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When pulp
fiction was in its heyday, it was the bomb.
People loved the books; couldn’t wait for the
next one. These were hardboiled stories written
in gritty prose laced with bad clichés (is there
a good one?). These sordid tales were churned
out as fast as writers could pull them together,
and that wasn’t fast enough sometimes.
These aren’t
Ellery Queen or Agatha Christie kinds of
stories: The questions all get answered, yes,
but not before some down-and-dirty shenanigans
(usually grotesque murders) and sexy women with
breathy deliveries in dark, one-room detective
agencies.
Stephen King,
the world’s most successful novelist, remembers
reading pulp fiction, and how it scared the hell
out of him when he was a kid living outside
Lisbon. (Hard to imagine there is something out
there that scared him once upon a time.)
King grew up
anticipating the next case, and as far he was
concerned, they really weren’t being published
fast enough.
Then, over
time, hard-case crime novels fell by the
wayside. They were replaced by television,
movies, VCRs and, eventually, DVDs and the
Internet: the stuff that fills the minutes in
this e-age of ours like insulating foam. Oh,
there were hardliners all of those years who
kept the genre from flat-lining, but not in the
kinds of numbers the publishers had seen in the
past.
Nowadays,
collectors still hope to find a cache of the old
classic crime novels hidden in a box at an
estate sale; or they try to fill out their
collection using eBay and other online
resources.
Enter the
next generation.
Hard Case
Crime, an arm of Dorchester Publishing in New
York, has resurrected the old crime novel, but
the settings are modern. The stories still are
dark; the details of the crimes still gruesome;
and the paperback’s covers still include racy
women, spooky, suggestive scenes or both.
(Apparently, you gotta go with what works.)
King threw
his hat into the ring to be the latest
contributor to the series. “The Colorado Kid” is
an unconventional mystery for three reasons:
First, it’s
the story behind a man’s death, but there is no
back story. In fact, there is no story at all
behind the man. And his death, for intents and
purposes, isn’t a mystery, nor is it suspicious.
Which by itself, I suppose, is mysterious and
suspicious.
Secondly, the
story is told through an unfolding yarn as
recollected to a budding young (female) reporter
by two elderly small-town newspaper editors who
have spent the last 25 years piecing together
the Colorado Kid’s story. Their extensive search
eliminated a lot of possibilities, but failed to
yield many hard facts.
Thirdly, the
crime (if there is one) is seemingly impossible.
In his
Afterword, King acknowledges that readers will
either enjoy or hate the story. “I think for
many people there will be no middle ground on
this one.”
So how does
King explain this rather unconventional approach
to a (non)crime novel?
“I’m not
really interested in the solution but in the
mystery,” King wrote. “Because it was the
mystery that kept bringing me back to the story,
day after day.”
What’s
especially fun about this 184-page story (short
even for a King short story) is that it takes
place right here, and includes several Downeast
references. In fact, one of the other unsolved
mysteries chronicled in the story is a series of
mysterious lights in the evening sky that are
later attributed to the city lights of
Ellsworth. Likewise, area landmarks play a role,
and the fictitious island community could very
well be somewhere off Mount Desert Island or
Hancock Point.
It’s a
Downeast yarn, told by Downeasters (complete
with pronunciation recommendations for certain
common words) for the rest of the world.
Yes, the
story can be maddening. Yes, the non-plot
lumbers along when certain theories are knocked
out of the water.
For a
non-story about an apparent non-crime, though,
it’s non-unfun.
Other authors
contributing to the Hard Case Crime series
include Edgar Award-winner Domenic Stansberry,
Richard Aleas, Max Phillips, Lawrence Block, Max
Allan Collins, Donald E. Westlake, Day Keene,
Allan Guthrie, David Dodge, Wade Miller, Peter
Pavia and Ed McBain, among many others. |
