Rough Comforts

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Have you ever seen a person headbutt another person? In real life I mean, not on the screen. Unfortunately I have, and what happens is this: the headbutter recoils and goes ‘Ow!’ and the headbuttee looks more baffled than injured. It’s pathetic, watching a person headbutt another person, on several levels. But in Killing Floor, the first Jack Reacher novel by Lee Child, we read this, a few chapters in:

I headbutted him full in the face. Came off the back foot with a thrust up the legs and whipped my head forward and smashed it into his nose. It was beautifully done. The forehead is a perfect arch in all planes and very strong. […] It’s like getting hit in the face with a bowling ball. […] It must have caved his whole face in.

Reacher knows how to do it, he can do it – he’s a musk ox with a personal philosophy – and, given the bad actors he constantly stumbles upon, he very much will do it. If you, an aspiring headbutter, are browsing your local bookshop wanting to brush up on the theory and they don’t have Killing Floor, fret not – Reacher headbutts someone in pretty much every one of the twenty-nine published novels he stars in. It’s one of his things. One of many.

Twenty-nine novels and counting. What does it require of the reader to make it through every headbutt of every book? What does it say about me that I have read them all? What does it say of the writer of twenty-nine Jack Reacher novels? Does he sit down to another day at the desk, enervated at the thought of describing another cephalic ruin? Does he come to it full of vigour, each Glasgow kiss fresh as the last? Or does he simply copy a previous passage into a placeholder and tweak it? Tweak it… but only minimally. Because the reader doesn’t really want it tweaked too much. We want it basically the same.

Endlessly the same.

And on the nose.

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The Jack Reacher series, currently consisting of the aforementioned novels, a dozen short stories, a novella and Reacher’s Rules, a thin volume of inspirational hardman philosophy, has sold 100 million copies worldwide. There’s a new one just out – same time every year – In Too Deep.

Reacher’s creator, Lee Child (real name Jim Grant) is responsible for the majority, though the last five were co-written with his brother, Andrew Child (a.k.a Andrew Grant) and the plan is for Younger Child to take over from Older Child completely in the near future. Let’s leave any musings on the weirdness of having to adopt your older brother’s nom de guerre for another time. In addition to prose, there have been two movies starring Tom Cruise (playing the bottom half of Reacher), and two seasons on TV starring the suitably large Alan Ritchson, which are perfect if what you’re looking for from a screen adaptation is basically every single beat of the book played out with as little adjunct creativity as possible.

The implications of all this – the deals, the rights, the royalties – should give you at least one answer to the question ‘What drives an author to write so many of these books?’ That the crime at the heart of Killing Floor is the production of counterfeit currency is apt – Reacher is Child’s own money-printing machine.

But all this, the endless serial, the adaptations, the cash, it all only happens if the people want it. And keep on wanting it.

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The headbutting is only a microcosm, really. The headbutting isn’t the point. The point is that the people Reacher headbutts are bad, and deserve it, and Reacher never bears any of the real-world consequences of doing it. If you did it you’d be arrested, regardless of how much the recipient ‘deserved it’. Because we don’t like vigilantes in real life. We’ve moved past them, as a society. We generally accept that while you or I might want revenge, it is not our right to seek it – and that it might be better for our mental and spiritual health not to, to leave it in the hands of the judiciary (where in certain US states they will administer revenge municipally). But this is law we’re talking about, not justice. Justice is a different thing altogether.

There is a line from the Greeks through the Elizabethan revengers, the Count of Monte Cristo, to Zorro and Batman: a sociopath aimed in the right direction. Righteousness at the thick end of a boot, the point of a sword, down the barrel of a gun. We might have moved past this in real life but we have always, and still, want this in our fiction. Perhaps it’s our own helplessness, the knowledge of our weakness in a world that’s more regulated than ever but feels less safe. But who do we imagine ourselves as in these fictions – the avenger or the avenged? Do we want to save, or be saved? Am I Reacher, or am I the cowed townsfolk?

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Cowed townsfolk are a regular feature of the Reacher books, a series made up almost entirely of regular features. Killing Floor begins like this: ‘I was arrested in Eno’s diner. At twelve o’clock. I was eating eggs and drinking coffee. A late breakfast, not lunch.’

