Lee Child

• Born: October 29, 1954
• Place of Birth: Coventry, England

TYPE OF PLOT: Thriller

PRINCIPAL SERIES: Jack Reacher, 1997-

Contribution

Lee Child’s key decision in creating Jack Reacher was to make him free from any psychological problems. Unlike other modern thriller/mystery heroes, Reacher is in no way dysfunctional. This way, Reacher resembles the character that initially inspired Child to create a mystery/thriller hero: John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee. Reacher is consciously constructed as an almost mythical hero whose antecedents stretch back to Homer and beyond. Even though Reacher appeared before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, he is the perfect hero for the post-9/11 world—smart, capable, ruthless, and always searching for justice, yet able to temper action with mercy when appropriate. Child’s audience has grown with each book in the series, and his popularity has been strengthened by the regularity with which each book appears and the works’ overall high quality. Child has said that he regards his promise to produce a book a year as an obligation not only to his publishers but also to his fans. The books have been generally well received, and fans of the novels have organized websites about Reacher. Child does pay attention to fans’ concerns, questions, and suggestions; he informs readers how Reacher became the man he is by writing The Enemy (2004), which takes place when Reacher was an officer in the military police.

Biography

Lee Child was born James Grant on October 29, 1954, in Coventry, England. As a boy, he enjoyed reading novels by Enid Blyton and the Gimlet series by Captain W. E. Johns. He grew up in Birmingham, won a scholarship to St. Edward’s School (the same school that J. R. R. Tolkien attended), and attended college in Sheffield, reading law. He says that his skill in writing came from a physics teacher who valued concision over verbosity. The child spent eighteen years with Granada Television as a television presentation director and later union shop steward, then was let go with other veteran employees as an economizing measure. Searching for a new career with a wife and daughter in his mid-forties, Child gave himself a year to write a novel. After it was published, he moved to New York, his wife’s hometown, in 1998. He began producing Reacher novels at the rate of one per year. Reacher’s character is ideally suited for cinematic adaptation. Plans to film Child’s work materialized in 2012 with the film Jack Reacher starring Tom Cruise.

Child shares certain qualities with Reacher. For example, both are tall, which led to Reacher’s name. Both defended older brothers in playground fights, both can tell the exact time without using a timepiece (a holdover from his television days, says Child), and both are New York Yankee fans. Killing Floor (1997) won the Anthony Award and the Barry Award in 1998, and Die Trying (1998) won the Thumping Good Read Award from the W. H. Smith Group in 1999. Tripwire (1999) won the Washington Irving Award in 1999, and Running Blind (2000) won it the following year. In 2005, Child won the Bob Kellogg Good Citizen Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Internet Writing Community and the Nero Award for The Enemy.

In 2020, Lee Child announced he would be passing the responsibility of writing Reacher's story to Andrew Grant, his younger brother. Blue Moon (2019) was the final novel in the series written solely by Child. In 2020, Grand and Child collaborated on Grant's first contribution to the Jack Reacher series, The Sentinel.

Analysis

Lee Child’s greatest accomplishment is creating a believable thriller hero for the twenty-first century. Almost all thriller heroes require a certain suspension of disbelief. ’s James Bond had the seeds of parody within him from the first novel, an aspect that the films about the character would ultimately reveal. Mitch Rapp, the hero of the political thrillers by Vince Flynn, is almost superhuman in his dispatching of foes. By making Reacher a former military police officer, Child takes advantage of the generally positive image the military enjoys in the United States.

Child gives Reacher the physical tools to accomplish his tasks and the knowledge of weaponry so beloved by certain fans of the genre. However, it is the basic premise of Reacher’s character—that he learned his skills in the U.S. Army’s military police and that his upbringing caused his wandering and how he was let go—that makes his appearance in a different part of the country at the beginning of each novel and his talent in unraveling the mystery and enforcing its solution all the more believable. MacDonald got around this credibility problem by making McGee a salvage expert. Child makes Reacher a knight-errant who wanders the countryside of his native land and becomes involved with people, sometimes almost against his will.

