Mr. Mercedes A novel

HALFWAY THROUGH "Mr. Mercedes," billed as Stephen King's first hard-boiled detective novel, a fedora makes an appearance. It's a winking gift to the retired cop hero, Bill Hodges, from his first client, Janey Patterson. "Every private dick should have a fedora he can pull down to one eyebrow," she tells him. Hodges tries it on for size, as do Jerome (his teenage Watson) and even Janey herself. No one seems to hang on to it for long. Then, at a critical point in the story, it disappears in a flash. The fedora's symbolic weight, and conspicuous disappearance, signal both King's affectionate awareness of the hard-boiled tradition and his point of departure from it. The premise of "Mr. Mercedes" bears all the genre's hallmarks. Battered and lonely, Hodges is the archetypal detective haunted by the big case he couldn't crack - that of Mr. Mercedes, the mystery assailant who plowed a car through a crowd, killing eight people. Pressed into service by Janey, the sister of the woman whose car the killer used, he quickly feels energized and committed to his cause. The novel's two wealthy sisters even seem to be a nod to Carmen and Vivian Sternwood, Raymond Chandler's dangerous pair in "The Big Sleep." At one point, Hodges wonders if he "could be Philip Marlowe after all," envisioning a "va-voom receptionist" like someone out of a Mickey Spillane novel. King is clearly having fun, and so are we. In the decades since Chandler and Spillane, the genre has expanded and evolved past the classic straight white male detective who upholds honor in a fallen world. Yet from Harry Bosch and Elvis Cole to the HBO series "True Detective," the archetypal gumshoe continues to hold our gaze; we need him, it would seem. As Chandler wrote in his celebrated essay "The Simple Art of Murder," setting the rules for decades of knight-errant detectives to come: "He is the hero, he is everything." The world may change, but he remains our constant. King understands how this attachment works. In interviews, he often speaks about how popular horror novels reflect the cultural anxieties of their era - the deterioration of the traditional family, changing gender roles, economic decline. So it is with the detective tale, each new set of fears generating a new foe, a new threat. And King cannily focuses on a particularly urgent and timely one: the spree of rampage killers dominating current headlines. As opposed to mobsters or serial murderers, these assailants hit us where we live: a primary or secondary school, a college campus, a movie theater, a shopping mall, a beloved marathon. In "Mr. Mercedes," it's a job fair, a poignant sign of recessionary times. And as the story unfolds, the killer, baited by Hodges, plans a far more momentous public act of terrorism. For the first half of the novel, King tickles our anxieties, his detective engaging in a classic cat-and-mouse game with the killer. But you can feel him wriggling against the hard-boiled tradition, shaking the hinges. Soon enough, in ways large and small, he rejects and replaces the genre's creakiest devices. Instead of another hard-drinking soulful detective, King presents a hero who lost interest in alcohol upon his retirement, and whose only addiction is daytime television. And while Marlowe (nearly always) abstains from women, and John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee or Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins pursue them relentlessly, Hodges' sexual interests are focused, monogamous and decidedly un-neurotic. But it's the larger genre deviations that make "Mr. Mercedes" feel so fresh. At their purest, hard-boiled novels are fatalistic, offering a Manichaean view of humanity. For King, however, dark humor extends beyond the investigator's standard one-liners, reflecting a larger worldview. Killers and detectives make mistakes all the time (the wrong victim consumes the poisoned hamburger; the intended target fails to start his own car), and coincidences play a far greater role than fate. "Mr. Mercedes" is a universe both ruled by a playful, occasionally cruel god and populated by characters all of whom have their reasons. One man can do only so much. This brings us back to the fedora. Fundamental to classic hard-boiled fiction is the idea that one man, the detective, is our vanguard against evil. But King has something else in mind. Tossing that fedora back and forth among his characters - Hodges, his computer whiz assistant, Janey, all his "good guys" - he decides it fits them all but suits none. The one person it might suit never wears it: Janey's 45-year-old cousin, Holly Gibney, who turns out to be King's most important character. The fedora's disappearance (by incineration) marks a shift in the story itself. Thereafter, Hodges begins to retreat, ceding the spotlight to Holly, a most unlikely hard-boiled hero. First described as a "spinster," Holly still lives with her mother and barely speaks above a mutter. A smoker, a lip biter, a Lexapro popper, she's an accumulation of nervous tics. At one point, watching her quiver, Hodges notes her knees "almost literally knocking." KING IS UP to something sneaky. This is not the woman we find in old-school hard-boiled novels (or even the revisionist updates, which favor, as we'd hope, female competency, wile and grit). It's as if Carmen Sternwood, the thumb-sucking, seizure-ridden sister from "The Big Sleep," were transformed from murderous kewpie to insistent ally. And as if the private investigator, instead of dismissing or isolating this unusual woman, has found a way to reckon with her humanity. King's game plan pays off exuberantly in the last act, which defies expectations in ways both surprising and invigorating. You can practically hear King rubbing his hands together as Holly jostles herself into the center of the action, playing a critical role in the investigation but also, more substantially, providing the nerve, drive and jittery heart of the novel. At the end of "Mr. Mercedes," Holly is not about to hang up a shingle to become one of the genre's "unlikely" detectives in the manner of the private eye with Tourette's from Jonathan Lethem's "Motherless Brooklyn." What makes her unique is that heroic though she is, she is not driven by relentless and abstract ideals. Unlike Chandler's "man of honor," Holly is not motivated by a sense of mission or nobility. Her reasons are personal - including some long-nursed grudges that may bring "Carrie" to mind - and utterly idiosyncratic. They are, in other words, more like our own. In "The Simple Art of Murder," Chandler wrote: "In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption." He's making the case for his Philip Marlowe, honorable and true, his "shopworn Galahad." But nobility for nobility's sake doesn't interest King. In the end, with his characters facing the unbearable possibility of a second, far worse act of senseless violence, King locates his "quality of redemption" in a woman with "graying hair and the face of a neurotic teenager" - and in the makeshift family that has formed between Hodges, Jerome and Holly herself. No one man or woman, King suggests, can forestall every act of senseless violence or protect us from random catastrophe. But what "Mr. Mercedes" offers instead are bighearted men and women who are, after all, much like us. And, King seems to be reminding readers, the good guys still outnumber the bad. In classic detective novels, one man stands against evil. King has something else in mind. MEGAN ABBOTT'S latest novel, "The Fever," will be published this month.