Some key Reacher essentialisms are established immediately: The coffee. The diner food. The fastidiousness. The clipped sentences. In the second paragraph he describes the diner as if being tested on its layout – if you’re going to read all twenty-nine you’ll need to pay attention to these passages, which you’ll be keen to skip past but have a habit of becoming pivotal to the action later on. Reacher says nothing for a chapter and a half, and then makes a long expositional speech detailing his history and motivation, the first of about a thousand such clunking tracts. The town of Margrave is riddled with corruption, another essentialism. The whole plot rests on a truly staggering coincidence in which Reacher’s brother is murdered in this random town in the middle of nowhere an hour before Reacher arrives there on a whim, and it won’t be the last time we’re asked to trade objective logic for Reacher’s logic (kind of like a child showing their art project to you: very deeply involved and explained at length, but with its own internal sense).

I open a Reacher in anticipation of satedness. It’s like coming home to the one you love.

The most essential thing about Reacher, as Cruise found out, is that he’s a brick shithouse. His size is a plot driver. He walks into town and gets noticed. He’s unmissable and visibly dangerous. His throbbing physicality is much described across the series (and fascinatingly, without any latent homoeroticism whatsoever), but he basically amounts to twenty-five overinflated basketballs in a mailsack. Within this bulk lies the heart of a pedant. Reacher is a maths nerd, a music nerd, a topography nerd. He’s the mind of Sherlock Holmes tethered to the morality of Dirty Harry in the body of the Hulk. Euclid in an XXL thrift store t-shirt.

A raft of other essentialisms come from this disconnect between how he looks and how he thinks. A lot of Reacher’s nature is prescribed, by Reacher himself, to his itinerant childhood as a military brat and subsequent years of stultifying service as a military police officer, but it’s clear within the first half of Killing Floor that Reacher is a mass of tics and particularities – a character with a capital C. Early in the book, after some relentless plot, we get this:

People spend thousands of dollars on stereos, sometimes tens of thousands (…) but they were wasting their money. Because the best stereo in the world is free. Inside your head. It sounds as good as you want it to. As loud as you want it to be.

This does at least establish Reacher’s extreme self-sufficiency. He cannot only survive paramilitary onslaught with minimal resources… he doesn’t even need a stereo. A crucial aspect of this self-sufficiency is his mindset, which has no time at all for self-pity, hopelessness, or remorse:

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.

He will espouse some lightly paraphrased version of this attitude over and over. These tropes establish a framework for the reader, a series of comforting footholds as we scale the plot. You’re never far from one, and I can list the following without recourse to the text: his obsession with coffee (hot, black), refusing to sit with his back to the room, his taxonomy of cheap motels and diners, the conviction that sex with a woman is always better the second time, how he lays his clothes flat under the mattress, received military wisdom on the subject of eating and sleeping when you can, the fact he carries a toothbrush and nothing else, uses Western Union to collect his pension, shops in thrift stores when he needs to change clothes (and leaves his old clothes in a bin), his ability to always know the exact time, the fact he has no middle name and insists on being called only by his surname – even by his own mother… this isn’t even half of it, and misses out all the examples that feel lifted directly from a martial arts textbook.

In Killing Floor these gimmicks are all present, but newly formed. When they feature in every book, sometimes more than once, you start googling diagnoses. While the plots are action thrillers, the character is straight out of the detective genre, where quirkiness alerts the reader to the sleuth’s genius before the crime has been solved and removed all doubt – their minds do not work as ours do. Child takes this idea and ramps it up as much as he’s amped up Reacher’s physicality. Only Poirot can rival Reacher for peculiarity – ordering breakfast with both of them would be a trying experience, certainly.

All of this is cliché raised to the level of architectonics. Like all works of immersive particularity, Reacher has a way of getting into your head and staring out at the world through your eyeballs, providing colour commentary. It means you can create a functional Reacher novel in your head, just like Reacher can listen to the blues in his. The closer the text in front of you adheres to this Reacher-of-the-mind, the better you feel.

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I first read Killing Floor on a beach. It only took me reading a few choice sections to my friends – headbutts, head-stereos – before we were all at it, every one of us dedicated to Reacher, our holiday reading piles left neglected, sacrificed at this altar of tautly rendered savagery. Because once we were done with Killing Floor, once we’d discovered there were at least a dozen more of these, that was it. When we weren’t reading bits to each other we would just shout out loud, like we were at the football, in response to Reacher’s shenanigans: Christ. Go on. Bloody hell. Like he was Roy Keane. And accompanying all this: laughter. We couldn’t get enough.

Every writer has predilections, obsessions. It’s one of the joys of reading to watch these shift and morph.