Child knows that the literary heritage of Jack Reacher begins with the heroes of the classics, then passes through medieval knights to the cowboy heroes of the American West. The tension in the Western hero is between his rugged individualism and the community's needs. Once the latter becomes too dominant, the hero rides off. In Reacher’s case, as he readily admits, he always leaves. In some novels, Reacher becomes involved in a case through family or quasi-family pressures. His older brother and his fate haunt Reacher, as does the last quest of his military mentor and father figure, Leon Garber. However, Reacher often becomes involved by merely being in what he views as the wrong place at the right time.

In Child’s novels, the victims are often forced to grow into more capable, self-aware characters. They are shaken out of their complacency because their mindless acceptance of a shifty business ethos has put them at the mercy of ruthless predators. A character Reacher dismisses as a Yuppie later grows into a character Reacher likes. If a husband does not develop into a better person, his wife sometimes does. Even if victims express their independence by threatening Reacher, in one sense, Reacher’s task has been accomplished.

Child fuses in Reacher both the intellectual and physical aspects of the hero, unlike MacDonald, who endowed his hero Travis McGee with physical strength and McGee’s sidekick, Meyer Meyer, with intellect. However, Child often splits his villains into a team of masterminds and superhuman henchmen. The superhuman villain is often so imposing that Reacher seems outmatched—but the hero still manages to vanquish his foe. The masterminds are devious but not bent on world domination or attacking the United States. Rather, they are motivated by the more commonplace of the seven deadly sins—greed, anger, and lust. They are, nonetheless, savage in carrying out their plans, and Reacher is equally savage in stopping them and exacting a rough-hewn justice.

Child walks a fine line in depicting both the villains’ depravity and Reacher’s quest for retribution. The modern thriller writer is always in danger of going over the edge in the depiction of violence: not enough violence, and the novel seems tame; too much, and the reader seems to be wallowing in sadism. Child seems to have a fairly precise knowledge of what is excessive; for example, the villain’s torture and execution of two police officers in Tripwire is only hinted at by the mention of a scream. Child knows when to use his readers’ imagination to fill in what the villain is doing.

Like almost all unattached thriller heroes, Reacher has a romance in every novel. The relationships are all sufficiently motivated so that none seems entirely gratuitous, although Child has been criticized for featuring basically the same woman, the “Reacher woman”—a tall, thin, blond professional in her early thirties—as Reacher’s love interest in every novel. Reacher has been hurt in the past, losing someone he cared about to a villain, so he carries a whiff of the Byronic hero about him, but this quality is largely negated by his powerful and strong image.

The basic question about Reacher is the one asked about all heroes: Why is he heroic? Fleming’s James Bond is, in the end, fulfilling Admiral Nelson’s command that every Englishman do his duty. Child’s Reacher, however, is only a few dollars away from vagrancy. Reacher admits that he always wanted to be a police officer, but because he was the son of a military man, he became an officer in the military police. However, now that he has been let go because of a reduction in forces, he values his freedom: He calls his first six months in the United States the happiest period of his life. When pressed by villains who sneer and ask if he is making the world safe for democracy, Reacher answers that he is a “representative” of all victims of the villains and that he “stands up” for those victims. In a candid moment, he admits that his hatred for “the big smug people” overshadows any connection he might feel with the little guys. In giving Reacher this trait, a British author has created a quintessentially American hero.

Killing Floor

Child’s first Jack Reacher novel, Killing Floor, is a variation of the Southern Gothic theme in which the lurid underpinnings of a town are hidden beneath a glossy sheen of perfection. Reacher must defeat the source of the “swamp,” as he calls Margrave, Georgia, a vicious villain with wolflike teeth and, it is hinted, psychosexual problems. The plot relies on a huge coincidence connecting the villain’s schemes with Reacher’s family, which Child adequately explains by describing Reacher’s love of the blues. The climax is satisfyingly apocalyptic, although Reacher’s reasons for abandoning his romantic interest are somewhat perfunctory, relying on readers’ familiarity with the necessity for this separation as a genre convention.

