Stephen King reinvents himself as a (gasp!) detective writer
It’s a horrific coincidence that Stephen King’s 2014 novel Mr. Mercedes focuses on a man who chooses to plow into a crowd of innocent people in a motor vehicle, in light of last week’s tragic events in Nice, France. It perhaps goes to show that we live in a world where some people are bent on carrying out evil acts, no matter what, while others merely contemplate the evil that men do.
It’s a shame that such thoughts can even exist, but let us not blame Mr. King for having them. He has spent his career peering into countless dark corners, and even after writing some 50 best-selling novels, he appears to have hit another hot streak — a late golden age that perhaps began with his “what if” fictional take on the JFK assassination (11/22/63) that possesses a new maturity; and his streak now continues with the final chapter in his so-called “Bill Hodges Trilogy,” End of Watch. It’s a switch for King, tapping into the hard-boiled detective genre and developing a character who threads himself into three respectably pulpy, entertaining page-turners.
Retired detective Bill Hodges shows up first in Mr. Mercedes, just after the aforementioned attack in which Brady Hartsfield (a very evil man indeed) steals a Mercedes-Benz and uses it as a weapon against a crowd of early-morning job seekers lining up for a job fair. Years after police fail to locate the assailant — who calls himself “Mr. Mercedes” — Hartsfield begins taunting the lead detective on the case, Hodges, now retired, through poison pen letters and a secret website.
It’s a compelling read in the page-turner vein, and allows King to go deep and get cozy with characters that you come to know and like — and eventually come to realize are being set up for a franchise.
Hodges himself is a kind of everyman: no great thinker, he’s in his 60s, a bit overweight, at times a bit comical, but certainly a smart detective. You don’t need a Marvel superhero when you have someone who can piece things together like Hodges. Of course, he has help: two unlikely partners — a middle-aged woman with Asperger’s named Holly who’s a whiz at logistics, and an African-American college kid named Jerome who’s also computer-savvy.
Is Stephen King aping the hard-boiled turf of Raymond Chandler? Not exactly. It’s still King, with all his psychological tugs and pop cultural riffs and jokey bits and ability to freeze the blood intact. The only difference is, nothing supernatural takes place in Mr. Mercedes, or its 2015 sequel, Finders Keepers. (The paperback cover of that sequel, with its wooden box entangled in tree limbs against a moody sky, may make you think otherwise.)
What King seems to be doing — knowing that few writers will throw away ideas — is weaving his stray bits and leftover premises into the world of Hodges and his cohorts. Who knows if the idea of a car killer was floating in King’s mind years before he found a place for it? (Well, before that, he did write Christine, about a killer car.) Finders Keepers is even more intriguing, with its back story about a secluded writer whose main literary creation is beloved by millions of readers — the kind of fan adoration that Misery easily brings to mind — but here, the writer is a curmudgeonly literary figure mashing together American authors J.D. Salinger, John Updike and Philip Roth.
John Rothstein lives on a New Hampshire farm, far away from public scrutiny, after writing his celebrated “Jimmy Gold Trilogy” — a gloss on Updike’s “Rabbit Angstrom Trilogy,” most likely. Rumors abound — just as with Salinger — that far from quitting writing, the reclusive author has been amassing piles of new manuscripts in a safe. This is what lures Morris Bellamy, a literary fan, to go knocking on Rothstein’s door one winter day with a pair of thugs in tow.
King has often enjoyed exploring the complicated relationship between fan and writer, as well as between fan and fictional hero. Here, he has a disgruntled reader showing up at a writer’s doorstep, gun in hand, to accost the author over the final book in the trilogy. (Opening line: “Wake up, genius.”) Critics are everywhere, as we know. It’s not too far removed from the Annie Wilkes character in Misery, and perhaps nobody understands this perverse attachment that fans have to imaginary characters quite like King does.
King also pokes tongue in cheek to take on the prized literary circles that have so far eluded him — the benighted world of National Book Awards and Nobels for fiction. (Though let’s be fair: King has received a 2014 National Medal of Arts and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Not too shabby at all.)
That Moleskine notebooks containing Rothstein’s unpublished work will find their way out of the safe and end up in various crafty hands is not giving away too much of the page-turning fun in Finders Keepers. That retired detective Hodges will turn up to look into the matter — in his new capacity as repo man/bounty hunter — is also part of the fun.
The backdrop of US economic woes plays a role in the “Hodges” books as well, adding extra pathos to King’s characters and their motives. Whether it’s job seekers caught up in a different, more vicious kind of undertow, or young Peter Saubers in Finders Keepers trying to raise more money for his family (echoing the boy in D.H. Lawrence’s short story “The Rocking Horse Winner”), King weaves in a palpable mood of dread and desperation.
Next up is King’s finale, End of Watch, which came out in June 2016 and hasn’t quite reached these shores yet, but for people looking for good summer/rainy season reads, it can be comforting — gooseflesh and all — to check back in with the Master of Horror and find out what other tricks he has in his kit bag.
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Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers and 11/22/63 available at National Bookstore.
