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 on King explore his canon in religious contexts, in political and historical contexts, in mythic contexts, in Gothic/horror contexts, and in a wide variety of other contexts appropriate to a writer who has become "America's Storyteller." Beginning with a never-published chapter authored by Stephen King himself on the influence of the genre on his own writing, King Noir makes an invaluable contribution to King scholarship by placing King's works in conversation with American crime fiction.

In interviews, King has acknowledged his debt to earlier writers in the genre, and he much more often references hard-boiled writers than he does horror writers. One could speculate that King became a writer because of his love of pulpy crime fiction, which he continues to hold in high esteem. From The Dead Zone to Mr. Mercedes, from the crime fiction of his pseudonym Richard Bachman to Holly, King returns obsessively to patterns established by American sleuths of every stripe, paying homage to them at the same time as he innovates on the formulas he has inherited. To focus upon a hard-boiled Stephen King is to discover exciting new avenues for inquiry into one of America's most enduring, and adaptable, storytellers.