The Colorado Kid -- Stephen King: A Book Review

The Colorado Kid

Stephen King

Hard Case Crime, 2005

What do you get when you cross one of the most prolific writers of the age with an intriguing story without an answer?  What you get is a pulp mystery written by Stephen King called The Colorado Kid. 

Stephen King lets us in on how he came up with the idea for the pulp novel The Colorado Kid in an afterword.  Most people do not read afterwords, just like they usually do not read forewords or introductions.  But this reader does.  And in the afterward to The Colorado Kid, Stephen King tells us that it was an intriguing newspaper story sent him by a friend that gave him the idea for The Colorado Kid.

If you are still curious by the time you finish The Colorado Kid, then by all means read on.

But up until then, you follow a story about two professional storytellers, old newsmen of the The Weekly Islander, telling a story to a far younger intern storyteller.  After the intern, Stephanie McCann, asks the two old newshounds if there was ever a story they covered that they could not explain -- a true unexplained mystery -- Vince Teague and Dave Bowie begin the tale of The Colorado Kid. 

It all started with a dead body, as many mysteries do.  And that body, found as it was on small Moose-Lookit Island off the coast of Maine, was truly that of a mystery man, a stranger to the locals, without identification of any kind.  A much younger Vince and Dave were quickly on the story, backtracking the man’s movements on the island. 

The more they found out about the man, the more of a mystery he became.  With the help of another young intern, the island’s only newspapermen, the local police, and the local doctor worked together to piece things together.  But where was he from?  Why was he on Moose-Lookit Island?  What caused his death? 

Stephen King, if nothing else, is a master storyteller himself.  Few authors are able to develop characters as well as King.  In The Colorado Kid, he does it through the dialogue of the two old newsmen as they tell their story and, at the same time, teach their charge.  McCann pushes the story along with incisive questions. 

The Colorado Kid is not only the story of two news chasers that have dedicated their lives to their craft but a case study of small town life.  Death is the intruder, the interloper that changes things, takes the innocence of some, becomes a motivating force for others.  To some the body is part of a job.  For Teague and Bowie, the body becomes a story to be told.  And as time goes by, and more and more people see it as old news, dead news, or a cold story, occasional tidbits of information allow the two reporters to piece together the dead man’s story.

Curiosity is a motivator.  All good reporters have it in abundance.  It works like an addiction.  Researching, asking questions, getting to the bottom of a thing unknown or unexplained becomes the reason to be.  It consumes a person.  The Colorado Kid is about that addiction, that overpowering need to know. 

King takes the reader back nearly three decades to a simpler time, when the local doctor would call a local reporter before he even called the local lawman.  Back before modern forensics and the “CSI” craze.  Back before computers and identifying a body became as easy as accessing the right database. 

And through it all, Stephen King captures the reader’s curiosity as well.  The reader becomes an acolyte reporter, trying to figure out the mystery.  And that is where King the writer connects the reader to the story, because every reader is a novice detective at heart, just as is every good reporter. 

The Colorado Kid reads like an old pulp detective story.  It was purposely designed to do so.  It was written for Hard Case Crime Books, a line of novels featuring such mystery greats as Lawrence Block (Matthew Scudder series),Ed McBain (The 87th Precinct novels) and Donald E. Westlake (the Parker novels). 

And just who is The Colorado Kid?  That remains a mystery, until you read the book…