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Jack Reacher
The Basics of Reacher
'What kind of work do you like to do?'
In response he gave her his capsule bio. Easy to understand at first, then harder later. Son of a Marine, childhood in fifty different places, then West Point, then the military police in a hundred different places, then the reductions in the work force when the Cold War ended, leading directly to his sudden head-first introduction to civilian life. A straightforward story. Followed by the wandering, which was not so straightforward. No job, no home, always restless. Always moving. Just the clothes on his back. No particular place to go, and all the time in the world to get there. Some people found it hard to understand. (Blue Moon)
Jack No-Middle-Name Reacher is the protagonist of Lee Child's wildly successful book series. Reacher (never referred to as Jack or Jack Reacher) is a physically imposing and visually dominating 6.5 foot, 250 pound former Military Police, now happy-go-lucky itinerant avenger / knight-errant / wanderer / adventurer / ronin. Armed with a clip-together toothbrush, cash, passport (expired), ATM card, subway card and monthly pension Reacher roams the length and breadth of the western world, occupying bus stations, diners & motels. Reacher is dogmatic about keeping no attachments. He wears clothes once and when he's done disposes off the old clothes and goes buys more. Reacher was once asked why he didn't carry a spare shirt...
'Slippery slope,' Reacher said. 'I carry a spare shirt, pretty soon I'm carrying spare pants. Then I'd need a suitcase. Next thing I know, I've got a house and a car and a savings plan and I'm filling out all kinds of forms.' (Bad Luck & Trouble)
He brawls in bars, shoots bad guys, beds women, drinks coffee, rights wrongs and never stays long. Reacher's military background continues to have a strong influence on his life even after leaving the army. Reacher doesn't own a watch but always knows the time down to the minute.
Espresso, double, no peel, no cube, foam cup, no china. (The Hard Way)
What does Reacher look like?
There’s been some debate about what Jack Reacher looks like. Lee Child defended the choice of Tom Cruise against backlash from his fans; he was even seconded by Stephen King who pointed out that like Reacher, Tom Cruise was a very physical person. But Reacher’s physical dimensions were too much a part of the core character for the sub-6-foot Tom Cruise to continue. Next up is Alan Ritchson, who plays Reacher in the Amazon Prime series. Comparisons have even been made between Reacher and Lee Child himself, and the author admits that he was a dominating presence in his school yard for a year or two during an early growth spurt, so the comparison stops there. Who did Lee Child picture as Reacher? According to an article in the New Zealand Herald, author Lee Child says he modelled Reacher on an English rugby player called British Rugby icon Lawrence Dallaglio.
From the article - "I based Reacher on a physical type of person which is huge and ugly. There was an English rugby player called Lawrence Dallaglio... Think of him in his peak. He was a big guy."
A Masterclass in Violence
He was calm. Just another night of business as usual in his long and spectacularly violent life. He was used to it, literally. And the remorse gene was missing from his DNA. Entirely. It just wasn't there. Where some men might have retrospectively agonized over justification, he spent his energy figuring out where best to hide the bodies. (The Hard Way)
What happens in Reacher novels? The reader gets a masterclass in violence done right, usually in small-town America, sometimes in NY (The Hard Way, Gone Tomorrow), sometimes in Europe. One entry explains using a simple physics equation why speed is more important than mass (Personal), another shows how cheating (count to 2 instead of 3) in a brawl is the best way to win, and in yet another Reacher's size is neutralized when he has to fight a midget in a confined space (61 Hours). Reacher also explains guns and sometimes knives (a Benchmade in Gone Tomorrow) - both of which he commandeers from the wicked on the go.
The Death of Jack Reacher
Reacher had no middle name. It was Jack Reacher, plain and simple. Born 1960, not dead yet. He wondered what his headstone would look like. Probably wouldn't have one. There was nobody to arrange it. (Die Trying)
The Sentinel (2020) was co-written by Lee Child and his brother Andrew Child. The author seemed to have tired of his creation, much like writers before him. Before choosing to pass the baton to his brother, Lee Child considered killing him off. Child contemplated killing his character and concluding the series. Off hand he said Reacher would be tough to kill, and the Reacher code of honour would demand he give himself up rather than the one he's protecting on that particular adventure. Child described it as dying by bleeding out on a dirty bathroom floor in a motel, which brings up the same mental picture as the end of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, or Mike from Breaking Bad.
