Among edgy, gritty characters, writer Joe Ricker finds his place 

Right from its engrossing first chapter, Joe Ricker’s crime thriller Some Awful Cunning dives into a hard-boiled world of double crosses, false identities, and murder. A lot of that is thanks to the intriguing profession of the protagonist, Ryan Carpenter, as an “underground relocation specialist.” He helps people disappear completely when they need it most. Ricker says that he gravitates naturally to writing about a seedier, darker world. “I mean,” he says with a chuckle, “I do work at a strip club in Reno, Nevada.” 

Ricker’s lengthy CV boasts experience one would expect from a published author as well, namely more than 10 years of teaching writing at the university level. But he finds that time as a lumberjack, a ranch hand, a tattoo-removal-kit salesman, a bartender, and, most recently, security at the strip club has been what really helped him build the characters and world of Cunning.

 As a young boy, Ricker already loved writing. He would create stories and new adventures for beloved characters in Westerns, but he never took it seriously until he was 21. At that age, Ricker was at a low point. He was abusing alcohol, had warrants out for his arrest in multiple counties, and was surrounded by some seriously bad influences. Among the many colorful stories of his wilder days is even a run-in with the police that ended with him blowing the cop a kiss, getting tasered, and ending up in the hospital. (“I wasn’t in the hospital long,” Ricker assures. “They brought me to jail right after.”) 

Ricker eventually realized he wanted a different life for himself. He turned to his mother for help, got his legal issues sorted, and spent 30 days in sober isolation, days that he mostly spent journaling. Ricker eventually thought, “Oh. Maybe I should try to write fiction? Maybe I should be a writer?” He soon headed south to study English and psychology at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. 

Ricker had no idea Oxford had once been home to William Faulkner or that the city still boasted a tremendous writing community, but he wound up pouring drinks at City Grocery, where writers like Tom Franklin and Larry Brown hung out. Ricker would also eventually take classes from them and others, but he says, “Being a bartender at that bar gave me a better opportunity to get guidance from that caliber of writers.” 

After finishing his MFA at Goddard College in Vermont and teaching at Ithaca College in New York, Ricker grew restless. “I really wanted to be out West,” he says. “New Mexico, Utah, Arizona…the places I’d only seen in calendars.” With that in mind, Ricker set off in a 2004 Impala mostly held together with duct tape and zip ties. After the first three months on the road, Ricker had a taste for it and then set off again, this time for two years. “I had a better vehicle that time,” he jokes. 

Ricker says traveling around the country and seeing so many different places fed directly into the knowledge that Cunning’s transient main character, Ryan, needed to travel while resettling people on the run. The idea crystallized in Ricker’s mind while camping in New Mexico one night: He saw a figure in an orange jumpsuit. They ended up being part of a routine work crew, but Ricker couldn’t shake the idea of someone running from jail. That made him work out a character living on the road who “could help people escape some kind of persecution in their lives or legal trouble….That was the moment when the story originated.”

In Some Awful Cunning, Ryan breaks his standard protocol and betrays his most recent employer to save a young woman and her son. That choice sets him on a treacherous path around the country, leading to his hometown in Maine. It also takes him through plenty of barren landscapes, down lonely highways, and running across many shadowy figures: 

If Ryan had done everything he was told, he wouldn’t be driving to Dallas to lie to Victoria Williams about what he’d done with her stepson. 

In the darkness of the highway, the foggy glow of the next city hovered in the distance. Headlights on the other side of the median crested the hill he was approaching, like glinting eyes rising out of brackish water….The world was nothing more than a swamp full of alligators—motionless predators lurking in murky water that the helpless were trying to wade through.

While Ryan Carpenter ends up being more complex than your average thriller’s leading man, Kirkus Reviews praises Ricker’s rogues’ gallery of a supporting cast, calling Some Awful Cunning “a clever, original novel with a twisted plot and wily characters.” And among the most notable are women like the sharp but deadly vamp Victoria Williams, the foulmouthed, tough-as-nails sheriff’s deputy Jennifer Carlton, and more. 

Ricker was thoughtful about these characterizations, striving to avoid sexist or misogynistic stereotypes even as he fit them into the book’s pulpy world. “I was really thinking about women who had a tremendous impact on my life. How would they be if they were a cop? If they had access to money? What if they were ruthless in a way that didn’t make them shy about murdering someone?” Ricker hopes to continue showcasing the fascinating, well-rounded female characters of Cunning by putting one of them at the forefront of the sequel he’s currently writing.

In addition to Some Awful Cunning, Ricker has published a short story collection, Walkin’ After Midnight, and another novel, All the Good in Evil, both of which also delve into criminal underworlds. He says that he used to spend a lot of his time working on more literary fiction—things he was never really meant to write. But after a first short story involving edgier, grittier subject matter, other writers told him he had found what he should be pursuing. “I don’t even know what the fuck literary fiction means,” Ricker says, explaining that, for him, there is plenty of literary merit in crime thrillers.

Above all, though, Ricker feels at home in the genre because it’s what he knows. “I’m more comfortable with those characters,” he says. “I guess it comes from spending a small portion of my life as a criminal.”

Rhett Morgan is a writer and translator based in Paris.