Introduction

This introduction establishes the concept of the hardboiled detective as he emerges in King’s fiction and discusses what both distinguishes and melds gothic horror and the work of the detective writer—the latter applying reason and ratiocination to contain and dispel the chaotic impulses and compulsions of the gothic. As this book demonstrates, King’s corpus remains replete with references, both subtle and overt, to the dense nexus of horror and crime fiction. But our specific focus here is the hardboiled Stephen King, and so it behooves us to define our terms. For a text to be considered hardboiled, it typically needs to include several stylistic and thematic elements: a chivalric detective that seems out of place in a deteriorating modern world; witty banter that demonstrates the detective’s rhetorical skills; a tension between the art of detection and the brutal violence required to “solve” the case; a grim fatalism at odds with the detective’s (futile) struggle against fate. Because horror and crime fiction bleed into one another in significant ways, we must delineate the hardboiled King from the horror King, if only to ensure that the subject at hand does not become a turbid composite.