to his father, though. So he tells himself that if he fully takes charge of the job, checks out everything personally, makes sure absolutely nothing can go wrong, then it's just one last job, and he'll be out of the life for good.

You know this story, right? The "one last job and then I'm out" story? It's a good one. A classic, in fact.

Ronnie and Quan both promised Bug they would stay away from coke for the duration of the job, but they lied. Ronnie also lied about the value of the diamonds, which was really more like $3,000,000. (If you were smarter than Ronnie, it would make you wonder why jewels that valuable would be passing through a rinky-dink, small-town jewelry store and who would be behind it.) In fairness to Ronnie, though, there's no way he could have known the fat lady who was Jenny's boss at the store was also a stone-cold killer. I won't tell you anything about what happens next except for the one thing you already know -- once the robbery starts, everything goes to hell big time, real fast.

S.A. Cosby is a terrific writer. With this novel, he's already in the realm of the likes of Elmore Leonard, Dennis Lehane, and George Pelecanos. The story is peopled with a fully realized cast of characters, the small-town Georgia settings feel lived in, the action sequences and tense encounters are white-knuckle stuff. If you like hard-boiled noir fiction, this one's for you.

The chase scenes in this book were better than any movie. My heart was beating fast and I was completely involved. This novel is not the kind I usually read, but I’m so glad I read it. Bug wants to be a good family man, but he thinks he inherited some kind of bad boy gene from his father, who was occasionally a good family man, but mostly a criminal. The story flips back and forth between the loving husband and father, and the amazing wheelman. Highly entertaining book.

"He felt it then. Felt it for the first time tonight. The high, the juice, the symbiotic relationship between man and machine. The thrusting vibrations that worked their way up from the blacktop through the wheels and suspension system like blood moving through veins until it reached his hands. The engine spoke to him in the language of horsepower and RPMs. It told him it yearned to run."

S.A. Cosby straps you in from the very beginning of Blacktop Wasteland, with a drag race that gets your heart pounding and adrenaline pumping. That feeling never leaves you through the entirety of this gem. Hold on for one crazy, jaw dropping, high speed chasing, double crossing, dangerous ride!

Beauregard "Bug" Montage is a loving father, and caring husband. He owns a mechanic shop but ever since his competitor, Precision, has come into town offering lower prices, business has gotten slow and bills are stacking up. Bug has chosen the better life of his "two beasts". He used to be a "wheelman" known up and down the southern east coast for his impressive driving skills. With his daughter needing money for college, his mother's nursing home threatening to kick her out, and the monthly bills of his double wide and mechanic shop piling up, Bug feels there is no other way to make it than to get involved in his old way of life.

Bug is approached by an old associate named Ronnie who claims he has an "easy" jewelry heist that will make them a lot of money. He just needs Bug's driving skills. Bug is convinced that doing this one last job will help him get back on track and be a better husband to Kia, a better father than his own dad, Anthony, who left years ago to never return. What could possibly go wrong?

WOW! What an amazing book to start 2022 out with. S.A. Cosby makes you feel like you are in the car with Bug, drifting through curves, flying in the air after jumping hills, dizzy from doing 360's, smelling burnt rubber and gasoline. You will fall in love with the incredibly flawed Bug and root for him the entire way.

S.A. Cosby...you have made a fan out of me! Razorblade Tears....you are in my future!!!

"The thing about loving someone was that they knew all your pressure points. They knew all the spots that were open and raw. You let them into your heart and they cased the place. They knew what made you feel weak and what ticked you off."

When you really love a subgenre, you don’t want to read the same thing over and over again, but you do want to see tweaks and new takes on your cherished tropes. Blacktop Wasteland falls right square in the country noir subgenre. It distinguishes itself from the field not just with execution but with a protagonist who is a wheelman (and all the car chases the choice suggests) and African-American.

Bug is a family man. He has two boys with his wife and an older daughter with another woman. He is close with his cousin and his uncle. He is a businessman. He owns a local auto mechanic shop. He is also a criminal. He made the money to buy his double-wide and start the shop with money made working as a wheelman for crews in Virginia and North Carolina. It’s a life he put behind him until the bills start to pile a little too far up and Ronnie frigging Sessions shows up looking for a wheelman. Sessions is “known for two things: his twenty-three Elvis tattoos, and stealing anything that wasn’t nailed down with titanium fasteners.” Bug knows he’s bad news, but he also knows he needs money fast and bad. It goes about as poorly as expected.