I was just talking for the sake of it. Which is uncharacteristic. Mostly I'm a very silent person. It would be statistically very unlikely for me to die halfway through a sentence. Maybe that's why I was talking. (Gone Tomorrow)
For all his disposition towards violence the taciturn Reacher doesn't have a death wish. Lee Child has described him as 'happy-go-lucky' and Reacher articulates his strong desire to live at all costs - even if he has to talk himself out of dying...
Before Lee Child, another author of detective fiction tried to kill off his creation.
Holmes & Reacher
Like Lee Child, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - creator of Sherlock Holmes - also tired of his creation and planned to kill him off and end the tedium of writing Sherlock Holmes stories for the Strand Magazine. In 'The Final Problem' Sherlock faces off his arch-nemisis Professor Morairty at the Reichenbach Falls, and both of them end up falling into the waterfall and dying. It took eight years, thousands of fan mail and over 20k cancelled subscriptions to the Strand Magazine for Conan Doyle to write The Hound of the Baskervilles (chronologically set before The Final Solution). And then he resurrected Holmes by having the Reichenbach incident be a case of pseudo-cide.
At the end of '61 Hours' (Reacher #14, chronologically #22) the physically imposing Reacher faces off against the Latin American midget drug lord Plato in an underground facility with limited space, where Reacher is unable to even stand up straight. With his maneuverability limited and Plato's height no longer a disadvantage Reacher faces a tough fight. Reacher manages to come out on top in the brawl, but at the end Plato's minions drops a flare down the gas filled basement shaft and blow it up. There's no clarity if Reacher has made it out alive at that point. Of all the violence that Reacher is involved in, his fight against the midget Plato is memorable because of the physical contrast between the brawlers, and the advantage that Plato gains by taking on Reacher in a setting where Reacher's size is neutralized.
Factoid: Reacher's colleagues in the military have nicknamed him 'Sherlock Homeless'.
Reacher, his reptile brain & philosophy.
He considered himself a modern man, born in the twenthieth century, living in the twenty-first, but he also knew he had some kind of wide-open portal in his head, a wormhole to humanity's primitive past, where for millions of years every living thing could be a predator , or a rival, and therefore had to be assessed, and judged, instantly, and accurately. Who was the superior animal? Who would submit? (Blue Moon)
For all the violence that is front and center in the books, Jack Reacher is equally cerebral and calculating. As an author Lee Child have gone out of his way to establish that Reacher is a relic, something antediluvian that still lurks around us around the turn of the millennium. A 250 pound vessel for a combination of genes passed down unaltered from a time before civilization, when good instinct meant intelligence (and survival)
Reacher is no armchair detective. His hands are dirty and he improvises in response to the situation. But his principals are grounded in unchanging realities of human nature, and often it boils down to a binary of prey and predator. It is a philosophy that has served him well, and Reacher reiterates it to himself on many an occasion, often after getting the better of those who have forgotten to listen to their own instincts.
Joe Reacher, Mycroft Holmes, Achille Poirot & others.
Like Sherlock Holmes - Reacher too has a brother, and like many investigators, Jack Reacher joins a host of fictional detectives with siblings.
Jack & Joe Reacher
Hercule & Achille Poirot
Sherlock & Mycroft Holmes
The Hardy Boys
Miss Marple & her sister.
Cormoran Strike & his 7+ half siblings
Harry Bosch & half brother Mickey Haller (The Lincoln Lawyer)
Dick Tracy & Gordon Tracy
The Affair
Reacher nodded. "If you can't do the time, then don't do the crime." "You got out of the army. So maybe you couldn't do the time either." Reacher smiled. Thanks for the opening, he thought. "I had no choice," he said. "Fact is, they threw me out." "Yeah, why?" "I broke the law, too." "Yeah, how?" "Some scumbag of a colonel was beating up on his wife. Nice young woman. He was a furtive type of a guy, did it all in secret. So I couldn't prove it. But I wasn't about to let him get away with it. That wouldn't have been right. Because I don't like men who hit women. So one night, I caught him on his own. No witnesses. He's in a wheelchair now. Drinks through a straw. Wears a bib, because he drools all the time."
