How Jack Reacher got under my skin

Lee Child’s hero has appeared in 24 novels in 20 years – and Malcolm Gladwell is proud to have read the lot. Here’s why

On page 74 of Lee Child’s 1997 thriller Killing Floor, our hero Jack Reacher registers his first kill. Reacher is in the bathroom of a prison, Warburton Correctional Facility, outside a little Georgia town called Margrave, and five members of the Aryan Brotherhood come for him.

If you an aficionado of the Jack Reacher series, as I am, you will know that five to one are not particularly long odds for someone like Reacher. It’s just a matter of geometry and physics. I’ll let you enjoy the fight sequence for yourself, since the fight sequences of Jack Reacher novels are always especially pleasurable – exquisite narrative miniatures in which the horror of the violence is subsumed by the artfulness of the description.

Suffice to say that one guy wades in – “a solid mountain of lard. Sheathed with heavy slabs of meat. Like armour. Nowhere to hit him”. Except, of course, his eyes. And so on and so forth. Like I said, I’m not trying to spoil things here for you.

In any case, Reacher kicks another of the bad guys in the head. Only he misses, and catches him instead in the larynx – and the bad guy chokes to death on his smashed voice box. It is his first kill.

For Reacher fans, this counts as a literary milestone – I will always remember where I was when Reacher kicked the Aryan Brotherhood guy in the larynx. And what do we learn from it?

Well, in the normal thriller, the hero would engage in some kind of justification. He would explain, rationalise. He would show remorse. The author would feel some need – in the face of this kind of brutality – to assure you of his protagonist’s humanity.

If you have read as many books in this genre as I have – and let me just admit, for the record, that I have in my house an entire library of books in which people repeatedly kill each other, by one means or another – then once the first kill happens, you immediately look for the accompanying explanation. What am I to make of my hero now that he has revealed this side of himself to me?

Reacher kills the guy on page 74. And Lee Child makes us wait another 13 pages for the moment of moral accounting – if you want to call it that:

I just sat there next to Roscoe and watched the horizon reeling in. I’d killed one guy, and blinded another. Now I’d have to confront my feelings. But I didn’t feel much at all. Nothing, in fact. No guilt, no remorse. None at all. I felt like I’d chased two roaches around that bathroom, and stomped on them. But at least a roach is a rational, reasonable, evolved sort of a creature. Those Aryans in that bathroom had been worse than vermin.

I had to confront my feelings. And what does he find? Nothing much at all. If memory serves, over the course of the next two decades,

Jack Reacher will never confront his feelings again. And thank God for that.

Please indulge me while I digress on the subject of my grand unified theory of detective/mystery/thriller fiction. It will all relate back to Lee Child in the end, I promise.

There are, structurally, four essential narratives in this genre.

The first is the Western. In the Western, our hero comes to a world without justice or law, and establishes order.

Gary Cooper rides into the chaos of a dusty town and single-handedly subdues the bad guys.

Then there is the Eastern. In the Eastern, our hero works to improve and educate the institutions of law and order in a world where they are incompetent.

The Sherlock Holmes stories are Easterns: Scotland Yard is hapless, unimaginative. Inspector Lestrade and his colleagues dutifully follow rules and procedures.

Agatha Christie wrote Easterns as well. What does it say for the English attitude towards authority that they were so willing to believe that a moustachioed Belgian and an elderly spinster from St Mary Mead could outperform their officers of the law?

The Eastern, curiously, is the only one of the four thriller paradigms where the criminal himself is a bit player: the Eastern’s narrative emphasis is entirely on the game of wits between our heroic protagonist and the braindead institutions of authority.

Third is the Southern, where the hero restores order to a hopelessly corrupt world.

John Grisham’s novels are all Southerns. The protagonist in Grisham’s books is an outsider, a lawyer of scruple and conviction.

The villains are all hopelessly crooked and venal insiders: they are representatives of corporate and political authority. Who is the winner in a Grisham book? The law is the winner.

Finally, there is the Northern, in which our hero works to perpetuate order from within a functional system.

The popular television show Law & Order is a classic Northern. The prosecutors are hard-working and honest. The police are dogged. By the end, the villain is always behind bars. Virtually all Scandinavian crime fiction – which has recently and deservedly risen to such prominence – is Northern. How could it not be? There is little room in the orderly, rational universe of Scandinavian pragmatism for crooked cops and corrupt judges. It has been a long time since anything was rotten in the state of Denmark.

