Mr. Mercedes

Brady Hartsfield is a classic psychopath. He lacks even the weak conscience that characterizes a sociopath, is self-obsessed, and lacks empathy. King explores several explanations for how Brady became the way he is, but none of his childhood influences fully explain or justify who he became. From Brady’s earliest memories, he and his mother both seem to lack empathy or love for other people apart from their very unhealthy attachment to one another. At best, Brady both loves and hates his brother and mother, but love and hate are overshadowed by his indifference. He can mentally apologize to them for his role in their deaths, but he doesn’t feel actual remorse.

Brady takes pleasure in chaos and destruction and in the thought of other people’s pain, but his greatest thrill is in having control over others. He loved manipulating Olivia into dying by suicide, and he loves the hiding-in-plain-sight element of his job driving the ice cream truck. It makes him think that he is outsmarting his opponents, which at the beginning of the narrative, is true.

Both the incident at the job fair and the attempted bombing at the concert are hiding-in-plain-sight crimes. In the first case, Brady committed a terrible act right out in the open and escaped undetected while deflecting public outrage. In the second incident, he entered the concert venue right under the noses of the security staff, smiling and waving at the people he intended to kill. His only stealth crime was the car bombing in which Janey was killed. In all three cases, he uses a vehicle to carry out his murder—the Mercedes, a wheelchair, and Hodges’s car, respectively. He plans to die by suicide at the concert, implying that apart from his desire to destroy Hodges and harm others, he does not have much to live for.

The reader never learns the genuine reason for Brady’s corruption. The cynical message of the hard-boiled detective story is that some people are just born bad, and that’s just the human condition.

At the outset, Hodges’s teenage neighbor is his only human connection to the outside world. Jerome’s friendship and his goofy sense of humor are probably among the few things that keep Hodges going in the midst of his depression. Jerome also clicks with Holly in a way that shows his warm personality and lack of judgment toward others.

Jerome is tech-savvy and bound for college, but he has a sense of ironic humor about being Black. He sometimes puts on a character he calls “Tyrone Feelgood Deelite,” who is a minstrel-like amalgam of anti-Black stereotypes, showing that Jerome is aware of the social and cultural history of race in the US. The persona is his way of expressing, through satire, that he isn’t defined by history. Arguably a depiction of the “magical Negro” archetype (though he and his family are saved in the end), Jerome risks his life going with Holly into the concert hall to stop Brady and save his mother and sister. In the process, he is taking over from Hodges the role of the young hero. This is because a part of Hodges’s new role in life is to act as a mentor for the younger generation. Jerome is a good role model for Hodges, embodying the youthful hope and idealism Hodges lost and needs to get back in order to embrace the next phase of his life.

Olivia Trelawney is the wealthy woman who owned the Mercedes Brady Hartsfield stole and used to murder the jobseekers at the City Center job fair. Before the novel begins, she dies by suicide due to her guilt over the murders.

Hodges becomes aware of how he misjudged Olivia when Janey explains her personality to him: Olivia had OCD and anxiety, and her sensitivity opened her up to manipulation by Brady. Part of her sensitivity is expressed in her misguided compulsion to “save” the Mercedes killer. Brady persuaded her to feel sorry for him and even to identify with him. By redeeming him, she feels she might redeem herself for what she has been made to believe is her role in the murders. This is a part of Olivia that she keeps hidden from everyone, and her protective shield causes people to see her as cold, indifferent, and condescending.

Janey acknowledges that Olivia wasn’t always easy to know, but she deserved compassion, and if Hodges and Pete had made the effort to understand her better, they would have realized that Olivia was much too detail-oriented ever to have left her car unlocked.

Janey Patterson is the sister of Olivia Trelawney and the woman who hires Hodges to investigate her sister’s death. She is in her forties and becomes Hodges’s love interest. In doing so, she plays the role of the lady in distress who arouses the chivalrous instincts of the hard-boiled detective. The lady in distress is rarely an ingénue. She is usually old enough to know her own mind and to engage the detective as an equal. Janey takes the lead in their romance although Hodges is by no means reluctant to follow.

Janey is quite a bit younger than Hodges, who is in his sixties. She represents a way for Hodges to reclaim some of his youthful qualities—optimism, chivalry, and a reconnection with life, love, and connection to other people. He is surprised to realize that he can still be loved.

For Janey, Hodges is a rebound relationship after the end of her abusive marriage. She makes it clear that as soon as she concludes her unfinished business concerning her sister Olivia’s death, she intends to make a new start somewhere else. In the meantime, making love with Hodges is both a conscious gift that she gives to him and an affirmation of her own hopeful future.

Janey dies in a car bombing, and this event gives Hodges renewed motivation to catch the killer. Her death is an example of the “Woman in the Refrigerator” trope, a term coined by writer Gail Simone in 1999 to describe when a female character close to the protagonist is brutally killed or maimed to stimulate his protective heroic instincts.

Holly Gibney is Janey’s cousin, who meets Hodges for the first time at her aunt’s funeral. King describes Holly as having obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and associated anxiety, and the second book in the series contains a reference to her having autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Despite her initial skittishness, she becomes a major player in the plot to stop Brady, even dealing him the blow to incapacitate him at the concert.

Holly’s storyline is a coming-of-age arc. At the outset, she fills the archetype of the wounded child under the control of a devouring mother. When Holly’s world is transformed by Janey’s death, she makes a leap into adulthood, defying her mother to hunt down the monster who killed the cousin who was kind to her. As the knight-protector, Hodges shepherds Holly through her delayed coming-of-age until she seizes his weapon and makes the leap into adulthood on her own.

Holly’s growth arc is one of overcoming challenges. She has been sheltered more than she needed to be by her overbearing mother; Holly’s mother loves her and wants to protect her, but she also treats Holly like an exasperating child or a cumbersome piece of baggage. Holly hasn’t asserted herself with her mother because she has been fearful of and overwhelmed by the world and because, until Janey’s death, she didn’t want anything badly enough to make the effort.

Hodges has learned from his injustice to Holly’s aunt Olivia, and he looks past the things that make Holly seem different and sees an interesting and insightful person. Recognizing that he really sees her, Holly feels able to trust him.

Like Olivia, Holly has OCD and anxiety, but unlike Olivia, Holly has a tough-minded practicality that won’t let her be overwhelmed by guilt. She also has Hodges to support her; he refuses to let Holly blame herself for Mr. Mercedes’s bomb that killed Janey. Holly becomes the protagonist in a spin-off novel, The Outsider (2018), and the novella “If It Bleeds” (2020).