- From Echo Burning (Jack Reacher #5), establishing that Reacher isn't above creative reinterpretation of his past.
Fort Kelham Army Base is located close to Carter Crossing, Mississippi, and is home to the Special Forces involved in clandestine missions in Kosovo. The CID sends two MPs to investigate any possible involvement of the army in the murder and rape of Janice Chapman in Carter Crossing. Major Duncan Munro is sent to Fort Kelham to investigate the base and Major Jack Reacher is sent undercover to Carter Crossing to shadow the sheriff's investigation. In the backdrop of this case are the budget cuts and downsizing the army is undertaking after the end of the Cold War.
The events of Lee Child's The Affair take place in March 1997 six months before the events in Killing Floor (Jack Reacher #1). This is Jack Reacher's final investigation as a military cop and provides him with a reason for leaving the only world he has known. The book takes its name from his relationship with Elizabeth Deveraux - a former marine and county sheriff in Carter Crossing who is actively investigating the same crime. She quickly sees through his cover and they join forces to find the killer.
An investigation cannot sustain itself all on its own. It needs an external source of energy. It needs outrage.
Reacher has to deal with the military's dependence of Washington, the corrupting influence of politicians and the immense pressure to keep the army away from scandal. His supervisors make it clear that they prefer the investigation find a civilian responsible for the rape-murder and this doesn't sit well with Reacher. Further injustices of other murders going unsolved because the victims were black women from marginalized communities adds to his outrage, as does the military's willingness to fabricate evidence to implicate a convenient target. Reacher realizes that the rape-murder is not a one-off but in fact Carter Crossing / Fort Kelham has a serial killer on the loose.
Sgt. Frances Neagley ( from Bad Luck and Trouble - Jack Reacher #11) makes an appearance to give Reacher a warning which is summarily ignored. Reacher also deals with members of a Tennessee militia who arrive in Carter Crossing to destroy evidence of the murders, and Rangers out to arrest him, all of whom are dealt with with typical disdain and violence. Reacher's original travelling accessory (before the ATM card and passport) - his folding toothbrush joins him at this point of his life.
Killing Floor
With nowhere in particular to be Jack Reacher steps off the Greyhound bus at Margrave, Georgia because big brother Joe told him that's where blues musician Blind Blake died. Reacher decides to check out the town on a whim. Almost immediately upon reaching (but after a decent breakfast) he is arrested for the murder. Someone's head was shot off and Sheriff Morrison alleges he saw Reacher leave the crime scene. Reacher knows he hasn't killed anyone, not in Margave anyways but lands up in prison.
Another co-accused in the murder joins him in the cell and Reacher tangles with members of the Aryan Brotherhood. Suspecting the involvement of the police in setting him up Reacher gets himself involved in the investigation after he is released from prison. But a more personal connection is established when he finds out that the murder victim is his brother Joe who was carrying out his own investigation in Margrave. Joe Reacher was looking into a possible counterfeiting operation run by Margrave's Kilner family, who carried on under the protection of the sheriff, mayor and dirty cops. Bodies pile up, including the sheriff himself. Reacher realizes he's arrived at Margrave during a logistical glitch in an otherwise smooth counterfeiting operation. The operation involved collecting hundreds of thousands of $1 bills, bleaching the notes and forging $100 bills on the original (and therefore undetectable) paper.
Reacher and his trusted allies in the Margave police begin to fight back to complete Joe's mission. They send soft targets into protective custody, set ambushes for their adversaries and begin to take down the Kilner family and their operation.
Killing Floor is Lee Child's debut novel introducing Jack Reacher. Reacher is a towering veteran of 13 years from the Military Police. At 36 he's made redundant after the Cold War. During his career he's been posted to bases all over the world and now he returns to the country he's served but never known. Jack Reacher roams the continental USA. He makes no plans or commitments, has no ties, or baggage save a folding toothbrush and an ATM card. After 9/11 he has no choice but to also carry a passport. Like Conan the Barbarian, Reacher is an itinerant brawling giant. He's squeaky clean with no substance abuse issues except caffeine.
