The Guardian view on Jack Reacher: enduring appeal
It’s 25 years since James Grant, who had recently been made redundant from his position as an executive at Granada TV, published his first Jack Reacher thriller under the pseudonym Lee Child. There are now more bestselling books than years separating the author from his former career. The stories follow the dealings of the eponymous Reacher, a demobbed military policeman, who wanders the US unencumbered by possessions save a toothbrush and a passport. Along the way he solves crimes and deals comprehensively, often violently, with the bad guys. Despite the apparently blokeish content, with its technical descriptions of weaponry, deadpan sentences and lengthy fight scenes, they are nevertheless popular among a number of impeccably distinguished British literary women – Kate Atkinson, Dame Margaret Drabble and Lady Antonia Fraser among them. (And to be fair, not just women: Philip Pullman and the great Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami are also admirers.)
Now the books are to have a fresh life, with a new adaptation launched on Amazon this month. Screen versions have stuttered in the past. Fans found it hard to accept neatly proportioned Tom Cruise as Reacher for a pair of movies, since the hero, according to the novels, is 6ft 5in and built like a tank. Also, some of the books’ most salient and attractive features are not so much the twists and turns of plot, but Reacher’s quiet, dry wit; the texture of smalltown America; and his passing interactions with waitresses and barbers and librarians – all things that need time to unfurl, a quality that TV can afford. It is likely that fans will be more satisfied with Nick Santora’s adaptations than with the films. In lead actor Alan Ritchson, the makers have found, in the words of Guardian television critic Lucy Mangan, a performer “the size of a house and roughly as expressive unless called upon to be otherwise” – in other words, someone absolutely perfect for the part.
There have been subtle tweaks: in updating the story to the present day, to the world of Instagram and climate crisis, Reacher makes jokes about recycling. And instead of buying new clothes whenever he needs them and binning the old ones, as he does in the books, he shops at a thrift store. Lest he sound too much like a paragon of modern virtues, though, there’s also the violence – which ought, by rights, to be unpalatable on TV. In its original form, the fighting is rendered slowly: it is tracked move by move by the author so that it becomes stylised. In the adaptation, by contrast, it’s all over blessedly quickly, but it retains the stylised nature of Child’s prose original; there’s a choreographed grace to it that makes it seem as much like ballet as actual fighting.
Asked why he liked Child’s novels, Murakami replied, with typical (and almost Reacher-like) economy: “Everything’s the same!” That’s a little unfair, since Child has played with various fic
tional points of view and techniques in the books. But in one essential, Murakami is right. Reacher’s calm triumph over the bad guys is always the same. If only real life were like that.