Follower

Donnerstag, 13. September 2018

Stephen King: Crime Writer / Max Booth. In: CrimeReads September 13, 2018

When news of Stephen King’s latest novel, The Outsider, first broke, the horror community found themselves divided into two camps: those willing to welcome this new title with the same enthusiasm as his previous publications, and those disappointed that King had once again decided to release something under the crime umbrella. Maybe this latter group figured he’d gotten the genre all out of his system now that he’d concluded his Bill Hodges trilogy about an ex-cop tracking down a serial killer (Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers, and End of Watch) and he would finally return to his horror roots. Which is odd, because while, yes, The Outsider is a crime novel, it also clearly falls under horror. Nearly every book can be classified under multiple genres. It’s what makes them interesting. And horror and crime? I can’t think of a more exciting tag team.
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.

The Hard-Boiled Stephen King

In celebration of Stephen King, the crime writer, we thought we’d go over his vast bibliography and highlight some of his ventures into crime fiction. So, let’s get the obvious titles out of the way first and tackle the undeniably hard-boiled, like his Hard Case Crime original paperbacks, The Colorado Kid and Joyland. King’s love for a good, gritty murder mystery has never been more present than in The Colorado Kid. Arguably one of King’s most underrated novels, it involves a rookie newspaperwoman investigating a 25-year-old cold case. Reactions were strong against this one when it first came out, but perhaps a stronger appreciation for it has grown since the TV adaptation (Haven). No clear resolution is offered in The Colorado Kid, which upset a lot of casual horror fans not too versed in hard-boiled mysteries, but honestly? It’s kind of perfect and begs to be revisited by diehard “constant readers” who originally shrugged it off. His second HCC paperback, Joyland, features nearly the same plot, except this time he replaces “rookie newspaperwoman” with “rookie carnie-boy.” These are the easiest of King’s novels to classify under the crime/mystery genre thanks to the publisher’s legacy of releasing gloriously pulpy crime fiction, plus those beautiful front covers by Glen Orbik and Robert McGinnis really help emphasize what the reader is getting themselves into. There’s not a crime writer alive today who doesn’t fantasize about one day publishing a paperback with Hard Case Crime (Yo, Ardai, if you’re reading this: hit me up). ... [mehr] https://crimereads.com/stephen-king-crime-writer/

Keine Kommentare: