The Multiple Deaths of Richard Bachman

King chose to publish under a Richard Bachman pseudonym back in the 1980s. This chapter unpacks the reasons why he chose to do this and connects these reasons to detective fiction and King’s larger oeuvre. The protagonists in the Bachman novels confront many of the same problems that confound hardboiled detectives found in the work of John D. Macdonald, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Thomas Harris. Lost in a milieu that is at best indifferent, and likely hostile to their fate, Bachman’s characters haunt the periphery of society. Either the consequence of personal illness (mental and/or physical), societal alienation, or a combination of both, Bachman’s antiheroes are devoid of standardized constructions of reality in their recognition of life’s absurdity. Suffering from psychic imbalances leading to self-hatred, aggression and sociopathology, the noir/hard-boiled detective, like the Bachman male (we focus primarily on the novel Roadwork), finds himself alone in a world bereft of faith in family, community, sexuality, friendship, religion, government, and the assorted Virtues.