Stephen King tries out with the cops in Mr Mercedes

Stephen King's first cop thriller picks up the pace late on but still falls limp
Killer car: John Carpenter’s film Christine, 1983, based on Stephen King’s book of the same name

Mr Mercedes by Stephen King (Hodder, £20)

EVEN before Stephen King was knocked down and almost killed by a minivan in 1999 while walking along a road in Maine, menacing cars were a theme in his work. There was Christine, which he wrote in 1983, a story about a red and white 1958 Plymouth Fury possessed by evil spirits, and then From a Buick 8, about a vintage car which wasn’t actually a car at all but a portal into another universe. In Mr Mercedes the handsome grey machine becomes a lethal weapon, but since this is a cop thriller — King’s first — the car is firmly in the control of a straightforwardly nasty psychopath called Brady Hartsfield.

The book opens with Hartsfield in the stolen car, wearing a clown mask and rubber gloves, mowing down a crowd of unemployed jobseekers at a job fair, killing eight people and injuring many more. The case, led by Detective Bill Hodges, is never solved and months later Hodges retires to spend his days home alone, watching TV, getting fatter and contemplating suicide.

Then, out of the blue, Hodges gets a letter from a man claiming to be the killer, taunting Hodges with his failure to solve the case.

Hodges is sufficiently incensed to pull himself up and out of his La-Z-Boy and get to work, determined to track Mr Mercedes down, unofficially of course, since his badge no longer works.

Along the way he hooks up with Janey, the sister of the woman from whom Hartsfield stole the Mercedes (the woman killed herself after the tragedy). Janey hires Hodges as her private dick to find out what really happened to her sister, and the pair strike up a relationship that is pure Bogart and Bacall pastiche, right down to the brown felt Fedora she gives him.

The sex between them though is less than elegant, King’s preoccupation with cars ever present: “She grabs the hardness of him through his underpants and wiggles it like a gearshift, making him gasp. ‘That’s a good start. Don’t go limp on me, Bill, don’t you dare,’” Janey tells him the first time they go to bed.

King’s forte as a storyteller has always been in his brilliant blurring of the lines between what’s normal and what isn’t. You never know if the demons and the worlds they inhabit are real or not — and that’s the point.

The only ones here have been computer-generated by Mr Mercedes, and while the pace picks up two-thirds of the way through the book it’s a bit limp — and certainly not enough to make you gasp.

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