Bug is a great character. He fits directly into a country noir mold as a guy who “dream of living in a double-wide down a dirt lane. At least it has “running water and a roof that didn’t leak like a sieve. A house where everyone had their own room and there wasn’t a slop bucket in the corner.”

Bug is also a hard man and a very competent criminal. Noir fiction is all about “the long drop off the short pier” and “the all-time sure thing that goes bad.” In country noir, there are no piers, “but the people still find a way to fall.” I love the motif, but it can lead to sad sack characters who the passive receptacle to events outside their control. Things will happen outside Bug’s control, but he is not a man who sits easy with the idea of being a product of his environment instead of the other way around.

He is quick, vicious, and effective at dealing out violence. He is also a careful, canny criminal. He isn’t just better than good behind the wheel of a car. He knows the business of robbery. He is a competent, cautious planner. And he has the skills to turn a nondescript car into a getaway vehicle, get away in it, then make it disappear.

(His pride and joy is his father’s Plymouth Duster, but he is smart enough to not use it for a job. Is there a history with his dad? Of course there is; this is country noir.)

Bug’s competence creates his core conflict as a character—a creeping suspicion that wheelman Bug is the real Bug and family man and businessman Bug just an act. When his cousin asks if it feels good prepping for a job, Bug says ‘no’ but is self-aware enough to admit to himself that “It felt better than good. It felt right. It was like he had found a comfortable pair of old shoes that he had thought were lost forever.”

Blacktop Wasteland has everything I ask for from a country noir. A solid plot. Violence. Colorful characters. Family drama. Pulp action sensibilities and literary character beats. I have no real quibbles. But while it rises easily above disposal crime fiction, it never quite reaches the literary heights of a Ron Rash or Daniel Woodrell book. And can a written chase scene really compare with well crafted, expensive movie chase?

This is not the genre I typically read, but this book and Cosby have received so much positive attention, I decided to check it out. I may not read another (but then again I may), but very glad I read this one. It is very gritty, mostly dark, often graphically violent, with lots of sex and profanity, and told from a decidedly Black point of view. Most to all of these things normally turn me off, but Carson makes them work and feel right and natural in this book. There is also humor and a deep sense of family that helps balance things somewhat. Did I mention action? Plenty of that as well to go with excellent plotting. Yes, this is a page turner once you get about half way in. The racial aspects were not preachy or condemning, and I felt enlightened and educated on that topic and a greater sympathy for the Black experience in America. The ending wasn’t perfect in the happily ever after sense, but it was appropriate for the story and characters. Glad I read it.

The character development was, in my opinion, perfect! The book has a Deep South feel and is focused on Beauregard “Bug” Montage. Bug is trying to be an honest man making an honest living for his family. He left behind a past filled with fast driving and the kind of crime that requires a getaway driver. Even though he is no longer that beast, he knows it runs through his blood. He labels it a Montage thing.

As finically hardships start to multiply a former partner shows up with a new opportunity Bug can’t seem to pass it up. Unfortunately for Bug it seems that if anything can go wrong with this job it does go wrong. Bad luck and deception runs rampant.

🗣 𝗤𝘂𝗼𝘁𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 “You can’t be two types of beasts. Eventually one of the beasts gets loose and wrecks shop. Rips shit all to Hell.”

🧐 𝗧𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵𝘁𝘀 I listened to the audiobook version and was blown away by the narrator as well as the story itself. It flowed flawlessly and kept my attention throughout. It had me anxious and even heartbroken at times. This read like a fast paced, action packed movie with a well thought out heist, getaway driving, street racing, twists and turns, and crazy southern characters.

I loved Bug as a character and how this was so well written with the right amount of details and great dialogue. I am already anticipating my next S.A. Cosby read. My favorite part about the audiobook was the author interview at the end. We get to hear Cosby’s thought process and inspiration for his characters and stories. I am a new fan!