BOOK REVIEW
Stephen King explores a favourite topic: the unsettling dynamic between famous authors and their devoted fans.
Stephen King has won many specialised awards — the Black Quill, the Balrog, the Bram Stoker, just to name a few of the Bs — during his long, incredibly prolific career. But until April he had never won an Edgar for best novel. This is the greatest genre-specific accolade available for crime books and thrillers, and King finally won it for Mr Mercedes, an atypical King novel published last June. It features a vicious, teasing killer determined to inflict mass violence on crowds of Americans. And it describes him in what is, for King, a pretty no-frills fashion.
Fans of this author’s phantasmagorical side could enjoy it, too, since Mr Mercedes is such a well-wrought exercise in everyday horror. It begins with the title character driving straight into a crowd lined up at a job fair, using his showy car to injure and kill people desperate for work — in case mowing down strangers wasn’t ugly enough. It goes on to create a trio of improbably matched crime-solvers and a taunting war of nerves between the killer and Bill Hodges, a former cop who becomes his main nemesis.
Mr Mercedes was both shockingly normal and filled with expertly wrought suspense. It couldn’t be called a return to form because King had never tried anything this basic. But it was the promising start of a trilogy that now resumes with Finders Keepers, which feels very much like a middle volume. While it doesn’t have the high drama of that opening instalment or the fireworks that, most likely, will cap off the stories of these characters, it has greater depth and time for reflection. And it considers one of King’s favourite subjects: the dynamic between famous authors and their fans.
Finders Keepers is also about leaping through time. Its first page establishes that agility, with the splendid sexuality of a 19-year-old boy coming alive in the mind of an almost 80-year-old author. The author has been dreaming, and he resents the rude interruption (“Wake up, genius”) that rouses him. But it’s worse than rude. It’s deadly. His home has been invaded by a rabid fan who means to rob and kill him.
The fan is the ghoulish, red-lipped Morris Bellamy, and he is besotted by the work of the author, John Rothstein, who has many Salinger-like qualities. (“He wrote that book about the kid who got fed up with his parents and ran away to New York City, right?” somebody says of him.) The year is 1978. Like Salinger, Rothstein has abandoned the literary world early enough to be proclaimed a reclusive genius and retreated to a small town in New Hampshire.
He has also refused to publish anything more than his established body of work, which includes three novels. But he is rumoured to be writing every day. And Morris winds up stealing not only Rothstein’s life and cash, but also more than 150 notebooks full of his unpublished writing.
It’s no spoiler to say that Morris quickly kills his two accomplices, then winds up in prison with a life sentence for rape. This is all just part of King’s warm-up. So is a visit to the Saubers household in 2009, just before the father, Tom Saubers, goes to the fateful job fair where Mr
Mercedes begins. Tom becomes one of those who lined up for work, only to be maimed by the attacking car and left unable to earn a living. So it is an amazing coincidence that the Sauberses live in the house where Morris lived right after the 1978 robbery. And that the 13-year-old Pete Saubers finds a trunk full of literature and loot that Morris buried nearby.
Pete starts mailing anonymous letters with money to his parents, and for years he keeps them afloat. But in 2013, when the book’s real action starts, the money has run out. So have the reasons for denying Morris parole. And away we go.
By this point Pete, too, has fallen in love with Rothstein’s writing, but he approaches it in a much healthier way than Morris did. As King puts it in one of those literary asides that are always welcome: “Most young men and women who fall in love with the works of a particular writer — the Vonneguts, the Hesses, the Brautigans and Tolkiens — eventually find new idols.”
But Morris has been turned into a case of arrested development by the literary snobbery of his mother, a celebrated academic who dared call her son’s favourite author jejune just when Morris, admittedly well on his way to homicidal lunacy, was at his most vulnerable. Rothstein did not intend to leave his Jimmy Gold, the main character in all five of his novels (two of them unpublished), as a sellout working in advertising, even though that’s the impression with which he left readers. Incidentally, the famed catchphrase by Jimmy Gold, frequently repeated here, is neither catchy nor credible. Holden Caulfield would call it lousy.
One of the pleasures of Finders Keepers is watching King’s ways of making pages turn. (“Pete lay awake for a long time that night. Not long after, he made the biggest mistake of his life.” That’ll keep you moving.) Another is the time-travelling, as when Morris “put his dirtsmeared jeans and sweatshirt in the washer, an act that would also be replicated by Pete Saubers years later”, since both young men, decades apart, know about the same hidden trunk and live in the same house.
Last and hardly least, there is the very appealing trio of crime-solvers who joined forces in Mr Mercedes. Bill Hodges is now running a private crook-nabbing firm called Finders Keepers. He works wonders with con men and other miscreants, aided by the Happy Slapper, a sock full of ball bearings. He works with the lively Holly Gibney, who applies her knowledge of movie dialogue to sleuthing. (It’s amazing what she figures out using the logic: “Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.”)
Finally, there’s Jerome Robinson, now a Harvard man. Bill and Holly are crazy about him, and the reader might be more so if Jerome, who is black, didn’t jokingly call Bill “Massa Hodges” and lapse into unfunny, demeaning dialect. (“Dis here black boy is one safe drivuh!”) But they’re still a great team throughout Finders Keepers. And Mr Mercedes still lurks, ready for his curtain call.