Stephen King knows crime. He grew up mainlining pulp legends like Richard Stark and John D. MacDonald. He was a goddamn noir geek, if you want to know the truth. When MacDonald agreed to write the introduction for King’s debut collection, Night Shift, he nearly pissed himself. Read any interview or essay where King discusses his early inspirations, and you’re bound to find numerous hardboiled writers’ names machine-gunned out as a response. His books are littered with references to his writing heroes. Without crime fiction, there is no Stephen King. It has inspired his rage against the system, his attitude toward certain political states of mind. One has to wonder what King’s approach to writing would be like if he hadn’t grown up devouring pulp fiction. At the very least, I suspect his output wouldn’t have exhibited such an exuberant frequency. The life of a pulp writer depended on typing until their fingers bled, sometimes finishing entire novels in less than a month. They wrote stories about terrible people doing terrible things and readers still to this day can’t get enough of it. In King’s fiction, nobody’s perfect. Everybody has their baggage. Protagonists often commit crimes, take the law into their own hands, do whatever it takes to get shit done. It’s a simple, complicated truth, but there’s no denying the people who shape us into what we become.
While it’s true that the majority of King’s work features supernatural elements, there’s no denying the fact that many if not all of them can also be classified as thrillers. Just because you throw in a ghost or child-eating subterranean monster, it doesn’t mean you still don’t have a thriller on your hands, too. Fiction is not restricted to only one genre, and that’s perhaps why Stephen King has earned such a successful career. He has been branching out since the very beginning of his career, incorporating elements from various genres and making them his own. The two biggest genres being horror, yes, but also crime fiction. His books are fueled by the ethos of classic thrillers.
People sometimes forget that Stephen King has been writing crime fiction long before the recently released Bill Hodges trilogy (which includes Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keeper, and End of Watch). This is the genre he grew up on, so it makes sense that his own work would pay it forward, both with his own work, and his frequent mentorship of young writers. One look at his Twitter account will clearly show that he’s still endorsing up-and-comers in the industry. King has written and read pretty much every kind of crime novel you can imagine, and this list attests to his diversity of approach.
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