I was sitting in the back of an auditorium two years ago, listening to S.A. Cosby ruminate on the beginnings of his since gone thermonuclear writing career, when he mentioned a magazine that had escaped my mind for too long.
Cosby was heaping praise on one of the first places he was published. Thuglit, the long defunct New York City magazine that was once a haven for gritty, ugly, nasty imaginations, a name I would have hoped meant something to the room full of avowed thriller fans.
The shoutout drew a cheer from me. And maybe two others.
I was annoyed about the lack of reaction then. I’m still kind of annoyed about it now.
Because to hear Cosby tell it, those people might not have been buying his books without Thuglit in the first place.
“I think in the future people in the writing world at large, and the crime writing world in particular, will realize just how revolutionary and important Thuglit was. Most people’s current favorite crime writer first got published there, but more than that, Thuglit gave us misfits and us loose cannons and all of us who live, creatively, in a world of darkness and shadow a place to tell our stories,” Cosby said. “I definitely wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing if not for Thuglit.”
For the better part of 11 years, the self-described “best damn crime fiction on the planet” was published largely on the relentlessness of Todd Robinson, a Bostonian lost in New York City, author, bartender, heavily tattooed punk rock Dad and tireless advocate for writers who wanted to publish crime fiction with dirt and blood under its fingernails. Thuglit was the launching pad for some of the biggest names in crime fiction these days. It got hyped by Chuck Palahniuk. It not so secretly doubled as a talent scout for a big-time literary agent. It went from being self-published to having an anthology deal with Kensington!
And then it was gone. And it shouldn’t be forgotten.
At one time, Thuglit had a reputation as your favorite crime author’s favorite crime magazine. Placing a story there was a badge of honor: I still remember running out of the L.A Times newsroom, beyond ecstatic, when I found out I made the cut for the final issue of Thuglit in 2016.
But I’ve always felt like the mag and Robinson never got the obituary they deserved, and when I started sending flares to some of Thuglit’s heaviest hitters, they agreed. So here it is, an overdue goodbye to the magazine you’ve maybe never heard of that jumpstarted the careers of several people whom you certainly have.
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Visualize the character of someone who goes by “Big Daddy Thug,” and your mind’s eye would probably draw an approximation of Todd Robinson.
A bear of a man whose voice sounds like a cement mixer that smoked unfiltereds and caught a head cold, Robinson’s the nicest person you’d never want to fight. He spent chunks of our interview for this piece giving me genuinely great parenting advice, between strings of four-letter words.
When Robinson founded Thuglit in the mid-2000s, he said he “didn’t have a bucket to shit in or a window to throw it out of.” An avid reader with no editorial experience, he was armed only with a desire to see more stories in the vein of Elmore Leonard and Andrew Vachhs and extreme frustration with what he saw as an antiquated market for crime-focused short fiction.
“The main thing that lit the fire under my ass was I was at Bouchercon at a short story panel. I got into it with a couple of editors from Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen,” he said. “Look at the fucking names. Alfred Hitchcock, not a fucking novelist, not a writer. But here we are.”
Robinson said those magazines, at least at that time, catered to what he called “Murder She Wrote pastiches.” They didn’t show the ugliness of crime, the craters it can leave behind on a person or a city.
“I was fighting to bring the same level of realism to short stories as The Wire was doing as The Shield was doing,” he said. “Yet the same people who were watching those shows clutched their pearls on the page. And I don’t get that disconnect.”
Someone at the panel suggested Robinson start his own magazine. So, he did.
Robinson admits he knew next to nothing about publishing – it would take years before Thuglit even had print issues – but he knew the blood crusted space he wanted to fill in the short story market. Crime stories that were “unpleasant,” that shook people out of their comfort zones, of the worlds they understood.
It wouldn’t be long until he got one, a story titled “Johnny Cash Is Dead” from a guy named Jordan Harper.
Back then, Harper was working as a music critic. Thuglit was the first place he ever published a story. Nowadays, you might recognize Harper as the author of the Edgar-award winning She Rides Shotgun, which is now being made into a movie starring Taron Edgerton, and the co-showrunner on the TV adaptation of Ed Brubaker’s Criminal comic books.
“I read that story and went this is why I’m doing this magazine,” Robinson said of Harper’s first offering.
Even as it gained popularity, Thuglit was a labor of love by a staff of two. Robinson says he’d often print out submissions and review them by hand while on the subway to one of his bartending gigs. If things got slow at Shade – the tiny, dimly-lit West Village bar where Robinson works that became a part of Thuglit’s lore as a space where some of its authors also performed live readings – Robinson says he broke out pages there. His ex-wife, Allison Glasgow, functioned as acquisitions editor, culling Thuglit’s ever swelling submissions pile and also copy-editing stories. While Todd’s name is synonymous with the mag – his e-mail address is still Thuglit related – Glasgow “does not get nearly enough credit,” he says.
