Wise and fierce story
While both violent and provocative, Cosby's latest is also beautifully moving
Elmore Leonard, wherever you are, you've got competition. With his third novel, S.A. Cosby has reappeared as one of the most muscular, distinctive, grab-youby-both-ears voices in American crime fiction. Leonard seemed to believe that revenge is a dish best served red hot, and with Cosby it's practically molten.
As in Cosby's earlier novels, racism is portrayed as a source of bottomless pain for its victims and sometimes for its hapless perpetrators, too. In the new book, Cosby weaves another social evil, homophobia, into his speeding narrative. He also gives us characters so real they practically become close acquaintances.
In Razorblade Tears we have Ike Randolph, who did time for manslaughter when he was “Riot” Randolph, taking the fall for a drug-gang pal. Ike has remade his life and runs a successful landscaping business in rural Virginia. The problem is Ike's 20-something gay son, Isiah, whose sexual orientation Ike hated, has been gunned down and killed on a Richmond street along with his husband, Derek. Ike is a beautifully wrought character who is racked with regret for not having accepted the boy he loved. When the police take their own sweet time investigating the murders, an enraged Ike hooks up with Derek's father, Buddy Lee, who's also guilt-ridden — and likewise an ex-con with a violent history — to track down the killers and execute them.
The two aggrieved fathers, thrown together by fate — a trademark subject for Cosby — are a memorable pair. Ike doesn't trust anybody who's white like Buddy Lee, and Buddy Lee has his own peculiar ideas about Black men. It's their joint mission, and their similar histories, that keep the relationship intact.
Cosby is plainly nuts about the American language, and the novel absolutely sings with it. Buddy has some kind of lung disease — it turns out to be a bad one — and at one point he's “coughing like a '73 Gremlin with a bad valve.” When Ike and Buddy approach the mansion of a big-time music producer and meth dealer, “Ike spied a silver BMW in the rearview mirror, driven by a woman with the most severe I-want-tospeak-with-the-manager haircut he'd ever seen. She zipped by them doing at least thirty miles per hour, like she had some Dalmatians in the trunk that she needed to make into a coat.”
The only minimally false notes in this wise and fierce entertainment are a few times when Ike is explaining to Buddy what it's like to be Black in America, and he speaks in coherent little essays, sounding more like a CNN commentator than an ex-con.
A more believable line of Ike's is when he and Buddy are about to go to war with killers, and he says: “I can get a gun if I need to. This is Virginia. They damn near sell them at Seven-Eleven.”
It's dead-on social commentary in a throwaway line, the kind of gem the novel is full of.