Colorado Kid, The

Inhoud

On an island off the coast of Maine, a man is found dead. There's no identification on the body. Only the dogged work of a pair of local newspapermen and a graduate student in forensics turns up any clues, and it's more than a year before the man is identified.

And that's just the beginning of the mystery. Because the more they learn about the man and the baffling circumstances of his death, the less they understand. Was it an impossible crime? Or something stranger still...? No one but Stephen King could tell this story about the darkness at the heart of the unknown and our compulsion to investigate the unexplained. With echoes of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon and the work of Graham Greene, one of the world's great storytellers presents a moving and surprising tale whose subject is nothing less than the nature of mystery itself...

Bespreking

Weak excuse of a mystery novel

When a man is found dead on the beach of an island off the coast of Maine it is quickly classified as a case of accidental death. Only some minor local interest is raised when it turns out that the victim had no identification whatsoever on his body. Vince Teague
and Dave Bowie, two reporters from The Weekly Islander, do all that is within the power of a local newspaper to find out the true identity of that mysterious guy, but without much luck. Years later a missing link is found by a graduate student in forensics, but the news story is as dead as its main protagonist. Nobody seems to be interested in yet another case of an unsolved crime. But maybe the real reason is that the truth beyond the mystery is too hard to face. Because in the end when you eliminate all impossibilities, what is left, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.

Although Stephen King in a way apologises -by means of adding an Afterword to The Colorado Kid- for having produced an atypical mystery novel, it does not really rings well to the average reader. It is easy to claim that this is due to the fact that the story has no real ending, but I think it quickly becomes clear that the problem lies much deeper. The rather flat and colourless depiction of the main characters does not really help in getting the reader emotionally involved. Whereas a good writer can still cover this up by a well composed plot, it is exactly this lack of storyline that adds to the misery and makes reading it so unsatisfactory. It really blows my mind why it takes more than a third of the book to come to introducing The Colorado Kid. Maybe when Hard Case Crime asked King for a story, the only thing left in King's drawer was a short story. Adding a lengthy character introduction might have made it into a book, but certainly not into something King can put into his hall of fame.