You may not have realised this, but when you peruse the row of paperbacks, you are choosing among these four very different existential fantasies. Do you wish to join the hero in establishing, improving, restoring or perpetuating order?

On flights over the years, I have made a habit of glancing around the cabin and classifying my fellow passengers accordingly.

Oh, there is the businessman with his Jo Nesbo, seeking the reassurance of Nordic institutional stability. There is the pensioner with her Agatha Christie, quietly rejoicing in Miss Marple’s triumph over the local constabulary. And

I’ll always remember where I was when Reacher kicked the Aryan in the larynx

me? I’m reading Lee Child.

And what is the Reacher series, in this paradigm? Well, that is the special joy of reading Killing Floor.

Because here, in his first foray into the genre, we have the pleasure of seeing Lee Child work his way towards an answer.

We begin with a slightly sinister small town in Georgia. Reacher arrives, as he always does, by accident. He’s on a bus from somewhere in Florida to Atlanta, and decides to hop off. He walks into a town along the highway. The town is nice. Too nice. And sure enough, we quickly learn, the police department is not what it seems. It’s like something out of a Grisham novel. We are, we think, in Southern territory.

But wait. Are we? Reacher is a drifter, a man without attachment or loyalties. He does not seek to restore the institutions of order. He is the order. Just Reacher, all six foot

Reacher does not mature from one book to the next, his character has no arc

five of him. He wants to kick the corrupt guy in the larynx. Lee Child feints towards the Southern, and then heads due West.

And what happens when the bad guys are all dead? If this were a Southern, Reacher would stay and become mayor. In an Eastern, he would set up shop down the street from the police station, as a private investigator, there to humiliate the town detectives when the next murder occurs. In a Northern, there would be a formal criminal inquiry into his conduct. Were Lee Child Norwegian, Reacher would end up in a rehabilitation facility outside Trondheim, looking into his soul and finding bottomless fjords of remorse.

But this is a Western. Reacher confronts his feelings, finds nothing at all, and hops on the next bus out of town. As you will discover if you read on in the Reacher series – and let me tell you that you are a fool if you do not – there are many, many other towns in America in need of his services.

Why do I enjoy reading Lee Child so much? The awful phrase generally used by people like me in answer to a question like that is “guilty pleasure” – a request for clemency from the literary jury. Give me a pass on this one. I can’t be reading Proust all the time.

Thrillers are guilty pleasures because they are presumed to lack the rigour of real fiction. Genre fiction is all plot. Characters are wooden. The prose is barely serviceable. When non-writers imagine that they have a “novel” in them, nine times out of 10, that novel is a thriller. Of course it is. With a square-jawed hero, a couple of bloody murders and a chase scene.

Please.

I was raised on Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie. These are examples of genre fiction. But the only thing that term means is that these are stories told within a tight set of narrative constraints.

The author starts with a set character (Miss Marple), a set predicament (a terrible crime in St Mary Mead) and a fixed outcome (the murderer is caught), and must innovate within those narrow confines. The pleasure of reading a Miss Marple story comes from reading lots of Miss Marple stories, because with each variation on the most familiar of themes, our admiration for the ingenuity of Christie’s innovations grows.

Lee Child happens to be a genius at this same relentless innovation.

Reacher does not mature from one book to the next. His character has no arc, as they say in Hollywood. What changes is the complexity of the situations that he finds himself in, and the artfulness with which Child extracts him.

Consider the following randomly chosen passage from Make Me, where an unarmed Reacher confronts a bad guy in a doorway. We are nearly 20 years and two dozen books removed from Killing Floor. Reacher is the same. The predicament is the same. But just listen to the poetry of Reacher’s mental accounting of the situation:

In Reacher-land, there are a thousand moments like that, each more elaborate and artful and thrilling than the last.

Killing Floor is where the die was first cast. Our hero is the loner in a modern-day Western, who confronts small-town conspiracies, brings them to a bloody end, and leaves town.

Tell me that story again, please. And again.

This is an edited version of the introduction to The Folio Society edition of Lee Child’s Killing Floor, illustrated by Oliver Barrett, available exclusively from foliosociety.com/reacher

‘NO GUILT, NO REMORSE’ Jack Reacher in the aftermath of his first kill in the 1997 novel Killing Floor