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The Colorado Kid
...announced at www.stephenking.com on Monday!
Comments
Great news - can't wait for the details.
Blu
The Colorado Kid, a paperback with a lurid, 1940s-style cover featuring a languid brunette (painted by Glen Orbik of Batman and Superman fame), comes out in October from publisher Hard Case Crime.
The story: A man is found dead on an island off the coast of Maine. A local newspaperman and graduate student in forensics try to identify the man. The more they learn, the more baffling the mystery becomes. (The sexy brunette on the cover is a young newspaper intern learning the ropes.)
Hard Case Crime started last year with the mission of publishing old and new hard-boiled fiction. The list of new paperbacks (all about 200 pages) includes The Confession by Domenic Stansberry and Little Girl Lost by Richard Aleas (pseudonym for Hard Case Crime founder Charles Ardai), both of which were nominated for Edgar Allan Poe Awards this year.
King, who lives in Florida and Maine, found out about Hard Case Crime when Ardai approached him to get a blurb for one of the paperbacks. "King decided he'd rather write a book," Ardai says.
http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2005-02-27-king-pulp-fiction_x.htm
FIRST PUBLICATION ANYWHERE!
On an island off the coast of Maine, a man is found dead. There’s no identification on the body. Only the dogged work of a pair of local newspapermen and a graduate student in forensics turns up any clues, and it’s more than a year before the man is identified.
And that’s just the beginning of the mystery. Because the more they learn about the man and the baffling circumstances of his death, the less they understand. Was it an impossible crime? Or something stranger still...?
No one but Stephen King could tell this story about the darkness at the heart of the unknown and our compulsion to investigate the unexplained. With echoes of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon and the work of Graham Greene, one of the world’s great storytellers presents a moving and surprising tale whose subject is nothing less than the nature of mystery itself…
2005-2006 Lineup Also Includes Lawrence Block, Donald Hamilton, Ed McBain and Donald E. Westlake
New York – Winterfall LLC, creator of the celebrated Hard Case Crime line of pulp-style paperback crime novels, today announced that a new book by Stephen King will be the lead title of the line’s second year. The Colorado Kid tells the story of two veteran newspapermen and their investigation into the mysterious death of a man on an island off the coast of Maine. The book was written specifically for Hard Case Crime and has never previously been published. One of the most beloved storytellers of all time, Stephen King is the world’s best-selling novelist, with more than 300,000,000 books in print.
Launched in September 2004 by novelists and pulp mavens Charles Ardai and Max Phillips (and recently nominated for two Edgar Allan Poe Awards by the Mystery Writers of America), Hard Case Crime revives the storytelling and visual style of the great pulp paperbacks of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. The line features an exciting mix of lost pulp masterpieces from some of the most acclaimed crime writers of all time and gripping new novels from the next generation of great hardboiled authors, all with new painted covers in the grand pulp style. Authors range from current best-sellers such as Lawrence Block, Max Allan Collins, Ed McBain, and Donald E. Westlake to Golden Age stars like Erle Stanley Gardner (creator of "Perry Mason"), Donald Hamilton (creator of "Matt Helm"), Wade Miller (author of Touch of Evil), and David Dodge (author of To Catch a Thief).
Cover artists include the legendary Robert McGinnis, creator of the posters for the original Sean Connery James Bond movies, as well as other award-winning painters chosen for their ability to work in the vivid and dramatic style that made pulp paperbacks so memorable. After seeing samples of Hard Case Crime’s books, Mickey Spillane—creator of Mike Hammer and one of the best-selling paperback writers of all time—wrote, "Those covers brought me right back to the good old days."
The Colorado Kid will be published in October 2005 in the classic pocket-sized mass-market paperback format in which hundreds of millions of books were sold during the heyday of pulp fiction. The book will be published through Winterfall’s ongoing collaboration with Dorchester Publishing, the oldest independent mass-market publisher in the United States. The book will also be available in audiobook and e-book editions from Simon & Schuster, publisher of Stephen King’s work since 1998.
"Steve is an extraordinary writer, and as much a fan of classic paperback crime fiction as we are," said Charles Ardai, Hard Case Crime’s editor. "We originally contacted him to see if he’d be willing to write a blurb for our line, and he decided that what he really wanted to do was write a book for us instead. We’re thrilled that he wanted to be part of Hard Case Crime and we’re very excited to get to introduce the world to the baffling mystery of The Colorado Kid."
