By William Saunderson-Meyer for the Sunday Times
Finders Keepers
Stephen King (Hodder and Stoughton)
****
There are blockbuster authors whose adherence to formula is so slavish and predictable as to sap the reader of all appetite. The recent work of Patricia Cornwell springs to mind.
Then there are the few who succeed each time in whetting one’s appetite anew, because they have taken the freedom that fame brings to experiment with new genres, new characterisations, new themes. Stephen King is one of the latter and Finders Keepers is another successful foray into crime fiction.
This is the second book in a trilogy that launched with Mr Mercedes and introduced ageing detective Bill Hodges, his socially dysfunctional assistant Holly Gibney, and mouthy Ivy Leaguer Jerome Robinson. The trio surface to ride to the rescue of Pete Sauber, a high-school senior who is the target of a murderous former convict, Morris Bellamy.
With Finders Keepers King returns to a theme first tackled in his 1987 horror classic, Misery – the relationship between fan and author and how it can become corrosive, even dangerous.
Reclusive literary genius John Rothstein authors the Runner trilogy, about the coming of age of Jimmy Gold, “an American icon of despair in a land of plenty” as the Time cover story of the day describes it. He then never publishes another word, although rumours circulate about a stash of moleskin diaries in which Rothstein takes Jimmy beyond complacent middle-age.
Finders Keepers continually flits between the Bellamy back-story and the present-day Pete. Bellamy murdered Rothstein in 1978, partly to get ownership of the diaries, but largely sparked by inchoate rage at how Rothstein had ended the published trilogy with Gold renouncing his youthful rebelliousness to become an advertising executive, living in the ’burbs.
Before Bellamy can read the stolen diaries he is jailed for 36 years, for an earlier violent rape, without the police realising his role in Rothstein’s murder. Pete finds the cache that Bellamy had squirreled away in a buried trunk and immerses himself in the Jimmy Gold sequels.
Since the trunk also contains tens of thousands in cash stolen from Rothstein, which Pete uses over an eight-year period to save his family from destitution, he cannot bring the unpublished Jimmy Gold novels to public attention, dearly though he would love to.
Finders Keepers is crammed with literary allusions, both clearly referenced and subtle, and the critics have had a field day identifying them. Rothstein, for example, is clearly a composite of JD Salinger and John Updike.
To my mind, there are echoes, too, of an even earlier master storyteller, namely Charles Dickens. In Great Expectations the young Pip Pirrip’s life is irretrievably changed for good and ill by his encounter with escaped convict Abel Magwitch. And as in Dickens, King’s narrative contains the reassurance that all’s well that ends well – although Finders Keepers ends, in typical master-of-suspense style – on a sinister note that sets up the final book in the trilogy.
Follow William Saunderson-Meyer on Twitter @TheJaundicedEye
Image: Koos Breukel
Book details
- Finders Keepers by Stephen King
EAN: 9781473698987
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