As we roll around towards another Summer here at Hobbit Towers, it’s time to pick the now-traditional “Stephen King Summer Read”. I wasn’t exactly sure what I fancied, until Titan Books came to my rescue and sent me a copy of The Colorado Kid for review.
To be honest, it grabbed me from the off with its appropriately retro-style cover by Paul Mann. It is in the style of Joyland, the Crime thriller I reviewed a few years ago, although The Colorado Kid was actually first published in 2005, before Joyland. The story though is quite different.
My initial thought was how much this was a great holiday read. It helps that The Colorado Kid is set on Moose-Lookit, an island off the coast of Maine, which allows for a picturesque setting with fantastic views. (It made me think of something similar to Amity Island from Jaws.) We are introduced quickly to two crusty old local newspapermen, Dave Bowie and Vince Teague, and their younger Ohio University graduate on a summer internship, Stephanie McCann. The first few chapters set up the characters surprisingly quickly, with the collective voices of experience creating a deceptively comfortable set-up.
However, what reads at first like a comfortable ‘shaggy-dog’ type of story soon takes a sinister turn when Bowie and Teague begin to tell Steph of an unexplained mystery from the 1980’s when a dead body was found in a sitting position on the local beach. There’s no wallet and nothing to identify the body by. It’s a locked room mystery but set on a picturesque island.*
And by this point the story really begins to grip. The more the recitation of the investigation continues, the stranger things become. There’s a pack of cigarettes found on the body with one cigarette missing but with a man who didn’t smoke. And also in his pockets, amongst some dollar bills, is a Russian coin. The case evidence seems to contradict itself and runs up lots of dead-ends that seem impossible. The desire to solve the murder becomes an obsession for all those concerned.
So, at first glance, The Colorado Kid is typical King territory – filled with likeable characters and small town values, meshed throughout with King’s trademarks of Americana and cultural references, the cute normality of everyday life disguising the darker underbelly of social life. It’s familiar and welcome territory, which leads the reader through what should be traditional King writing.
But, of course, Stephen knows this, which is why when things get towards the end, it is a surprise, even for those ‘Constant Readers’. He even admits in his Afterword that he thinks there’ll be no middle ground with this one, you’ll either love it or hate it. It is a story which is more about the journey than the destination, until the end. It reveals to us why people like a mystery, and perhaps why people like crime stories – it’s about the hunt for a resolution, and people like to see things solved.
For what it’s worth, whilst I can see some readers being frustrated by elements of this, (and that may be the point), I really enjoyed it. I can also see that it’s really nothing new for regular King readers, but to me the skill of the writer makes this a darned good, if short, read. I enjoyed it more than I did Joyland, and I did enjoy that a great deal.
It’s also helped by the fact that this edition is enhanced with artwork by Mark Edward Geyer, Kate Kelton, Paul Mann, and Mark Summers, which works well with the prose. It made me think that it was a new version in the style of the long-defunct Saturday Evening Post or even the old pulp magazines, which seems appropriate. There’s also a lovely introduction by Charles Ardai, the founder and editor of Hard Case Crime, which tells the reader how the story came to be first published, both in the US and the UK, and the influence the story had in developing a “little publishing imprint” in 2005.
To paraphrase from Ardai’s introduction, The Colorado Kid sounds like it’s a boxing story or a western, of which it is neither. In terms of style and tone, it seems at first to be a more traditional crime story than much of Stephen’s work, more Dashiell Hammett than Rod Serling this time around, although there are genre touches there if you want to look for them. For me, it’s those that resolve the story. Most of all though, what shines through is the ability of the writer to engage and grip the reader. In the words of the old cliché, sometimes less becomes more and The Colorado Kid’s shortness becomes a strength, not a weakness. There’s little room for excess here and therefore the story stands proud.
As a Summer read, read whilst sat on a holiday beach perhaps, it’s just the ticket. Now why hasn’t Stephen written more?
*And to illustrate this, the novella was adapted into a television series, Haven (2010 – 2015.) It is very different, which may be why the book has been out of print since about 2007.
The Colorado Kid by Stephen King
Published by Titan Books, July 2019. First published by Hard Case Crime in 2005 and in the UK by PS Publishing in 2007.
184 pages
ISBN: 978-0-8439-5584-2
Review by Mark Yon