He usually keeps to himself except for the annual adventure he stumbles into. He's adept at dealing with most situations after a career policing soldiers, knowledge of weaponry, and an understanding of how violence works. Quick thinking and dirty fighting. He is the mysterious stranger who comes into town on the bus, cracks heads, beds women and solves a problem on his way out.
Echo Burning
Sloop Greer is about to granted an early release from prison after serving a year and a half for cheating on his taxes. His childhood friend and lawyer Al Eugene has arranged for him to pay back his taxes and give up the names of his associates. Sloop's wife Carmen who secretly turned him in to the IRS has no intention of settling back into a domestic situation with the wife-beating Sloop.
Meanwhile there's a team of assassins skirting the periphery of the situation covering up some loose ends; there's a trio of locals watching the Greer ranch, a District Attorney looking to be elected judge in a few months and a New York attorney is trying to recover twenty grand from a rich white Texan who just lost a case against her poor Mexican clients.
At the same time Reacher is escaping a motel by climbing out of a window. If he had only known that the obnoxious guy in the bar the previous night was a cop he probably wouldn't have headbutt him. So he finds himself exiting the motel when the cop and his buddies come looking. Now he's expecting a long wait on a Texas highway in scorching temperatures before someone agrees to give him a ride.
Carmen cruises the highway looking for someone to help her. She gives a hitchhiking Reacher a lift and convinces him to help; he takes a job at her family ranch to see how he can assist and lays some ground rules with his hosts in his own special way, as he assesses the situation.
In Echo Burning, Reacher talks about how he dealt with fear at a young age by channeling his aggression turning fear into rage. He also mentions one Jodie Garber as someone he would readily kill for, and refers to the circumstances under which he left the army after assaulting a wife-beating colonel. He explains the different types of entry and exit gunshot wounds depending on the distance of the gun, and learns how getting elected judge is like getting elected into royalty.
Supporting characters include the weather, past presidents Hayes, Fillmore and Arthur, and the grave of gunfighter Clay Allison. In addition to involving himself in a domestic situation Reacher goes shopping, gets deputized, eats ice cream, saddles a horse, wears a watch and takes leaps of intellectual guesses while 'thinking like them'. Trust and belief are tested as Reacher interacts more with the people of Pecos County, and he struggles with his instincts which served him in the army.
Die Trying
Chicago. Once again after the events of Killing Floor - Jack Reacher is in the wrong place at the wrong time. All he wanted was to help a woman on crutches with her dry cleaning but within minutes he's held at gunpoint, bundled into a van with her and driven across the country. He weighs fighting back and concludes that he would be able to get the better of the four men, but decides against it considering the pedestrian traffic and probable collateral damage.
In the van he realizes that the woman is FBI agent Holly Johnson, also daughter of the Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff, and goddaughter of the President. Despite being on crutches on account of a soccer injury she tells Reachers to remain passive and let her manage things. Meanwhile Holly wonders why Reacher didn't take an opportunity to escape, and begins to accept his active role when he kills her would-be rapist. So as to not arouse suspicion Reacher hides the body and once against restrains himself in the van. The FBI begin tracing Holly's whereabouts and assume Reacher is one of the kidnappers after viewing the CCTV footage; but Holly's mentor and Reacher's former commander Colonel Leon Garber insists Reacher is not part of the crime. A small team of trusted agents take up the investigation.
A few days laters Reacher and Holly arrive at their destination - a Montana mountain community of a extremist military organisation attempting to secede from the US. The leader of the militia - Beau Borken is a maniacal neo-Nazi, and plans to use Holly as leverage, and she is kept in an abandoned county courthouse with walls of dynamite. Die Trying is thick on action and conspiracy, not so much on plot. Reacher is taking on muscle here and gets a chance to show off his expert marksmanship and technical knowledge of guns and explosives.
The Hard Way
Its been seven years since Reacher left the military. He's in New York a city he likes 'more than most places. He liked the casual indifference of it all and the frantic hustle and the total anonymity'. Over his morning coffee he witnesses a ransom handover. The ransom has been paid by one Edward Lane, Colonel (retd.), currently head of Operational Security Consultants. In Lane's service are former special forces soldiers - Marines, Delta Force, Seals, SAS; and in the general course of business OSC provides the government with plausible deniability overseas. However since none of the former soldiers witnessed what happened with the ransom money, Reacher is invited to elaborate on what he saw.
