Chris's review
status:
Read in October, 2006
This is King's entry into the "Hard Case Crime" imprint, and it's an interesting addition to the genre. According to their website, they specialize in "hardboiled crime fiction," which brings to mind the likes of Mickey Spillane and Ellmore Leonard. Lots of tough guys, fast-talking women and some poor dead bastard whose murder will probably get away scot free.
So it's interesting that King should write a hardboiled crime story with, as his characters tell us over and over again, no story to it. "No through-line," they say, and they're right.
On a small island off the coast of Maine (where else?), young Stephanie McCann is doing an internship with a small local paper. The editors of the paper, two true-blooded New Englanders if ever there were any, have taken her under their wing and try to show her that the world around us doesn't a...more
This is King's entry into the "Hard Case Crime" imprint, and it's an interesting addition to the genre. According to their website, they specialize in "hardboiled crime fiction," which brings to mind the likes of Mickey Spillane and Ellmore Leonard. Lots of tough guys, fast-talking women and some poor dead bastard whose murder will probably get away scot free.
So it's interesting that King should write a hardboiled crime story with, as his characters tell us over and over again, no story to it. "No through-line," they say, and they're right.
On a small island off the coast of Maine (where else?), young Stephanie McCann is doing an internship with a small local paper. The editors of the paper, two true-blooded New Englanders if ever there were any, have taken her under their wing and try to show her that the world around us doesn't always work the way we think it should. Their ultimate example is their very best Unsolved Mystery.
Every town has a few, they say, and more often than not, they become a local legend. A story that gets passed around and around, and every now and then someone chews it over and tries to figure it out, to no avail. The one thing they have in common, all these unsolved stories, is that they have exactly one mystery, and only one. Unknown lights in the sky, poison in a church club's coffee, that kind of thing. There's one mystery, which allows people to speculate, "Well it must have been...." More than one mystery, and people start to get uncomfortable. There are too many "Must-have-beens" for them to handle, and the story ends up better off forgotten.
Which brings them to the mystery of the Colorado Kid, a story which should have been a great Unsolved Mystery except that there are too many mysteries.
A man is found dead on a beach, one morning in April. He has apparently choked on a piece of steak, although the steak itself is missing, presumably taken by the gulls. His identity is a mystery for a year and a half before someone remembers a half-noticed clue that tracks him back to Colorado and a wife who's been waiting for word all this time.
How he got to the beach is a mystery. Why he choked on the meat is a mystery. Why he was carrying a pack of cigarettes with only one gone was a mystery.
Too many mysteries, and the would-be solver is led off into a wilderness. There are no clues to put together. There is no more evidence to find. The life and death of the Colorado Kid will never be known.
Kind of a strange story to launch a new hardboiled crime imprint with, don't you think?
I imagine part of it was having Stephen King's name on the author list. That's prestige right there. But part of it is a warning, one that we don't often hear enough but is worth listening to:
Life is not a story.
Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen allude to this in The Science of Discworld - fictional worlds like the Discworld or Stephen King's universe are held together my the power of Story. Leland Gaunt, Randall Flagg, IT, all of them will be defeated in the end because that's what the story demands. Andy Dufresne will escape because that's what the story demands, because without that, the story has no point.
But life doesn't care if there's a point. This poor, benighted universe is not interested in closure, justice or punishment, at least not on the scale that we can see, and so the problem of a dead body on a beach, no matter how mysterious it may be, may never be solved. And the world turns.
Still and all, though, we look for stories. We ignore the evidence of our eyes and our minds and look for the story in the most meaningless of things. Is this a flaw in our characters? An asset? I have no idea. But it is something that we should always remember - human beings love a good story, no matter how often there actually is no story.......less
The Colorado Kid (Hard Case Crime #13) 
