Why Stephen King Is an Unlikely Crime Fiction Grandmaster

The Outsider
King’s latest novel, now in paperback, is a work of full-on horror: it offers monsters, body trauma, and a fight between the forces of good and evil. But it’s also a police procedural—in fact, the first half of the book is almost entirely a mystery focused on a small-town detective’s attempts to solve a seemingly impossible crime. Naturally, the reasons it’s impossible turns out to be connected to an ancient and ravenous evil, but that doesn’t mean the investigative portions are any less effective or intriguing. Think of it as a Black Mirror-verse version of a crime ripped from an episode of Law and Order.

The Bill Hodges Trilogy
This trilogy of novels (Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers, and End of Watch) pulls off an interesting trick. The first is almost completely free of supernatural or horror elements, operating as a procedural-cum-thriller that follows the efforts of a retired detective, Bill Hodges, to identify and stop a serial killer who is sending him taunting letters. The second book continues this trend, telling another haunting but straightforward detective story. It isn’t until the third book that King allows elements of supernatural horror to leak in around the edges. As a whole, the trilogy illustrates that human horrors can be just as terrifying as demonic clowns—and that King really knows how to write a crime thriller.

Hard Boiled Noir

Joyland
This overt foray into noir was published by the Hard Case Crime imprint, so there’s no doubt it was conceived and executed as a crime novel despite containing some old-school King horror touches like a ghost and a child with “The Sight.” But those elements are mere subplots, with the main action being a decades-old case of serial murders at the titular amusement park that ends in a violent confrontation. There’s a genuine mystery at the core of this novel, and it’s solved without any supernatural help.

The Colorado Kid
King’s other Hard Case Crime novel doesn’t have any horror or occult elements—nor does it offer a resolution to the mystery it unfolds—a bold move, but one that might ultimately frustrate some readers. Still, the story, narrated by veteran newspaper reporters and recounting the mysterious death of a Colorado native, is riveting, a mystery filled with twists and clues. There’s something to the idea that some mysteries simply never can be solved, only be passed from one generation to the next, ultimately becoming something akin to folklore.

Prison Stories

Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption
One of King’s most famous and celebrated stories, this novella plays it straight too, landing squarely in the tradition of the prison novel, a subset of crime fiction with a rich tradition in both literature and the pulps. The story delves deeply into the routines, traditions, and haunting guilt of the incarcerated as Red, a man who has been in prison most of his life, tells the story of Andy Dufresne. Andy is wrongly convicted of double murder and spends decades plotting his escape from Shawshank Prison. For Andy, “escape” is a meaningful word in more ways than one. This is a soaring, ultimately hopeful story—but in the tradition of the best crime novels, it’s also filled with violence, punishment, and corruption.

The Green Mile
King’s other prison story has a strong supernatural element, of course, but it’s also firmly in the “prison story” channel. Set in a 1930s death row cell block, it focuses on the relationships between the guards and their prisoners, and in particular a huge and strangely gifted convicted murderer named John Coffey. Although the novel (which was first published as a series of novellas) favors a lot of magical realist techniques, it’s prison-novel and horror bona fides are strong enough that it won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel.

Straight-Up Crime Fiction

Blaze
King has written a number of novels that tell crime stories without the adornment or complication of supernatural elements—although many contain seriously horrifying scenes, and usually work with ingredients familiar to any fan of King’s writing. Blaze is about a kidnapping perpetrated by a mentally-challenged con artist who imagines he’s still being advised by his deceased former partner and only friend. It’s a sad, tragic road narrative with a Jim Thompson flavor—and was actually one of the first novels King ever wrote; it sat in the trunk for decades before he revised and published it under his Richard Bachman pseudonym.

Roadwork
This novel is kind of a cross between the Michael Douglas white-man’s-rage film Falling Down and a traditional crime novel. A man watches his life slowly circle the drain until the callous decisions of his local government break him. He gets a gun and goes on what can only be described as a rampage, wiring his house with explosives and killing several police officers who arrive at the standoff he’s engineered. It all leads to a literally explosive ending and a haunting revelation that puts a grim twist on the violence unleashed. It’s a book that isn’t out of place if considered alongside old-school crime novels of the 1950s and 1960s.

A Good Marriage
King once again leaves out the supernatural without losing any of the horror in this novella that springs from a deceptively simple premise: a woman discovers that her husband and the father of her children is secretly a serial killer. While this revelation leads to all the terror you might expect, King is very smart about playing with your expectations: Darcy Anderson initially struggles with what she uncovers, then resorts to violence to deal with it. King ends on a refreshing note of order—of a belief in a universe that ultimately makes sense—but at the core, this is a crime novel about a serial killer, only told from the other side of the mirror.

Big Driver
King’s version of a revenge-driven crime story is surprisingly straightforward: a woman is sexually assaulted, plots her revenge, and extracts it in a bloody, if slightly less-than-competent, fashion. The revenge tale is a classic subset of crime fiction, as is the idea of a mystery writer having the mental skill set to commit—or solve—crimes. King blends both ideas into a taut story in which his heroine, Tess, never becomes a robotic killing machine, and struggles with her actions until the final pages. It’s a neat, satisfying tale in which a crime is both the problem and the solution.
What are your favorite non-horror Stephen King stories?