Stephen King – return of the great storyteller

Stephen King’s latest novel, Mr Mercedes, is dedicated to James M. Cain and described as ‘a riveting suspense thriller’ — a phrase so closely approaching 100 per cent semantic redundancy (a non-riveting thriller? A thriller entirely free of suspense?) that it tells us precisely nothing. All it does is declare that the reader will keep turning the pages. Which we will. That’s what King makes us do.

Except Mr Mercedes isn’t, on the surface, a thriller; and you can bet that the consensus will be that King is writing what will be called ‘off-piste’. It’s a slender book, by his standards — only 400 pages — you can get it in your briefcase. There’s nothing particularly weird. No supernatural horrors; no reanimated corpses, things in drains, Greek fates materialising in lab coats. Mr Mercedes is — on that same surface — a ’tec-plus-chase story.

There’s a mad — properly; anyone with his back-story would be mad — killer, who ploughs a stolen Mercedes murderously into a crowd of poor folk queuing up at dawn for a cynical political jobs-for-all bullshit exercise. Then he hunts the owner of the stolen Merc to suicide. And then it gets worse.

The side of good is led by Kermit Hodges, a retired detective, now sitting in front of the TV, toying with the idea of eating his gun.There’s a curvaceous blonde who, quite believably, falls in tender erotic love with Hodges. There’s a black kid, Harvard-bound, sharp as a tack, whose whole family have white-folk names except for the dog, Odell.

And everything is known. Not that far into the book, we know whodunnit, we know wotidunn, we know why, we know everyone’s background and what’s coming next. Except, of course, we don’t, because King shares a skill and a sleight-of-pen with J.S.