Author: Stephen King
Title: The Colorado Kid
Year of publication: 2005
Page count: 184
Rating: ★★★
This short novel was King’s first for Hard Case Crime, an imprint specialized in crime and mystery stories—but don’t expect the one he dishes up here to come with a (re)solution, or even hints of one. From the get-go, you are told and reminded, over and over again, that the twenty-five year-old cold case is not just unsolved, but an impossibility. This is infuriating to most readers, particularly crime aficionados: Stories are supposed to have a proper beginning, middle, and end—we especially want them to get resolved, because real life so rarely works out that way. So, caveat lector, if you’re the type of person that gets frustrated by non-endings, this is a novel to steer clear from. You won’t find out how a man went to work in Colorado and ended up propped up dead against a trashcan on a beach on a little island off the coast of Maine only hours later.
“It was that kind of story. The kind that’s like a sneeze which threatens but never quite arrives.”
The unexplained mystery of the Colorado Kid is told to Steffi, a post-graduate intern at the Weekly Islander, by the newspaper’s 90-year-old founder and 65-year-old editor—the only two people who still know and care about the unsolved case all these years later. The two old friends use the cold case to test Steffi’s investigative spirit, slowly providing her with the facts and letting her extrapolate what might have happened based on those clues. It’s not just a lesson in journalism though, but also a meditation on the nature of a true mystery; a lesson in not knowing, while acknowledging that reporters worth their salt have a compulsion to investigate the unexplained, no matter how many cracks in a story.
“You go back to that old business the way a kid who’s lost a tooth goes back to the hole with the tip of his tongue.”
This novel started King’s (often regrettable) foray into the crime genre, and even though I didn’t love this, I have to commend him on running with the idea despite knowing just how many readers he’d anger. Every potential clue in the case of the Colorado Kid leads to small revelations, but bigger mysteries—the more is learned about the man and the circumstances of his death, the less is understood. In the end, it’s all a mystery, and as is so often the case in life, we have to make our peace with the inexplicable.
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