"This is an exciting line of books," Stephen King commented, "and I'm delighted to be a part of it. Hard Case Crime presents good, clean, bare-knuckled storytelling, and even though The Colorado Kid is probably more bleu than outright noir, I think it has some of those old-fashioned kick-ass story-telling virtues. It ought to; this is where I started out, and I’m pleased to be back."
Since its debut in 2004, Hard Case Crime has been the subject of enthusiastic coverage by a wide range of publications including The New York Times, USA Today, Vanity Fair, Playboy, U.S. News & World Report, BusinessWeek, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Houston Chronicle, New York magazine, the New York Post and Daily News, Salon, Publishers Weekly and USA Weekend, as well as numerous other magazines, newspapers, and online media outlets. The Chicago Sun-Times wrote, "Hard Case Crime is doing a wonderful job publishing both classic and contemporary ‘pulp’ novels in a crisp new format with beautiful, period-style covers. These modern ‘penny dreadfuls’ are worth every dime." Playboy praised Hard Case Crime’s "lost masterpieces," writing "They put to shame the work of modern mystery writers whose plots rely on cell phones and terrorists." And the Philadelphia City Paper wrote, "Tired of overblown, doorstop-sized thrillers...? You’ve come to the right place. Hard Case novels are as spare and as honest as a sock in the jaw."
Hard Case Crime is scheduled to publish nine books in 2005, increasing to a schedule of one title per month in 2006. The next two titles in the line, due in stores at the start of March, are Home Is the Sailor by 1950s pulp master Day Keene and Kiss Her Goodbye, an original novel set on the mean streets of Edinburgh, by the rising young Scottish noir stylist Allan Guthrie.
I expect it will be a straight up mystery but perhaps SK was inspired by Lost?
A pretty good quote from The Official Stephen King Newsletter, which just showed up in my inbox! Especially the last sentence!
Blu
P.S. The other exciting this is, I really expected today's announcement to be about "Lisey and the Madman" - does that mean that could still be out there somewhere, too?
BUT...
I thought the novel that would be announced would be the one he said he was writing about a haunted house supposibly inspired by his own mansion in Bangor? Bev, do you know what happened with this? Or is this Lisey's Story?
HA! :)
Here's what I'm pretty sure you might be thinking of, from a long interview with King posted at Guardian.co.uk last year:
He has another book written, though he says it's 'a mess,' and has yet to
decide whether anybody else should read it.
It is about a writer's widow, and came about when he returned home from his hospitalisation for pneumonia to find his wife redecorating his office.
"My wife says to me: 'Don't go in your office'. Like Bluebeard or something. I said, 'Why not?' She says: 'It's just a mess in there and it will really upset you.' One night I couldn't sleep and I went out there and she was right - it upset me. The furniture was all gone. The books were off the shelves. Everything was in boxes. It was just like a room that has been cleared out following an old person's death. It got me thinking about my own death and what would happen afterwards."
Will you be at WHC?
Record Courier Staff Reports
March 4, 2005
Douglas High School graduate Glen Orbik provided the cover to Stephen King's new novel of pulp fiction "The Colorado Kid."
Both USA Today and the New York Times carried items on King's book, which included information about Glen's cover.
The book is one of several published by Hard Case Crime, which is attempting to bring back the pulp novel.
According to Glen's stepfather, native Jim Perry, Glen moved here with mom Darla in the late '70s.
Glen graduated in 1981 with one of my favorite artists, Jennifer Hollister.
Jennifer said Glen favored the Boris Vallejo school of art that was popular with us Dungeons & Dragons kids back in the day.
He works as a freelance illustrator and specializes in covers for comics and paperbacks, according to his bio. He has worked for both Marvel and DC Comics, TSR (the folks who published D&D), Berkeley and Avon books.
My mom has a print of his "Batman: Avenger of the Knight," which I had no idea Glen painted until sitting down to write this.
"I knew he would make it," Jenn said when I told her about Glen.
Jim said Glen used girlfriend Laurel as the model for the cover on King's book.
Well when The Green Mile was originally released, its concept also included it being a paperback chapbook. Later it was released as a hardcover. That's the one I have in my collection. Six Stories's stories all made it to Everything's Eventual, in hardcover. I'll undoubtedly pick this up, especially for the low price, but hopefully there's a hardcover edition down the road... Maybe it's just me, but if a book isn't hardcover, it's somehow isn't a real book to me.