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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 fantasy, 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: 
© Discussing Books, 05/14/06
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Critiques