Andrew Mayden

By Andrew Mayden

Stephen King’s Bill Hodges trilogy is his first attempt at hard boiled detective stories.

The first novel, Mr. Mercedes, opens with a maniac murdering eight people who are lined up for the opening of a jobs fair in ’09. The killer plows into the crowd in a stolen Mercedes Benz which earns him his nickname: the Mercedes Killer.

Cut a head a year to Bill Hodges, a former police detective, now settling into his retirement. He is not enjoying the daytime television and lonely days spent at home. He even flirts with the idea of suicide, until one day he gets a letter in the mail from the Mercedes Killer. The psychopath taunts him, being only one of a very short list of crimes Hodges failed to solve in his career with the service. The letter is a ploy, another sick game, imagined by the killer to push the poor retired detective to commit suicide.

Very early in the story, the reader is introduced to the killer, a young guy named Brady Hartsfield. He lives with his mom and has an elaborate control room set up in the basement, which serves as his sanctuary and gives him the privacy he requires to do his real work. In the time since the massacre, he used his job as a computer technician to keep in touch with the owner of the Mercedes and, through letters and messages on the website Under Debbie’s Blue Umbrella, he convinces her to commit suicide, blaming herself for the small part in the massacre.

Brady’s plan to drive Hodges to suicide backfires. As the novel unfolds, we see the detective go to work following up on this new lead to catch the elusive Mercedes Killer before he can strike again. This time killing thousands.

The novel follows a well worn path with very little happening outside of what the reader expects to happen. However, what I find so engrossing about King’s work is that it never actually feels like you’re walking a well worn path. The lush details along with King’s amazing command of colloquial English, makes the book a captivating read.

Case in point: Janey Trelawney. Here is a character Hodges meets fairly early in the book. Her role is simple and easy to define. She becomes the love interest that reinvigorates his sex drive and gives him that extra boost to pull himself together and catch the bad guy. However, despite her obvious function in the story from a craft standpoint, she is still a well written character, complete with idiosyncrasies, humorous lines, and most important of all: motivations. It was her sister that committed suicide when Brady started pushing her.

King spends a lot of time referencing the genre he is trying to reside in. Hodges thinks he “could be Philip Marlowe after all.” He even goes so far as to playfully tease the stereotypes therein. Halfway through the book Janey buys Hodges a fedora because “he’s a private detective now… and every private dick should have a fedora to pull down to one eyebrow.” These tongue in cheek references to the genre seem to underscore King’s personal relationship with these kind of stories, but it makes the characters feel like they actually know they are characters in a detective novel.

The novel races toward a conclusion, with the last third of the book taking place in a twenty four hour period leading up to Brady’s plan to blow up a concert. In the end, it is Hodge’s mismatched pair of allies that actually saves the day. While Hodges is suffering a heart attack outside, it’s Jerome and Holly that race through the stadium and catch Brady prior to blowing the auditorium sky high.

All the pros and cons of the genre aside, this book has the two things that I have come to love about Stephen King’s work. First are the culture references casually worked into the text. People talk the way I expect real people to talk living in 21^st century America. Janey, for example, compares Brady to the serial killer in Dexter. Second I love his command of the language. He simply knows how to turn a good phrase. He uses choice words to make reading the novel an enjoyable experience. Even when I am not surprised by the twists in the plot, or inspired by the characters, I can always fall back on the easy-breezy way he writes and enjoy it on that level.

While far from my favorite King novel, Mr. Mercedes nevertheless proves King is a formidable author and shows no intention of slowing down anytime soon.