Lane's wife (Kate) and daughter (Jade) have been kidnapped. He pays the ransom but his family isn't returned, and this isn't the first time it happened. His first wife Anne was also kidnapped five years ago. That time he brought in the police yet Anne ended up murdered. He doesn't intend to make the same mistake twice and tries to recruit Reacher.
In the background Anne's sister Patti Joseph has her suspicions and keep Edward Lane under supervision through the watchful eyes of private detective Lauren Pauling (ex-FBI). From a distance Lauren watches Reacher move in and out of Lane's place. She too weighs involving him in her investigation. Reacher deals with his suspicions over two conflicting versions of events and simultaneously tries to recover the hostages. The Hard Way involves a lot of non-violent investigation for the most of the book; violence picks up in the last 100 pages or so with some disturbing crimes of war thrown in.
Reacher practices his ability to tell time accurately without using a watch, and he reacts to the wonders of text messaging. The book also has Reacher ruminating over his capacity for dealing with violence and conflict - 'He wasn't surprised. Surprise was strictly for amateurs, and Reacher was a professional. He wasn't upset, either. He had learned a long time ago that the only was to keep fear and panic at bay was to concentrate on the job at hand.' and 'He was calm. Just another night of business as usual in his long and spectacularly violent life. He was used to it, literally. And the remorse gene was missing from his DNA. Entirely. It just wasn't there. Where some men might have retrospectively agonized over justification, he spent his energy figuring out where best to hide the bodies.'
Bad Luck & Trouble
Someone's killing Reacher's buddies. Nine members of a team of elite ex-army cops - good enough to go to Atlanta and come back with the Coke recipe according to Reacher. Now at least one of them is dead.
Someone makes a deposit into Reacher's dwindling bank account. An irregular figure. Reacher finds out when he checks his balance from Portland and realizes its a code for help; he traces it to one of the team - Chicago based Frances Neagley. Reacher then finds out that Calvin Franz from their team has been killed - legs broken and thrown out of a helicopter into the desert. Calvin's office has been searched and ransacked by the killers but he had a secure system of backing up his files by using the United States Postal Service. Reacher and Neagley find his backup files and get to work on figuring out the password. They also visit the last employer of another team member who's missing - Tony Swan - a large defence contractor who'd let go of Swan a few weeks back.
Soon enough Reacher and Neagley are joined by David O'Donnell and Karla Dixon - and they move forward as a team. They trace their team members careers through Las Vegas casinos, manage the bureaucracy of the Department of Defense, negotiate the opaque world of defense contracting and unravel a terrorist plot. On the way another (undercover) cop gets thrashed, and the team is used as bait by the police. Reacher is seen interacting in and being part of a team in which he is an equal participant, rather than the primary protagonist. The team has its own idiosyncrasies - one of them cannot handle affectionate physical contact, another is a dapper, organisational expert who carries a ceramic switchblade to hoodwink the metal detectors at the airport; each one could have their own novel length origin story.
Along with his folding toothbrush Reacher begins carrying his passport since the events of 9-11, but draws the line at keeping a spare shirt. In his own words its a slippery slope from the extra shirt to having a house, car, savings plan and filling out all kinds of forms. Also in attendance is more weird maths requiring Reachers intellectual leaps of guesswork, factoids about the naming of Molotov cocktails and the practice of maxalding while tied up. After catching up with his former colleagues and seeing their varied career paths Reacher questions his perpetually untraceable status but eventually gets on a bus with no idea where its heading.
Gone Tomorrow
Reacher is on a train in New York when he spots a woman (Susan Mark) who ticks all the boxes for a suicide bomber. When he approaches her to diffuse the situation she pulls out a gun and shoots herself. Her name was Susan Mark. Reacher is then questioned by the authorities (NYPD, FBI & foreigners in suits) but what he's asked makes little sense to him. He involves himself in finding out the truth when he realizes there is more than meets the eye.
Susan Mark worked for the Department of Defense and was said to be in possession of a flash drive with information that lots of people are after and now believe is in Reacher's possession. The NYPD, FBI, former Special Forces soldier & current politician, a sinister mother-daughter duo and their henchmen - all are after Reacher.
