King Noir

Over the past thirty years or so, Stephen King has received enormous attention from both the popular press as well as academics seeking to explain the unique phenomenon of his success. Books have been published by professors exploring the King canon in religious contexts, in political and historical contexts, in mythic—specifically Jungian—contexts, in Gothic/horror (especially American literary) contexts, and from a wide variety of additional perspectives appropriate to a writer who, over the past half a century, has become “America’s Storyteller.” This book adds to these other interpretative analyses by reading well-known—and less well-known work—from King’s canon through the lens of the detective genre. In interviews, King has acknowledged his debt to earlier writers in the genre, such as Ed McBain and Raymond Chandler, but this is the first book to trace his hardboiled inheritance. Included in this book is a never-before-published essay by Stephen King on his own relationship to the detective genre. In a separate but related essay, the publisher for three of King’s detective novels, Charles Ardai (Hard Case Crime Books), was generous enough to author his own thoughts on working with King and their mutual connection to detective fiction. By focusing upon Stephen King as a writer of crime fiction, this book opens exciting new avenues for inquiry into one of America’s most enduring storytellers.