American Hero

I first met Jack Reacher in 1997 – and I was instantly smitten. A lone figure, downing coffee and eggs in a diner on the edge of a small American town, he remains as cool as an Inuit’s deep freeze when the local cops roar up, arrest him at gunpoint and charge him with murder.

Reacher, former US military cop turned wandering loner, just observes and analyses everything the police force of Margrave, Georgia, say and do, so he can work on extricating himself from what is obviously a simple misunderstanding. But the more he finds out, the deeper in he gets . . . Lee Child’s first Reacher thriller gripped me from the outset, and eleven books later he still hasn’t lost his allure. That first, Killing Floor, put Reacher into a brilliantly paced plot, in which the ostensibly pleasant Southern backwater of Margrave is revealed as the headquarters of a humungous but disturbingly credible financial scam. But it keeps you reading because you just can’t figure out how it’s going to resolve itself. And unlike many thrillers, the dénouement manages not to evoke an unsatisfactory sense of being somehow cheated on the promise of the set-up. It’s not all clever plotting, though. There’s some graphic triple-Xrated violence dealt out with deadly efficiency by Reacher – at a towering 6ft 4in, he’s 240 lbs of muscle and brain – and by his nefarious opponents. We learn a lot too about American prison life (very nasty) and banking in Atlanta (surprisingly interesting). And we get to know Reacher (nobody ever calls him Jack), and recognize in him the power of an archetypal but unique American hero. At heart, he’s a character out of the great traditions of American cinema – the loner who cleans up the town and then rides away. As the series progresses, each opening chapter finds him in a new location. He could be digging swimming pools in the Florida Keys, walking across the Colorado backwoods, savouring an espresso at a Manhattan pavement café table – always on the move, alert and interested in his surroundings but with no desire to form any attachments, or put down any roots. I was astonished to discover that Child, his creator, is British – a former Granada television presentation director who took off to the United States with his redundancy money at the age of 40 and started a new career as a writer. Perhaps it requires an outsider’s eye to appreciate the minutiae of American life – what’s on the diner menu, how the traffic systems work, the floor plan of a downbeat motel – and make its details matter. The fact that Reacher, unlike most of his compatriots, has travelled the world gives this American hero with eyes ‘cold icy blue like the Arctic’ a place outside the mainstream, Main Street way of thinking too. As the novels progress, we get more of the back story. He was an Army brat, born in Berlin in 1960. ‘Never even saw the States until I was nine years old.’ Then he grew up and became a military cop, with more globetrotting to whichever US military base needed his West Point-trained powers of enforcement. And why did he leave? ‘Just lost interest, I guess.’ Never a great one for introspection, Reacher. But not before he’d honed policing skills that owe more than a little to, of all people, Sherlock Holmes. And it’s this element that makes Reacher more than just a taciturn avenging cowboy with an unswerving moral code, or a cartoonish tough guy who could be played in a movie version by Arnold Schwarzenegger if only he could lose his Austrian accent. You should read a Reacher novel very, very attentively, though however hard you scan the details – and Child is, as mentioned, very thorough with the details – you’ll never quite guess their significance. Take the car keys: at the start of The Hard Way, Reacher sees a man walk across a street, unlock the door of an expensive car and drive it away. Remember that car key . . . if you’ve read the novel, you’ll know why, if you haven’t, I won’t spoil it for you. The point is that, just as Holmes is the only one to register the giveaway muddy knees of the clandestine diggers in the Red-Headed League, Reacher’s forensic eye snags on the off-kilter detail and – without the aid of anything stronger than gallons of black coffee – cogitates on it till he figures out what it’s telling him. Over the ten years Reacher has been pursuing his lonesome trail across the US, his creator has had to adapt his hero to a changing America. Ironically, as it turns out, he left the Army because ‘The defense cuts were happening. Made the Army seem unnecessary, somehow.’ But within a few years of cutting himself adrift, 9/11, the war on terror and the American military excursions into Afghanistan and Iraq have had an unavoidable impact on his existence. The incursions of Homeland Security measures into so many aspects of American life mean that the freedom of total anonymity is no longer an option: he has to start carrying photo ID. And the evil scams he finds himself with no option but to straighten out now have links all the way to the US military’s current theatres of operation. He even starts using a mobile phone, but only ever on a mission-critical, need-to-carry basis, like the weaponry he acquires to deal with . . . well, with whatever trouble has to be dealt with. He doesn’t always work alone. Sometimes his old military buddies find their way into a story, or a feisty woman cop or special agent finds her way into his (temporary) bed. But while the sex is obviously awesome – though never detailed, only ever implied with the coyness of an old-style Mills and Boon – and Reacher has an unfeigned respect for women, he’s not one for commitment. Once he’s meted out natural justice to whatever scumbag needs it – be it an abusive husband or an industrial conglomerate – he’s on his way, baggage-free but for the ID and a folding toothbrush. As the closing lines of Bad Luck and Trouble typically put it: ‘He raked the hair off his forehead and pulled his shirt loose on his shoulders and kept on going, towards whatever lay ahead.’ Pursued in the imaginations of his legion of fans, eager for the next adventure.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 21 © Karen Robinson 2009