Billy Summers and The Criminal’s Redemption

The novel Billy Summers (2021) flips Stephen King’s typical detective script. Whereas narratives such as King’s Mr. Mercedes (2014), for instance, remain relatively faithful to the orthodox detective narrative format—i.e., a criminal perpetuates felonious activity and the detective seeks to outwit him and foil his design— Summers is a novel of criminality from the point of view of the criminal himself. And while there is no detective figure per se in the text, Summers features that criminal coming to terms with his past’s violent actions and eventually choosing an alternative course. As such, Billy Summers confirms the working thesis of this book that King has been profoundly influenced by crime fiction throughout his career, even in those books where there is no ostensible detective present. The novel, ironically, appears to return to a Poe-like blending of detective and criminal doppelganger, like Poe’s short story “William Wilson,” since, as in Poe’s tale, King’s book reveals the “detective impulse” and criminal lodged in the same psyche. The novel tracks the reformation of a criminal named Billy Summers as he enacts vengeance on “the bad guys” that have done him—and his friends—wrong. Part neo-noir, part gangster novel, part meta-detective story, part tale of redemption, Billy Summers concerns itself with the imaginative possibilities as well as the dead-ends of American crime fiction.