Books I Didn't Finish: The Stephen King Detective Two-For-One Experience
I was recently in the hospital for a week, heavily doped up on pain medication (it wasn’t anything serious) and I needed a breezy, light book to pass the time. And lo and behold, the Kindle daily deal happened to feature a selection from my spooky frenemy, Stephen King!
That book was Mr. Mercedes, the first entry in what would become a trilogy revolving around a detective named Bill Hodges. The books are kind of notable in King’s ouvre for moving all the way out of horror and into the mystery/thriller genre, a space that many of his previous novels strayed pretty far into without entirely making the leap away from horror or the supernatural. Today we’re looking at Mr. Mercedes as well as its sequel, Finders Keepers.
The fact that I didn’t bother to read the third one is a spoiler.
Mr. Mercedes
The book opens with a prologue where a large crowd gathering outside a job fair in the early hours of the morning (it’s 2009, at the height of the recession) are mowed down by a man in a grey Mercedes, killing twelve and seriously injuring multiple more. Several years later we’re introduced to Bill Hodges, the detective in charge of the case who retired without ever catching the culprit. Bill is doing the whole depressed retired police officer thing, drinking and eating too much and idly contemplating suicide because his life just has no meaning without the work, god damn it.
But then Bill receives a taunting letter from the Mercedes killer. Reinvigorated, he snaps out of his funk and gets to work unofficially re-investigating the case. But the reader knows exactly who the culprit is: Brady Hartsfield, a handsome young underachiever who has the stereotypical murderer/sociopath backstory involving a messed up childhood. And he killed his disabled younger brother! And he wants to fuck his mom! And he doesn’t believe in God or the afterlife, because he’s EEEEEEVVVIIIIIILLLLLL!
...Sorry, I got ahead of myself there. Brady hasn’t directly murdered since the Mercedes massacre--he’s not really the serial killer type--but he’s increasingly fed up with life and is planning on ending it all in a blaze of glory that will hopefully make his previous exploits look like nothing. And if he can drive Bill to suicide (something he’s done at least once before) in the meantime, all the better.
As you may be able to tell from that synopsis, this is a very silly book. As is so often the case when I review King’s work, I find myself ticking off a checklist of his bad habits, most of which are present and accounted for here:
Cartoonishly evil villain who we see way too much of for them to be scary or threatening? Check
Gory violence side by side with saccharine whimsy? Check
Attempt at writing a black character that was probably well-intentioned but trips over itself really hard? MEGA CHECK
That last one comes in the form of Jerome, Bill’s teenage neighbour who does chores for him and helps him out with computer stuff. Jerome comes with so many black stereotypes that I’m not even going to bother to unpack them...but the thing is, he’s also a super-genius who’s been accepted to Yale and Harvard and shit! Totally not a stereotype! Nuh-uh!
I think I already went into how Brady falls flat as a villain. In case you need more explanation, King’s first mistake was calling his murderer “Brady”--possibly one of the least threatening names in existence--and then his next mistake was indulging in his well-worn habit of being unable to make his villains shut the fuck up. In this case nearly half the book is told from Brady’s perspective, giving us fascinating insights into how he hates children to and plans on poisoning Jerome’s dog out of sheer malice. Because he’s EVIL, you see. Oh and he really, really wants to have sex with his mother. The dude’s not exactly Hannibal Lecter, is what I’m saying.
Rounding out this stellar cast of well-realized characters is Holly Gibney, possibly one of King’s worst literary creations. I don’t think he or his fans would agree with me there, given that Holly appears in both sequels and The Outsider (a book that otherwise would have no connection to the Bill Hodges trilogy) and in one of the novellas in an upcoming collection.
Holly is an example of that character type you’ve probably seen a lot of lately, where she clearly has a bunch of Hollywood-ized markers of autism but is never explicitly stated to be autistic, I assume to give the writer plausible deniability. Or maybe she has some sort of mental illness! The book can’t seem to decide what her deal is. Whatever it is, it makes her so gosh-darn quirky and loveably odd. This is where King’s penchant for tweeness really comes in, as Holly is kind of similar to the annoyingly twee little girl in Doctor Sleep, except instead of being a little girl she’s forty five years old.
You’ve probably already picked up on this by now, but this is a trashy, trashy book. It’s the sort of story where Bill’s love interest dies because Brady is planning on murdering Bill by blowing up his car, but then Bill and his girlfriend swap vehicles for extremely contrived reasons, and also she just happens to have a habit of wearing his signature hat, thus making Brady think Bill is the one driving. This is the sort of ridiculous nonsense that would get lampooned all over the internet if a less famous author did it, but when you’re rich and famous you can get away with anything short of writing Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff.
