Words of wisdom

Need advice on spiritual philosophy and protecting yourself from surprising foes? Jack Reacher has the rules to live by.

AMONG ALL the junk mail and bills in my mailbox this week, I was delighted to find a review copy of Reacher’s Rules (Bantam, RRP $24.99), a splendid new book crammed with priceless advice from a fictional character.

As some of you will know, Jack Reacher is a former military policeman who always lives by his own rules, and now those rules have been compiled into a handy little hard cover, just for you.

Not since American poet Walt Whitman’s 1855 masterpiece, Leaves of Grass, has so much worldly wisdom been condensed into such a slim volume. Admittedly, the two books are very different in focus and style.

Here’s Whitman: ‘‘Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labour to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man . . . re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul . . .’’

Now here’s Reacher: ‘‘The best way to choke a man is from behind, using the thumbs on the back of the neck, and folding up the fingers so the pressure is applied from the knuckles, not the fingers, otherwise you’ll get your fingers broken and your butt kicked.’’

Of course, not everyone will see the coal-black humour in such graphic advice, but fans of British crime writer Lee Child’s anti-hero Jack Reacher will laugh like cane toads at sundown.

Lee Child is the nom de plume of British crime writer Jim Grant, who has become a millionaire writing poetically gruesome tales about a former military policeman who roves around the American mid-west, stumbling across murders and terrorist threats and considerately putting things to rights.

Like myself, Jack Reacher is stoic as a statue, but possessed of high intelligence, fast reflexes, a bleak wit, and an agreeably elastic sense of what is morally right. To Reacher, no response is too brutal when it comes to dealing with evil men or protecting the vulnerable, and this nifty little book boils down his life lessons to just 160 pages.

There are handy chapters on breaking and entering, hand-tohand combat, weapon use, and, in case these things are not as successful as planned, first aid. There are tips on surprising foes (‘‘Walk up the edges of stairs to avoid making loud creaks’’), common surveillance blunders (‘‘Never look through spy holes in doors; someone could be waiting on the other side to shoot you in the eye’’) and injury minimisation (‘‘Climb through a hole feet first; If there’s an axe or a bullet waiting, better to take it in the legs than the head’’).

Reacher also dispenses concise spiritual philosophy (‘‘The meaning of life is that it ends’’), grooming tips (‘‘Try not to get into a fight when you’ve just put on clean clothes’’), navigation advice (‘‘If in doubt, turn left’’) and invaluable rules of thumb for successful street fighting (‘‘Hit early; hit hard’’).

Such a book couldn’t have arrived at a better time. Child’s most recent Reacher novel, A Wanted Man, started well, with a hitch-hiking Reacher being picked up by a getaway car containing two killers and a hostage. Indeed, the first half of the story contained some of Child’s best writing to date, with prose so lean you expected Bob Geldof to be in the background somewhere, gathering pop stars for a benefit concert.

But then A Wanted Man quite literally lost the plot halfway through, becoming hopelessly bogged down in a morass of unlikely conspiracy theory detail. The novel’s shortcomings were another blow for Reacher fans still reeling from the news that pipsqueak Scientologist Tom Cruise will play Reacher in an upcoming movie released the week before Christmas.

Disgruntled Reacher fans made their dismay felt on the internet. ‘‘But Reacher is a towering giant!’’ they cried. ‘‘Will Cruise wear platforms? Stand on a box? Employ stilts?’’ Eventually, Child waded in with the placatory observation that ‘‘Reacher’s size in the books is a metaphor for an unstoppable force, which Cruise portrays in his own way.’’

We’ll see. In the meantime, Child has thrown Jack Reacher fans a bone with Reacher’s Rules. There could be no finer Christmas stocking-stuffer for connoisseurs of this righteous vagrant’s existential ponderings, and the book will also be extremely handy for anyone else who may need to find out at short notice how to shoot, strangle, stab or otherwise incapacitate evil-doers.