Stephen King is an ever-flowing font of creativity, but not to be underappreciated within that is his incredible self-assurance as a storyteller. While many novelists intricately plan all of their books – the plots, character arcs, the themes, etc. – before they pen a single word, the King method of writing is to start exploring an idea and letting it organically tell him where things should go next. It’s a demonstration of remarkable confidence… which makes it all the more fascinating to learn about moments in King’s career as a creative when that confidence was shaken.
A perfect example of one of these instances leads this week’s edition of The King Beat, and I’ve paired it with a bit of trivia about one of King’s best short stories. There’s a lot of fun stuff to discuss, so let’s dig in.
How Mr. Mercedes Changed The Course Of Stephen King’s Career
My Stephen King collection includes not just copies of every single King book but also a great number of books about King books. The author’s half-century of contributions to literature and pop culture have inspired terrific analysis going back to the early 1980s, and I have a special shelf of my library dedicated to those works. This past week, I added a new title to the section, having received by pre-ordered copy of King Noir: The Crime Fiction of Stephen King by Tony Magistrale and Michael J. Blouin, and I was tremendously pleased to discover that the first chapter is an original essay by King titled “My Love of Crime Fiction and Its Influence on My Writing.”
The piece principally focuses on his personal history with the genre –from the adventures of Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys, to the hard-boiled detective fiction of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, to the mysteries of Patricia Highsmith and Agatha Christie – but the most fascinating part of the work concerns the agita he experienced when he came up with the idea of Mr. Mercedes and launched a new era of his career.
Stephen King had written mystery novels prior to the 2014 publication (titles including Bag Of Bones, Black House and Joyland among others), but he recognized Mr. Mercedes as being special in his oeuvre for not featuring anything fantastical; it’s a wholly grounded detective story centering on a cat-and-mouse game between a retired cop and a deranged killer who steals a Mercedes and uses it to drive over a group of people waiting in line for a job fair. It was a new flavor for King, and he wasn’t sure how it would be received by is passionate Constant Readers. He writes,
I have never thought of myself as a horror writer, a supernatural writer, or a crime/suspense writer. I just like to tell stories. But I will admit to a real moment of doubt when I conceived the idea of Mr. Mercedes. It felt like a fork in the road. I thought people might not like the abrupt change from books like Under the Dome to a straight balls-to-the-wall crime novel, with no fantasy elements.
Of course, Stephen King is no stranger to anxiety about how people are going to respond to his work. This is the guy who wrote Misery (a book about a “#1 fan” who abducts her favorite author and forces him to write a book that resurrects the protagonist of his best-selling series) and created a penname (Richard Bachman) because he wasn’t sure if it was his name or the quality of his work that was selling books in the early 1980s. Nonetheless, he recounts his time developing Mr. Mercedes as mentally trying.
King writes that the decision to pursue the book ultimately came down to the fact that he couldn’t stop his flow of ideas for it:
I had real come-to-Jesus conversations with myself on several afternoon walks. What I finally decided was that I needed to stop trying to guess what readers wanted and do what I wanted. Because the details kept coming. That story just begged to be written. And really, if readers didn’t like it, was my family going to starve? Not a bit.
His concerns proved to be unfounded, as Mr. Mercedes was not only warmly received, but, as noted, it began a significant change in Stephen King’s literary profile. He has continued to write horror stories (just last year he published a collection full of them), but Mr. Mercedes became the first book in a trilogy, and it introduced readers to what has turned out to be King’s most prominent character since The Dark Tower’s Roland Deschain: Holly Gibney.
In addition to appearing in Mr. Mercedes and its two sequels (Finders Keepers and End Of Watch), Holly has returned in The Outsider, the novella “If It Bleeds,” and most recently became a titular protagonist in 2023’s Holly. He writes of the character,
Holly Gibney was supposed to be a walk-on, a sad and mother-ridden woman with a funny name. I never expected she’d be a continuing character. It was she who insisted that there was more to her than that, so I continued to follow her. I don’t lead the characters; the characters lead me. That might not be right for everyone, but it’s right for me.
Notably, while Mr. Mercedes is a firmly grounded mystery, the world of Holly Gibney has since seen splashes of the supernatural, including mind hijacking and monsters. It isn’t a constant, though, as proven by the mystery in Holly (and not knowing whether or not there is a supernatural element involved actually makes the book better).
If you’re not currently caught up with the adventures of Holly Gibney, now is a perfect time to start getting invested/reinvested, as she will once again be front and center in Stephen King’s Never Flinch, which is set to arrive in stores everywhere on May 27.
Stephen King Explains The TV-Centric Origins Of One Of His Best Short Stories: “Umney’s Last Case”
One of the staples of Stephen King’s bibliography is his proclivity for writing about writers, and while there are dozens of excellent examples, the short story “Umney’s Last Case” is a personal favorite. First published in the 1993 collection Nightmares & Dreamscapes, it’s a brilliantly constructed narrative that begins as a Dashiell Hammett/Raymond Chandler pastiche but eventually morphs into a fun commentary about the relationship between creatives and their creations.
It’s a story that gets special mention in “My Love of Crime Fiction and Its Influence on My Writing” (you can purchase a copy of King Noir directly from University Press Of Mississippi), as King specifically discusses its origins. In the “Notes” section of Nightmares & Dreamscapes, he wrote about how “Umney’s Last Case” was both an experiment in the hard boiled style and an analysis of an author’s sense of identity, but in the new essay, he explains that the idea for it originally came from thinking about classic police procedurals:
You mentioned Umney’s Last Case. I got the idea for that story because of TV programs like Mannix and Magnum, P.I. I thought, “Don’t these guys ever feel like they are caught in an existential nightmare? Doesn’t it ever occur to them that they might be fictional characters? Because after all, how many adventures can one man reasonably have?” That story also gave me a chance to do some hard-boiled, Chandler-esque prose. Loved it.
In “Umney’s Last Case,” detective Clyde Umney is a fast-talking gumshoe with an office in 1930s Los Angeles, and as he goes about his daily routine one morning, he begins to realize that everything in his life is leaving him behind, from the blind kid who sells newspapers to his trusty assistant Candy Cain. He’s flabbergasted by these developments until he meets what will be his last client as a private detective: Samuel D. Landry, who is the author of a series of Clyde Umney novels. Not only does the protagonist have to grapple with the discovery that he is fictional, but he is also informed by the writer that they are going to switch lives.
Not only is it an amazing and clever story, but it inspired a great adaptation in the underappreciated 2006 anthology series Nightmares And Dreamscapes – and William H. Macy’s turn as Clyde Umney/Sam Landry earned him an Emmy nomination. Sadly, the show isn’t available to stream on any major subscription service, and episodes can’t be purchased from online retailers, but the complete series on DVD remains available for a reasonable price.
That wraps up this week’s edition of The King Beat, but I’ll be back here on CinemaBlend next Thursday with a brand new column – and my hope is to deliver some exciting updates about Stephen King adaptations out of CinemaCon, as I will be on the ground in Las Vegas all week covering the movie-centric convention. You can get acquainted with all of the various projects that are now in development with my Upcoming Stephen King Movies And TV guide.