Thrilling formula that keeps on giving
There’s a reason Lee Child stays at the top of the charts, says Ken Strongman.
The publisher’s blurb to Night School suggests that a Jack Reacher novel is sold somewhere in the world every 20 seconds. This totals to 1,577,896 copies per year. This is a figure of near biblical proportions but it is easy to see why it might be accurate; well roughly.
Lee Child created a very fine formula more than 20 years ago and with this, the 21st Jack Reacher novel he has, to put it simply, kept up the good work.
With the possible exception of Greg Hurwitz’s Evan Smoak (Orphan X), there is no modern fictional hero quite like Jack Reacher. He is indomitable physically, seemingly attractive to women without giving it much thought, and is capable of analysing what people are doing, will do and when with a Holmesian precision.
Even for a reader (considerably) shorter than Reacher’s 6 feet five inches (1.9 metres), one cannot help but identify. Which, it must be said in passing, makes a nonsense of Tom Cruise’s depiction of Reacher.
Night School has Major Reacher at 35, back in the military police. He and a representative from the CIA and the FBI are in a school room at night, after Reacher has been given a medal in the morning. They need to find an American who has demanded $100,000,000 for the sale of something to they don’t know whom. All they know is that it is happening in Hamburg where a group of young Saudis are clearly up to something.
Since the powers-that-be say the three ‘‘students’’ can call on anything they want, Reacher calls on Frances Neagley. She might have a condition in which she cannot bear to be touched, but she manages to touch others with what might be termed extreme prejudice. She is very nearly as effective as Reacher in a rumble.
It is not long before Reacher and Neagley are in Hamburg, having rapidly decided they can’t do much in a school room in the United States. They become involved with a slightly flawed police chief of detectives and gradually begin to track down whom the American is, but are increasingly puzzled about what he is selling. American national security, right up to the president, are concerned about what is going on, and whatever it is, they want it stopped.
The plot becomes convoluted, but provides the usual opportunities for Reacher to use his physical and analytic skills. And, along the way, the attraction between him and Sinclair, the woman in charge of the operation, meets its inevitable fulfilment. She might be a high level controller of people like Reacher but she keeps on wearing little black dresses.
So, yes, it is all a little predictable, but it is hard to be much bothered by this. Lee Child has given us the latest Jack Reacher adventure and it is a satisfying read. And while I was writing this he sold about 90 copies of his books.