Stephen King's novel 'Mr. Mercedes' never accelerates

[Journal Sentinel, 30 may 2014]

Mike Fischer

Stephen King has always had a thing with cars.

In "Christine" (1983), a Plymouth Fury becomes a jealous and murderous lover. In the terrific "From a Buick 8" (2002), something resembling a Roadmaster tempts highway patrol officers — and readers — to take a one-way journey into King's sprawling "Dark Tower" series.

Now, in "Mr. Mercedes " — an homage to hard-boiled crime fiction that expressly invokes James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler — the killing machine is a Mercedes-Benz SL500. Shortly after King's novel begins in the predawn hours of a foggy April day, this 12-cylinder beast mows through a crowd of unemployed workers lining up in the dark for a job fair.

But unlike its predecessors, this King car isn't a supernatural creature with a mind of its own, any more than this novel is a classic whodunit. Just over 40 pages in, we've already learned that this paradigm of German engineering did its lethal work because it was driven by a psychopath: the seemingly innocuous and 30ish Brady Hartsfield, who'd stolen the car before embarking on his joy ride from hell.

While hell may be where Brady belongs, King's account of how and why Brady goes down that road is surprisingly flat, coming as it does from an author whose forays into the heart of darkness are usually so unsettling.

Brady is a virgin who still lives with and is unnaturally close to his doting single mother. He holds two dead-end jobs — including one driving an ice cream truck — and resents people more successful than he is. He thinks he is smarter than everyone else. And he's a megalomaniac who desperately wants the world to take notice that he exists.

That includes the decorated and recently retired detective in an unnamed city — reminiscent of Toledo and definitely somewhere in northern Ohio — in which "Mercedes" takes place. His name is Bill Hodges, and in the spring of 2010, Brady sends him a letter. Signing it "the Mercedes killer," Brady uses that letter to taunt Hodges for failing to solve the Mercedes massacre before turning in his badge. Game on.

Hodges and King have a lot in common.

Just as Hodges spent 40 years as a cop, it's now been exactly 40 years since "Carrie," King's first published novel. When we meet him in spring 2010, Hodges is 62; so then was King. Hodges has an ambivalent relationship with technology; ditto King, who has long resisted owning a cell phone. Hodges fantasizes he is Philip Marlowe; "Umney's Last Case" (1993), one of King's great short stories, is a dazzling Chandler pastiche.

There's nothing dazzling about "Mercedes," which trundles along in tired prose as a classic game of cat-and-mouse, in which close third-person narration spotlights Hodges and Brady. Hodges knows that "Mr. Mercedes" will kill again; the question is whether his deduction and intuition, meticulously noted on old-school legal pads, will catch the tech-savvy Brady in time.

Long before the end of this long slog, I didn't much care.

Maybe it was the plot, which has holes the largest Mercedes could sail through. Maybe it's the thin context, from a writer who usually sets the scene so carefully and well. Maybe it's the synthetic add-ons — Brady's childhood, Hodges' improbable fling and Hodges' equally improbable sidekicks — through which King tries to give these cardboard characters a life.

Late in the novel, as he prepares yet another terrorist act, Brady admits being "aware of what a crude and make-shift plan" he has concocted, adding that "the stupidest no-talent screenwriter in Hollywood could do better." He's right, which leaves me wondering why this phenomenally gifted writer didn't.

Not every car can take flight like "Buick 8." But in all my years as an unabashed King fan, I've never taken such a boring and joyless ride. "Mr. Mercedes" travels by interstate: fast but empty, from entrance to exit.

Mike Fischer is a local writer and lawyer.