The Colorado Kid

by Stephen King

Two old men, Dave and Vince, who run a small town newspaper in Maine, spend about 40 pages chit-chatting with their 20-something intern, Stephanie. Then they start telling her an unsolved mystery story about a dead man found on the beach 25 years earlier. The man who died had apparently choked to death, but there were some strange details. Eventually, these reporters figure out that the man isn’t local - he’s from Colorado. In fact, he had been in Colorado on the morning of his death. And he apparently had no connections to Maine, so why was he there? And the time window for him to get there was very, very narrow. And he had a pack of cigarettes from Colorado with him with a single one missing, but he wasn’t a smoker.

The crazy thing is that after these questions build up, the book ends. There is no resolution of the mystery. The old reporters get up and leave to run errands, and that’s it.

There is more of a point to it, though. In the beginning of the book, they all met with a writer from the Boston Globe who was asking for these kinds of unsolved mystery stories for a piece he was working on. They told him several but not The Colorado Kid. Dave and Vince explain to Stephanie why: The CK is not really a story. It has too many unknowns to make a good story.

For most of the book, you take this to mean that they didn’t tell the Globe reporter because they didn’t think he’d use it. But in the end, they explain that the real problem is that he would have used it. But he would have made it into a story – not by lying, but by emphasizing certain details and leaving out others. The goal there is to make the reader come to a conclusion without telling him explicitly what that conclusion is.

So the book did have a point, it just wasn’t the point I expected. I can respect that, but I still want to know what happened to the guy on the beach!