I came late to Jack Reacher. I’ve always been suspicious of the books. Maybe it’s because I bought a James Patterson book once when I was in an airport departure lounge where it was the only English language book for sale and I was desperate. I will never be that desperate again. Next time I’ll simply chew my knuckles down to the bone. It would be preferable to another James Patterson. Anyway. I don’t know why - but I ended up putting Lee Child and James Patterson into the same mental category; maybe it’s because bookshops tend to display them close to one another. Fast forward ten years. In 2019 I found myself in a National Trust second-hand bookshop and in a fit of madness I plucked a Lee Child book from the shelf, and found myself promising to ‘give it a try.’ And now, in the past three years I have read seventeen of them and I still have a few to go. It is like an addiction. I have to pace myself. I can’t let myself finish one book and then scoop up the next. But there they are, delicious and unread on the shelf, and the only sad thing is that I’ll soon have read them all.
So what is it about Lee Child and
the Jack Reacher books? They are not great literature (sorry Mr Child). They
don’t explore the great themes of the human condition. But they are bloody well
written. I feel as if I have to say this twice, because the received wisdom is
that this genre of books is a kind of semi-literary canon fodder for people who
don’t really read. Bollocks. These are brilliantly written novels. They are
technically well constructed and they’re smart. Child has a way of breaking every
rule of writing and making it look ok. And they’re page turners. Once you start one,
you have to keep going. That is rare in novels these days. At least it is for
me.
There is, of course, a certain recipe
for a Jack Reacher book – and some ingredients show up almost every time.
Reacher rocks up somewhere at random, encounters some bad guys, manages to
waste two, three, four – maybe even five guys at once in a brawl, gets the
girl, solves the mystery, kills the kingpin, disappears into the sunset. But
Lee Child messes with us. There is always an intrigue that takes a while to play
out. He gives us some novels in the first person, others in the third. He hops
around in time. He fleshes out Reacher’s back story in glimpses here and there.
We globetrot. Maybe he doesn’t get the girl. If Lee Child has a formula then he
breaks those rules as often as he breaks the rules of writing.
Which is a lot.
There is a sense that everything
is finely researched in a Lee Child book – from the workings of obscure guns to the
machinations of the CIA. The only certainty is, if you put Reacher in a room
with a posse of bad guys, the only person walking out with all limbs and brain
intact will be Jack Reacher.
I have heard Lee Child say, in an
interview, that he doesn’t plot the stories out. He starts chapter one without
any real idea where the story will take us. ‘If it isn’t a surprise for me, how
can I expect it to be a surprise for the reader?’ he said. I love that. It is
painfully close to my own writing method. My son Jon tells me I write into the
dark. I like that expression because that is how it always feels.
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