Reacher teams up with the Theresa Lee from the NYPD and Jacob Mark - Susan Mark's brother and also a cop in Jersey to unravel the events surrounding Susan's suicide. Along the way he tries to sort out friend from foe as he meets a politician, mercenaries and a Ukranian mother-daughter duo.
Just as in 'The Hard Way' which was also based in New York, this book has its share of gruesome scenes (torture and crimes of war), and references to the Patriot Act. Gone Tomorrow is an intense story, gripping because of the mystery rather than the plot; and it is violent. The stage for confrontation is set early on in the aftermath of Reacher's interrogations.
The screaming would start at a desperate pitch and move slowly and surely upward into insane banshee wailing. Sometimes it would last ten or twelve hours. Most corpses were never recovered. But sometimes bodies would be returned, missing hands and feet, or whole limbs, or heads, or ears, or eyes, or noses, or penises. Or skin.
And another parallel is the career path of veterans. Whereas 'The Hard Way' had vets becoming mercenaries, we have John Samson here taking up politics. Unlike THW Samson's service is under deep cover and he tries to turn everyone's attention away from asking questions - mainly by writing a book filled with the usual cliches and directing the focus there. Reacher purchases Samson's biography and his instinct tells him there's more the Samson than meets the eye. He rationalizes -
Most Special Forces careers never happened. It’s like people who claim to have been at Woodstock. Believe them all, the crowd must have been ten million strong. Like New Yorkers who saw the planes hit the towers. They all did, to listen to them. No one was looking the wrong way at the time. People who say they were Special Forces are usually bullshitting. Most of them never made it out of the infantry. Some of them were never in the army at all. People dress things up.’ So it’s a no-brainer to assume that people are fact-checking his actual biography. It’s a national sport.’ I skimmed it and found it fell into five main sections: his early life, his time in the service, his subsequent marriage and family, his time in business, and his political vision for the future. The early stuff was conventional for the genre. Hardscrabble local youth, no money, no frills, his mom a pillar of strength, his dad working two jobs to make ends meet. Almost certainly exaggerated. If you take political candidates as a population sample, then the United States is a Third World country. Everyone grows up poor, drinking water is a luxury, shoes are rare, a square meal is cause for jubilant celebration. Apart from that, nothing. Just a lot or training and standing by, which was always followed by standing down and then more training. His was maybe the first unexaggerated Special Forces memoir that I had ever seen. More than that, even. Not just unexaggerated. It was downplayed. Minimized, and dc-emphasized. Dressed down, not up. Which was interesting.
Gone Tomorrow has a little in the way of Reacher's past but his thought process covers his experience in combat, weaponry and military trivia. The book starts with Reacher going through twelve points in recognizing a suicide bomber that he learned from an Israeli operative. There are details about the effects of dynamite explosives, how he disguises his violence in public when the situation calls for it and even a brand endorsement for knives. There's even a little humor in there.
Reacher moves around New York negotiating in words and actions with the people after Susan Mark's flash drive assumed to be in his possession. He delves into his 'think like them' mode and leads them on when it suits him, and at the same time tries to locate the drive himself. Meanwhile he makes short term allies and enemies till he gets to the truth and the situation remains fluid till late into the book.
Reacher's Codes
The Reacher Workout
The Reacher Workout
Hope for the best, plan for the worst. Never forgive, never forget. Do it once & do it right. You reap what you sow. Plans go to hell as soon as the first shot is fired. Protect & service. Never off duty.Cruel but fair. (61 Hours)
Facts were to be faced, not fought (Bad Luck & Trouble)
The Reacher Workout
The Reacher Workout
The Reacher Workout
He kept his arms and legs moving through silent fractions of an inch and kept his muscles tensing and relaxing in a bizarre miniature version of a gymnasium work-out. He was no longer cold, but he didn't want to get any stiffer. (Bad Luck & Trouble)
A Number's Guy
The Reacher Workout
A Number's Guy
ATM Pin: 8197. He liked 97 because it was the largest 2 digit prime number, and he loved 81 because it was absolutely the only number out of all the literally infinite possibilities whose square root was also the sum of its digits... No other nontrivial number in the cosmos had that kind of sweet symmetry. (Bad Luck & Trouble)
