S.A. “Shawn” Cosby has joined John Grisham, David Baldacci, and Patricia Cornwell as nationally famous crime writers who live in Virginia, but Cosby’s writing is all his own. Alerted to his presence with the publication of Blacktop Wasteland, which I have not yet read, I bought his follow-up novel Razorblade Tears just to see what all the fuss was about. It didn’t take long for me to confirm that Cosby’s acclaim is no fluke. Cosby manages to create endearing, distinct, and quite dynamic characters who frequently experience (and inflict) extreme violence, but the bedrock of the story is social justice and fair play. His are not simply sensational thrillers, but also skillful ruminations on the current state of our world. And he manages to leaven it all with wit, clever repartee, and steady laughs. I’m impressed.
The protagonist of Razorblade Tears is a Black man named Ike Randolph. Ike has done time and was known in his criminal life as Riot, a nickname reflecting his volatile temper and physical intimidation. Nowadays he’s a married man who runs a legitimate landscaping service, but when the novel opens, he is grieving over the loss of his son, a gay man killed in an atrocious hate crime. Enter Buddy Lee Jenkins, another grieving dad whose gay son was married to Ike’s son and who died in the same hate crime. Buddy Lee, whose ready quips and open-mindedness complicate his potentially stereotypical incarnation as an alcoholic roughneck, teams up with Ike to find whoever killed their sons, and from that moment on, the action never relents. I expected the violence. I did not expect the complexities, humor, and depth of these two appealing characters. Despite their many flaws, you have to love these guys; they are on the right side of justice, even if it’s the vigilante sort.
In Ike Randolph and Buddy Lee Jenkins the clever Mr. Cosby has tapped into one of the oldest and most successful tropes in storytelling: the complementary companions whose combined skills make them an unstoppable team. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza provide an early example from Spanish literature; Holmes and Watson serve the same function slightly more recently. But as Leslie Fiedler, Arnold Rampersad, and other critics have noted, this pairing motif works especially well in American literature, where so often these partners are of two different races: Huck Finn and Jim, Han Solo and Chewbacca, Danny Glover and Mel Gibson (in the Lethal Weapon movies), the Lone Ranger and Tonto, Robert Culp and Bill Cosby (in 1960’s-era television show called “I Spy”), Ishmael and Queequeg, to name a few.
But if you want to visit the single novel where American literature begins, go to James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. I know. It’s easy to mock Cooper—Mark Twain reveled in doing so—for his turgid prose and his romantic excesses (for me the low point of the novel occurs when Hawkeye disguises himself as a bear in order to rescue a captive). Cooper, however, was a genius, a man of vision, and when he sets his novel (published 1826) in 1757, he chooses a time when all the assets and all the problems of the yet-to-be-established republic are coming into relief. In this novel Cooper addresses racism, misogyny, and the advent of multiculturalism. The woods of upstate New York, where the action of the novel unfolds, are as dense and as scary as any forest primeval in fairy tales, an untamed natural wilderness where anything is possible. Cooper wrestles with the inevitability of European intrusion into this pristine continent, knows that the native people will die in order for the new country to come into being, and encapsulates the tragedy of native genocide in the stunning death of Uncas, the last of the Mohicans. Cooper’s protagonist, Duncan Heyward, is a European who learns from, absorbs, and assimilates the culture of the native people and becomes something new, an American amalgam. His two mentors and foils are Hawkeye, who calls himself “a man without a cross,” by which he means cross-breeding of blood lines, and Chingachgook, father of Uncas and a pure-blooded Mohican. These two complementary companions, Hawkeye and Chingachgook, make an unstoppable team, but by the end of the novel, both are childless, and both represent the last of their kind. Without entering the melting pot, they face a future of solitude.
Go on. Get yourself a copy of Razorblade Tears and of The Last of the Mohicans. Once you get past Cooper’s numbing opening chapter (it’s not long), you’ll find that the pace of the old canonical classic is just as fast as that of Cosby’s brand new thriller.