Just Finished Reading The Outsider by Stephen King

Once when I was in the seventh grade in school, an unknown kid a couple of years ahead of me suddenly approached me with a giant, friendly grin on his face, erroneously recognizing me as an old buddy of his.  As I watched his face change from joy to confusion to downright anger and contempt, I realized how generally stupid my classmates were...it wasn't my fault that he screwed up.  After all, we could have ourselves ended up becoming friends.  I'm relating this because it does happen from time to time that some of us...including myself...find ourselves mistaken for another, a "dead ringer".  Alfred Hitchcock's terrific 1955 Henry Fonda movie The Wrong Man is a case example of this, with serious consequences.  Yet Fonda's character, wrongfully accused and convicted of a bank robbery mainly through the mistaken testimony of eyewitnesses, suffers little in comparison to The Outsider's Terry Maitland, who is directly implicated in the brutal murder of a little boy...

The question Stephen King raises in The Outsider is this: when two diametrically contradictory scenarios are presented, where will people come down when it comes to making judgments?  Terry Maitland has not only been identified by eyewitnesses as being around the scene of the crime when it occurred, but was also seen wearing bloody clothing.  The van he was seen in also bore his own fingerprints, as well as those of the victim...and DNA samples matched as well.  Pretty convincing, except that at the time of the crime Terry Maitland had an ironclad alibi, being many miles away at a writers' convention with even himself shown on video asking a question from the audience to the speaker.  Yet police detective Ralph Anderson simply refuses to believe in Maitland's innocence...after all, he has evidence supporting his guilt.  And so the story progresses as the town seems to have tried and convicted the accused in advance, with Maitland's wife and kids being shunned by former friends.  And it is here that I'll let you read what happens for yourself.  I will say this much: an old, familiar character from some of Stephen King's more recent novels resurfaces and provides a sense of sanity to it all...

As a sidelight, The Outsider discusses the caves of Texas that are in the vicinity of Austin.  As a recent visitor, I was impressed: I actually stepped down into one while I was there last year...I wonder how Stephen King, whom I had previously stereotyped as being just an expert on Maine and Florida (his summer and winter homes), managed to get into Texas caves...of course, the dude by this time has had many folks willing and able to perform some adroit advance research on whatever he wanted to write about...

Going off on a little tangent, I find it interesting how, in our country, one is supposed to be presumed innocent of a crime until convicted in a court of law...yet our law enforcement sometimes sees itself as judge, jury, and executioner.  Numerous television series show us the criminals in their heinous acts, so as viewers we already know they're guilty without the need of a trial: we just need to bring on the cops to settle the score, right? Wrong! The police can arrest and charge...and use force, even lethal force, to protect themselves and the public.  But they are not there to judge others and carry out their judgments.  I remember the first Superman movie when Christopher Reeve catches a cat burglar climbing the outside of a skyscraper.  After startling him, Reeves flies down and catches him just before he splats on the ground.  Our hero then hands him over to a cop, telling him to "lock him up"...say what?  Yet that's how a lot of us see our police...but not me.  Unfortunately, Ralph Anderson, the police detective in King's story, is one of those who feels the need to exercise his moral judgment over others is rightfully within the bounds of the exercise of his duty.  Sure, what results in The Outsider is fictional, but I believe that this sort of thing goes on all the time around us...