There are days when in seems that there is an malevolent god who delights in making my life just a wee bit more complicated than it needs to be. Minor speed bumps become major road construction projects and detours lead only to dead ends. There was a day just like that last week.
The microwave that went out last winter, two days before my east coast trip, still hasn't been repaired or replaced although I have been getting by with a cheap countertop model. I realized that the rosemary that has been holding up the slope of the back yard, and keeping the patio and pool from sliding into the wash is dying. And I don't know why. And while I was laying flat on my back trying to get a spring hose-clamp to secure the rubber hose to the drain pump of my front-loading washing machine, the compressor failed on the air conditioner. (The YouTube video showing repairmen in white uniforms easily slipping the hose over the bib and securing the clamp with simple pliers, is by the way, no more accurate than the commercials promising you a lifetime of success with the use of a new and improved hair shampoo and conditioner.)
First world problems, I know, but there were enough of them that I felt deprived by the fact that alcohol gives me headaches and that I had no legal access to any recreational mind-altering substances. I clearly needed an attitude adjustment.
I mopped up the laundry room floor for the third time, cursed my husband once again for dying before I was through with him, wondered if I was really cut out for home ownership, and took a shower. I knew I needed an escape, and as I went over my encyclopedic To Be Read list, one name jumped out at me. Old reliable himself, Stephen King, master storyteller.
And he had just published another mystery. Two birds. One stone.
Mr. Mercedes
By Stephen King
Published by Simon & Schuster
June 3rd 2014
448 pages
Billed as a hard-boiled detective story, Mr. Mercedes is the second crime novel that King has written. The first one, Joyland, was as much a coming of age story as it was a mystery novel. This novel promised to be more in the style of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett. On the dedication page is written "Thinking of James L. Cain." Cain was the American novelist responsible for works like The Postman Always Rings Twice, Mildred Pierce, Double indemnity and Serenade. And as an interesting side note, from Cain's Wikipedia page:
In 1946, Cain wrote four articles for Screen Writer magazine in which he proposed the creation of an American Authors' Authority to hold writers' copyrights and represent the writers in contract negotiations and court disputes. This idea was dubbed the "Cain plan" in the media. The plan was denounced as Communist by some writers who formed the American Writers Association to oppose it.
Perhaps King's pleasure in Cain's work is based as much on a similar world view as it is on the works themselves.
Written in King's typical prose that seems to disappear into the image the words create, Mr. Mercedes opens in the early morning hours as hundreds of people wait in line for the opening of a job fair in a medium sized midwestern city. Out of the grey fog appears the headlights of a Mercedes SL500 that heads straight for the job seekers we have met, killing 8 people and injuring 15 others.
The car, and clown mask the driver was wearing, become central to the police investigation that proved unsuccessful. The actual owner of the Mercedes, a middle-aged, wealthy, thoroughly entitled, and unlikable widow, was sure that she had locked the car when leaving it and denied having left the key in the ignition. Within a few months she had committed suicide.
The Mercedes killing was the last major case handled by now retired Detective Kermit "Bill" Hodges. Six months into his retirement, he spends his time eating junk food and watching daytime television while fondling his revolver and wondering how long he can put off swallowing it, when a letter arrives from the Mercedes killer. In an intentionally taunting tone, the letter reveals information known only to the killer.
Who is Brady Hartfield, a thirty-something social misfit who still lives with his mother and works two jobs, one doing in-home computer service calls for a large electronics retailer and another driving an ice cream truck.
The story is told through their alternating points of view as Hodges decides that he will find the killer himself, and as Hartfield races to complete his plans for his final headline grabbing mass murder.
During his secret investigation into the job fair killings, Hodges meets the bombshell (which every noir novel must have), the forty-something sister and now wealthy heir to the owner of the Mercedes. Who, of course, finds herself inexplicably drawn to the man who wants to re-open the case that so troubled her sister that it led to her suicide.
Rather than turn to the police for help in tracking down this killer, Hodges recruits Jerome, the teen-aged neighbor who mows his lawn and explains his cell phone to him, as well as Holly, a woman with severe OCD and social anxiety issues who exceeds even Jerome as a computer whiz.
This is the first in a planned trilogy of detective novels with the second, Finders Keepers, due out next year.
In Mr. Mercedes, Stephen King gets many things right, even though I did not find it quite dark enough, nor cynical enough, to be noir. It does work as a suspense thriller, without a single supernatural element.
King's portrait of Brady Hartfield is chilling, not least for the fact that Brady could be anyone. Anywhere. We would never have noticed him, which seems to be a common complaint of those who commit mass murder. King has always excelled at depicting evil, even providing a backstory which should, but never does, explain it.
Bill Hodges is engaging as a hero, even while some of his actions push the envelope of believability. There were a couple of times when the question of why didn't he just call 911 begins to form, but the pacing of the action pushes all questions into the background.
However. There is no forty-ish, independently wealthy, attractive woman in her right mind who would be so horny that she jumps into bed with the retired, overweight, out of shape, depressed, daytime-TV-watching, sixty-something detective. Not sure whether this fantasy came from King's inner 13 year-old boy, or if it is simply the fantasy of every aging baby boomer who still feels entitled to be bedded by an attractive woman no matter his own shortcomings.
Sorry. Not gonna happen.
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