Widened menus on report config dialogs.“Must be action, adventure, ingenuity, unbeatable self-defence,” Jim Grant wrote in 1994, on his way to becoming Lee Child. He was 39, married with one daughter, and working as a transmission controller at Granada Television, in Manchester. Union-busting had radically altered the industry. Grant’s plan was to write a thriller offering what he variously called “a surrogate, vicarious, escapist mood”, an “escapist feeling”, and a sense of “escapist identification” for those who could only imagine living without a job or beating up their boss. The proximity of writer and reader, or the writer’s status as proxy-reader, was intensified by his decision to proceed without a plan, so that the story was decided, almost one sentence at a time, by what Grant himself wanted to see happen. The phenomenal success of the Jack Reacher books – the 20-plus bestsellers, the 100 million copies sold, the admirers ranging from Margaret Drabble to Bill Clinton – have done nothing to disturb Child’s basic tenet.
“To give people what they don’t get in real life.” “What is the purpose of fiction?” he asked in his non-fiction book, The Hero (2019). Grant’s exercise in wish-fulfilment fantasy now stands as an exemplary case of the dream come true. He didn’t exactly get to beat up his boss, but he has certainly been able to survive without a job – and launched his new life with a book, Killing Floor (1997), in which a corrupt town official shared a surname with Granada’s then director of programmes Steve Morrison. Central to achieving Grant’s desired effect was the figure initially identified as “H” (for hero), and soon to become Jack Reacher who, after retiring as a major in the US military police, becomes a “hobo” and vigilante. He would need to be “unfeasibly tough… invulnerable”.
“No middle name,” in the words of Killing Floor. In With Child (2019), an account of the book tour for Child’s 20th novel Make Me (2015), the academic Andy Martin attempts to identify all of Reacher’s influences and precursors. Somewhere in the background – though too distant to qualify for the 17-strong list – is James Bond, who as Child noted in The Hero, is also a man of rank engaged in “dispensing rough justice.” Among them are the hunter-gatherer, Popeye after spinach, King Kong (but with less hair), Desperate Dan, and Michael Connelly’s LA detective Hieronymus Bosch, who, having a job, a home, and a fancy name, provided Grant with a source of counter-inspiration. Just as important, though scanted by Child’s account, were the careful limits placed on Reacher’s tough-guy credentials. There’s a scene in With Child where Child and Martin discuss the ambivalent piece I wrote for the New Statesman in 2015 about Martin’s earlier book Reacher Said Nothing.
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Martin says that I considered him “a bit superficial”, and Child replies, “I’m going to have to start introducing you as my superficial friend.” What I actually wrote – and stand by – was that Martin, in following Child’s over-insistence on Reacher as the avenger with the knockout punch, missed just how much the series is about the character’s reasoning, erudition and Blue Peter-ish knowhow (mixing salt and ketchup to clean metal, and so on). Reacher’s biceps are not irrelevant to his following, but his strongest muscle is his brain.
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In one of the many delightful scenes from the new TV adaptation Reacher, he sits across a table from Margrave’s chief detective, and provides a meticulous account of the murder for which he has been wrongfully arrested. It begins, “Three men dropped this body” and ends, “In an investigation, details matter.”Ĭhild is hardly unaware of Reacher’s multi-dimensionality. He has acknowledged that his readers enjoy the contrast between Reacher’s “enormous physicality” and “delight at small intellectual diversions”. Though the Bruce Willis of Die Hard appears on Martin’s list of Reacher antecedents, Child’s original idea was for a character with Willis’s body but the head of the blond, sensitive, privately educated actor William Hurt, and one of the models for Reacher’s narration was Kevin Costner’s delicate, diaristic voiceover from Dances with Wolves.
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