Stephen King, The Colorado Kid
I almost passed The Colorado Kid because it was published in the hard case crime series, and I don’t like hard-boiled mysteries (not that I have read many anyway, but I figure them as the kind where a lonely private behind a window with half-closed blinders solves a crime and the main suspect is blond elegant woman on high heels). It is funny anyway, for a fan of mysteries, to be so ignorant when it comes to hard-boiled mysteries. But of course the literary world of mysteries is a large and multi-faceted one…
Anyway, since I am intrigued by anything King has written, and since this one was short, I gave it a try. I shouldn’t have worried, The Colorado Kid is not a hard-boiled mystery, in the classical sense of the term, at least. The closest thing to what is, in my idea of it, a hard-boiled mystery, is the misleading cover picture, which bears few connections with the contents of the book, but for the fact that the woman on the cover holds a microphone, and that Stephanie, one of the three main characters of the novel, is a journalist.
The story takes place in the present (and not in the 50′s, as the cover could make us think) on an island off the coast of Maine (how surprising!), and involves three sympathetic characters, all journalists for the Weekly Islander. Stephanie is a trainee, put to the test by the two “geezers”, (as King refers to them in the afterword) who have run it for years and wish to see it pass into good hands. Stephanie gets acquainted with a mystery the two men have tried to make light on for years.
As I said, The Colorado Kid is not a hard-boiled mystery, it is hardly a mystery in the conventional sense (King plays with and eventually throws away the conventions of the genre), but rather a reflection on the nature of mystery, and a tribute to the classics of crime fiction, from Agatha Christie to Murder She Wrote. In a (not obvious) way it also reminded me of the New York Trilogy, by Paul Auster (but in many ways, below the surface, Paul Auster’s fiction often makes me think of King’s and vice versa). In The Colorado Kid, King explains what makes people attracted to mysteries. The two geezers state that a journalist who writes a story must provide his readers with a musta-been, that is to say give enough hard facts to point to a possible explanation.
No musta-been however in the Colorado Kid mystery, because the facts are scarce and the explanation remains out of grasp. No closure is to be expected from it then, and because of this the reader might be frustrated. In his Postscript to the Name of the Rose, Eco says that readers like a mystery not because it celebrates the victory of a final order, but rather, because it is a story of pure conjecture. No musta-been then for the Colorado Kid, no closure, but plenty of coulda-beens. As King writes in the afterword: “Wanting [to know] might be better than knowing”… Or to put it otherwise, for the Constant Reader to recognize: It’s the journey that counts, not its destination…
Rating: 4/5
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