Tim Cockey Books in Order

Tim Cockey grew up in and around Baltimore, Maryland, and that city never really left his work. Even after he moved away, he kept returning to Baltimore on the page, not as a postcard version, but as a lived-in place full of weather, neighborhoods, old institutions, bars, funeral homes, and people with sharp tongues.

Baltimore matters here.

Before fiction took over, Cockey did a little of everything. He studied in Ohio, London, and Copenhagen, then returned to Baltimore and worked for a local newspaper in advertising sales and design. At the same time, he moonlighted under a pen name as the paper's book reviewer. He later spent four years heading public relations for the Baltimore Opera Company, and he also worked as a story analyst for film and television companies including American Playhouse, ABC, and Hallmark Entertainment.

As a kid, he loved Batman and Howard Pyle's Robin Hood, which feels about right for a writer who would later build crime novels around off-center heroes.

The real turn toward writing came after a move to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. A small grant from the Maryland State Arts Council gave him time to work seriously, and he spent two years on an unpublished novel called Zen Bastard. During that stretch he also won a PEN-sponsored short story contest. When Zen Bastard did not sell as a novel, he reworked it as a screenplay, and that version later became a semifinalist for the Sundance Institute's screenwriters workshop.

The first book did not make it to print, but it still pushed him toward the work that did.

After moving to New York City, Cockey wrote The Hearse You Came in On, the novel that introduced undertaker and amateur sleuth Hitchcock Sewell. The setup tells you a lot about his style: a funeral director in Baltimore, a murder, a lot of trouble, and a narrator who stays funny even when the situation is not. Readers who like the Hearse books usually point to the same pleasures, the dry voice, the sideways humor, the local detail, and the way Cockey lets oddball characters feel like part of the city instead of decorations around the plot.

He followed that debut with Hearse of a Different Color, The Hearse Case Scenario, Murder in the Hearse Degree, and Backstabber. The first novel was a Book Sense Top Ten pick and a Dilys Award nominee, and The Hearse Case Scenario won the Lefty Award. These are mystery novels, but they are also very much Baltimore novels. Cockey likes outsiders, talkers, hustlers, damaged charmers, and people who get in too deep because they cannot leave well enough alone.

Then he shifted gears and wrote under the name Richard Hawke. With Speak of the Devil and Cold Day in Hell, he moved from comic Baltimore mysteries to darker New York thrillers. The setting changed, and the mood got tougher, but some things stayed the same: quick dialogue, strong pace, and a sharp feel for how a city sounds when people are under pressure.

Across both names, Cockey keeps coming back to a few things. He likes strong settings. He likes first-person voices that sound like actual people. He likes characters who are bruised, stubborn, and still game enough to keep moving. He has long lived in New York City, but Baltimore still feels like one of his permanent addresses. That probably helps explain why his books feel so rooted. The jokes land, the plots move, and the cities around them feel occupied, not borrowed.