I realize all of this sounds very negative, but here’s the thing: like a lot of King’s work, Mr. Mercedes is incredibly stupid and poorly-written in many ways...but it’s also a lot of fun. The cat and mouse game between Bill and Brady is fast and exciting, and the story keeps piling on the tension with nary a pause for wasted space. In the big finale when Bill and his allies are racing to stop Brady from blowing up a crowded concert venue, I genuinely thought the book might end in a big downer with Brady winning.
And in the end, isn’t that all that’s important in a thriller? That it thrills us? If we’re on the edge of our seat by the climax, does it really matter if the book is ridiculous and kind of racist and features a villain who won’t stop talking about how hot his alcoholic mother is?
Actually yes it does, but still! If you also find yourself blasted out of your fucking mind on pain meds and unable to leave your hospital room for five straight days, maybe you’ll appreciate Mr. Mercedes in the same half-ironic, half-no seriously way that I did.
Finders Keepers
The sequel opens with another prologue, this time focusing on a reclusive famous author named John Rothstein who wakes in the middle of the night to find three armed intruders in his isolated curmudgeon hideout. Rothstein initially believes that the thieves are after his savings and that they’ll spare him if he gives it up, but unfortunately for him the ringleader of the heist is Morris Bellamy, a troubled young man who actually wants the unpublished manuscript for the final installment of Rothstein’s Jimmy Gold quadrilogy. After clearing out Rothstein’s safe, Morris shoots him and then later impulsively kills his two accomplices (Morris isn’t the sort of person who thinks long-term) before burying the entire trove of cash and manuscripts, intending to dig them up as soon as the heat has died down.
But before he can do that, he gets blackout drunk and goes on a rampage serious enough to land him in jail for the next thirty years. Cut to 2009, when a young boy named Pete Saubers finds Morris’s stash. The Saubers family are teetering on the brink of financial ruin because Pete’s dad was severely wounded in the Mercedes massacre and can no longer work, so Pete devises a Precocious Scheme to use Morris’s stolen cash to help his family out, which works for several years. But when the money dries up, he comes up with a longer-term solution: sell the extremely valuable Jimmy Gold manuscript to a collector.
Said collector, Andy Halliday, is a former accomplice of Morris’s and has no intention of paying Pete what the manuscript is actually worth--or preferably anything at all--and the two enter into a tense battle of wits that could end with Pete’s family becoming millionaires...or with him going to jail for handling stolen goods. Meanwhile, Morris has finally gotten out of prison, and when he discovers that the precious cache he’s been obsessing over Andy Dufresne-style is empty, he assumes his old friend Halliday took it…
Oh wait, this is a Bill Hodges book, right? Yeah, he’s in this. He’s got a private detective agency called Finders Keepers that he runs with Holly. He gets involved in the whole Pete/Halliday/Morris standoff because, like, Pete’s sister is friends with Jerome’s sister, and like, she’s noticed Pete is stressed about something, so she tells Jerome, and then he comes to Bill and Bill zzzzzzzzz
Sorry, it’s just that the plot of Finders Keepers is so uninteresting I had to look it up on Wikipedia to remind myself what it was about. This, let me remind you, is something I read only weeks ago.
Maybe those pain meds affected me more than I thought.
Seriously, compared to Mr. Mercedes it’s a total snooze fest. And the tragic thing is, it didn’t need to be: strip away the Bill Hodges stuff and you’d have a still kind of trashy (the opening scene where Morris has Rothstein at gunpoint and they’re yelling at each other about literary criticism is extremely hard to take seriously) but perfectly serviceable thriller romp. The mental battle between Pete and Halliday is exciting, and having Morris as this looming threat that’s going to crash into the already-tense situation is really effective.
Morris is a far better villain than Brady, precisely because he’s a lot more mundane. He’s not a walking empty shell of humanity filled with pure howling evil who wants to hurt people just to delight in their suffering like so many of King’s bad guys; he’s just a violent, impulsive man who doesn’t care about anything but his own desires. That’s a lot scarier because it’s a lot more realistic. I also got a kick out of the way he’s very clearly an evil version of Andy Dufresne from The Shawshank Redemption, down to using his educational background to curry favour with authority figures in prison to protect himself.
I strongly suspect that this whole plot was originally a novella with no connection to the Bill Hodges trilogy, as his involvement with the story feels tacked-on and takes way too long to get going; Bill doesn’t even become aware of all of the facts of the case until over 60% of the way through the book, which is when I got fed up and stopped reading.
Maybe Bill could have gotten involved sooner if not for the sequel-bait scene where he visits a permanently brain-damaged Brady Hartsfield and we find out that Brady is developing spooky psychic powers
OH MY GOD STEPHEN KING HOW DO YOU KEEP GETTING THIS SHIT PUBLISHED