Killing Floor demonstrates Child’s skill in writing a riveting opening scene and establishing a sense of place. Unlike private investigators who are often tied down to one corner of the country, Reacher can roam all over the country and see each place with a fresh eye, as Child does. Also, while the novel is narrated in the first person, it is only one of three Reacher novels written from this point of view. Reacher’s voice is generally flat and serviceable, with only a flash of poetic intensity now and then.

Tripwire

In Tripwire, Child’s third book in the series, Reacher faces a particularly nasty villain, “Hook” Hobey, who does things with his hook that J. M. Barrie’s villainous Captain Hook never dreamed of doing. Child shows himself to be a master at describing New York City and the rural environs around West Point, and the villain’s lair is not secluded in the countryside but right in the midst of Manhattan, in the ill-fated World Trade Center. Once again, Reacher is brought into this situation because of past loyalties, this time to his mentor in the military police, Leon Garber, whose daughter serves as Reacher’s love interest in this novel. At the novel's end, Reacher has a girlfriend and a house, but readers know that both ties will have been loosened by the next novel.

A major stylistic change in Tripwire is Child’s switch to a third-person point of view, the point of view he uses in the majority of his novels. Child maintains that it affords him more freedom in creating suspense. It also enables him to segment the narrative into smaller, more easily readable chunks and engage in more character investigation—even of the villain. However, it also makes for some awkward narrative moments, such as Reacher’s being informed of the revelation that clears up the entire mystery—which is not revealed to the readers. As if to make sure the reader knows that Child realizes he is not playing fair, Reacher asks for this information to be repeated three times, and it is, with the reader remaining uninformed each time. The humor in Child’s novels does not extend only to Reacher’s wiseacre replies.

Persuader

Persuader perhaps is Child’s finest Reacher novel, containing a beginning both exciting and mystifying, a double narrative and plot that explains Reacher’s involvement in the present case, a thoroughly evil villain and his even more repugnant superhuman henchman, a wicked witch’s castle that is almost out of a fairy tale, and a damsel who must be rescued and whose last name, fittingly, is Justice.

Principal Series Character:

• Jack Reacher is a former military police officer. The second son of a Marine father and a French mother, he was born in Berlin in 1960 and grew up at military bases worldwide. He attended West Point and rose to major before being let go in 1997 due to defense budget cuts. Reacher became a wandering loner, a modern knight-errant on his return to the United States. Reacher has no set occupation but becomes involved in the problems of others because of chance circumstances or events from his past. He is physically imposing: six feet, five inches tall, and 250 pounds. He is a skilled marksman and a ruthless fighter, and his sense of justice is deep-seated and implacable.

Bibliography

Anderson, Patrick. The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction. New York: Random House, 2007.

Child, Lee. Interview with Lee Child by David Thomas. The Sunday Telegraph, April 1, 2007, p. O16.

Child, Lee. “Lee Child: Late to the Crime Scene.” Interview by Dick Donahue. Publishers Weekly 251, no. 22 (May 31, 2004): 44-45.

Child, Lee. “Lee Child: The Loner They Love.” Interview by Benedicte Page. Bookseller, 24 Mar. 2006, pp. 20-21.

"Jack Reacher Author Lee Child Passes Writing Baton to Brother." BBC, 18 Jan. 2020, www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-51162838. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Maslin, Janet. “Intrepid Hero Coolly Navigates a Grisly World of Hurt.” Review of The Hard Way, by Lee Child. The New York Times, May 11, 2006, p. E11.

Trachtenberg, Jeffrey. “Odd Twist for Hero of Popular Thrillers: Women Like Him, Too.” TheWall Street Journal, June 10, 2006, p. A1.