It was inside Shade where Robinson first met another future big-time author who would become a regular offender on Thuglit’s pages.
Two of Rob Hart’s last three novels have been optioned for film, but on the night he walked into a launch party for Robinson’s debut novel The Hard Bounce, Hart said he was a “scared little baby writer” trying to figure it all out.
“I think I had one published short story—and so everything in publishing to me felt like an ivory tower. And with Todd it just wasn’t,” Hart said. “So, I sent him a story and he published it and I went to the bar to collect the money he paid for the story and I put it right back into two rounds of Bulleit Rye. We’ve been best buds ever since.”
Robinson’s ability to spot talent is “unparallelled,” said Hart, who described Thuglit as the magazine that launched “a thousand ships.” At one point, Robinson said Thuglit became popular enough that a “powerful agent” started subsidizing the magazine so he could read issues early and scout talent.
Robinson declined to name the agent, but sources close to the guy writing this article can confirm the first time an agent decided to pay any attention to me, it was because they contacted Todd about my piece in Thuglit: Last Writes.
Hilary Davidson – the Anthony-Award winning author of The Damage Done – is one of those “thousand ships” that Hart referenced. She found Thuglit in 2007 while shopping her first piece of fiction and running into constant rejections. The story, “Anniversary,” about “an obsessed man making dinner for the object of his affections,” quickly resonated with Robinson, she said.
“’Anniversary’ opened so many doors for me. It ended up in a best-of-the-year collection and got me my agent, which led directly to my first book deal. This sounds hilarious in retrospect, but I felt like that should make it easier to get my fiction published. It didn’t. I kept on getting rejections, except from Todd,” she said. “Thuglit ended up publishing not only my first short story, but my second and third as well … I collected a bunch of Thuglit T-shirts. I still treasure them. A few years ago, when I put together a collection of short fiction, I dedicated the book to Todd. I really do owe him.”
One of Robinson’s few rules – especially as the submissions started piling up – was that he wouldn’t workshop a story with a writer. It was either ready for primetime, or it wasn’t.
He only ever made one exception. For a writer from Virginia named S.A. Cosby.
“Cosby came in with such a fucking fiery raw talent that I threw everything out the window to work with him on his stuff, because he was just so good,” Robinson said. “I think I’m almost as happy as he is at his success.”
Cosby – who famously quit his job at a hardware store and bet on himself to write his breakout novel Blacktop Wasteland – said the story he submitted was a mess in part because he was relying on free computer software to crank out pieces at the time.
“The first story I submitted was called ‘The Rat And The Cobra’ about two brothers and an inheritance in rural Virginia. When I wrote it I was too broke to get [Microsoft] Word so I was using a free computer program that made it difficult for Todd to format or edit it. But instead of tossing it in the trash he worked with me, encouraging me to get a professional writing program because in his words ‘you got a lot of talent but nobody is gonna go through this cheap software to get to the story,’” Cosby said. “Which was ironic because Todd saw something in me and did go through the cheap software to help me. I will never be able to thank him enough.”
When I think of Thuglit, I think of Lookout Records, the independent California label that released Green Day’s first two albums. A one-man shop run out of one room in the 1980s, operated by Larry Livermore, a guy who just wanted to elevate music he liked that wasn’t getting play elsewhere.
But unlike Livermore, who was long able to dine out on the royalties of Green Day’s pre-Dookie efforts, Robinson’s reward is better measured in reputation. While Thuglit won a wheelbarrow full of awards and Robinson’s name draws near universal love in the crime fiction community – the last time I mentioned Thuglit among a group of authors, several bemoaned that they “weren’t around for it” – it never became profitable.
By 2016, he said “sales were going down and going down … two more issues and I’m paying out of pocket. I’m serving fucking Espresso Martinis to pay a writer for my magazine.”
Robinson’s own writing career has been equally hard luck. The publishers of both novels in his highly entertaining Boo & Junior series have since gone out of business, and there is no hiding the frustration in his voice when talking about his publishing misadventures.
But that won’t keep a good thug down. Because no matter how many times the publishing industry screws with Todd Robinson, it can’t take away the influence he’s had on that industry.
“One thing I don’t think people truly understand about the pride I have stemming from the magazine is how much the success of the writers means to me. It might not be my own personal success, but I fought for over a decade and a half to prove that there was a place for the type of voices in fiction that they write,” he said. “‘I told you so,’ is always a fun phrase to throw out into the world when you can back it the fuck up.”