What I’m describing… this is love isn’t it? First the headlong tumble, the hungry days. Then, familiarity, comfort in repetitive foibles. When Reacher takes half a page to explain, for the umpteenth time, his shit shower-shave hierarchy, for example, this reader doesn’t roll his eyes – I luxuriate. I open a Reacher in anticipation of satedness. Low level thugs will be dispatched. Coffee (hot, black) will be drunk. The layout of buildings will be relentlessly described. I will follow Reacher as he procures weapons and then very deliberately places those weapons in various parts of his clothing and be told exactly why that is. I will see him stalk people and predict vectors of evasion and himself evade those who stalk him with his own vectors of escape. It’s like coming home to the one you love.

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These comforting, recurring, structural footholds work for the reader, but what about the writer? No Reacher novel will ever be celebrated for its prose, although I would argue the first book is pleasingly fleet of foot. But over time the same idiosyncrasies that render the character so vividly in the first book must become, for the writer, crutches, and finally prison bars. Reacher just isn’t Reacher without these gimmicks. The artistic animus that the readers of this magazine would recognise, the motivation to change and develop, seems to be missing. Every writer has predilections, obsessions. It’s one of the joys of reading to watch these shift and morph over the years, to witness a writer find new ways in, new angles of attack and discovery. It is the joy of writing, too, to keep going back for another hack away, another dust off, another rummage. DeLillo, Mantel, Amis, even Rooney… they return to the same themes, same situations. But these obsessions are clearly of a different type, driven by art, as opposed to commerce. They are a deepening of thought and feeling, not a mere retread. If a mass market paperback series is documentation of any obsession it’s that of the readership – of what they like, what they demand, what level of deviation they can endure.

I’m not saying anything here Lee Child doesn’t know, and didn’t know back when he wrote Killing Floor. He is a smart man who created elements of the mythos with a great deliberativeness and savvy, and being a smart man, he attempted to break with the constrictions of the first novel in its immediate follow-ups. There is definitely a recognisable ‘Reacher Plot’: he enters a town, realises something is off, beats the bad guys who have been holding the town hostage, leaves. But for all this is the ne plus ultra, the template, the elevator pitch… it doesn’t actually recur until the twelfth book, Nothing to Lose. In between we have a militia book, a serial killer book, a getting-the-old-team-back-together book, a flashback book, a couple of political thriller books. Some of these, early on, have the whiff of side-of-the-desk ideas, notes and errata, that Child repurposed, put Reacher in the middle of, after Killing Floor hit big and he was on the hook to deliver a novel a year.

Child experiments with the character too, but only very early in the series. Mostly the experiments are missteps. Reacher’s ability to always know the exact time was already fairly outlandish when it appeared in Killing Floor, but in the second book, Die Trying, we have this:

He lay back down on the floor and curled his arm under his head. Set the alarm in his head for two minutes to ten. […] Reacher woke up exactly two minutes before ten o’clock.

This is baldly ludicrous, and Child never goes that far again. The fact is, he so vividly nailed his character in the very first novel that he created a Little England of characterisation – he gave himself nowhere to go. A core Reacher essentialism is that he doesn’t change. The characters Reacher encounters change: some are rescued, some are ennobled by their small part in assisting Reacher, some are proven wrong in their suspicions of him. And of course, quite a lot of them are changed significantly by the end… they’re dead. Even his creator has changed – he’s become much wealthier. But Reacher, for better or worse, is immutable.

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I’ve tried to write one – a Jack Reacher rip off. I felt the same urge, perhaps, that drove Kingsley Amis (and others) to try their hand at writing a James Bond – creative curiosity… and the promise of a pay cheque. Sitting down to it, there was a fifteen-minute grace period of deskbound fun. I started with a little intrigue, in media res with the bad guys doing bad things… but we don’t know who or why. Then, to introduce my main character (Jake Hardman), I painted in some decontextualised thuggery, right off the bat. But then what? I needed a plot; I needed supporting characters. Most of all I realised I needed to know an awful lot about weaponry, battle tactics, military ranks, military call signs, the military’s private culture. That’s before I’ve figured out any of those helpful essentialisms. Should Jake chug energy drinks? Always wear a hat? Check into motels under the names of various Liverpool FC centre backs of the seventies? This necessary accumulation of knowledge, marshalling of that knowledge, the constant commercial imperative… well it’s a job isn’t it? A proper job. If I cast my imagination forward, after the sales of this first Jake Hardman thriller have knocked Richard Osman into a cocked hat, the prospect of doing it again lays heavy in the heart. This is, to be clear, an admittance of my inferiority. I couldn’t get through one book – not even one chapter. In the language of Reacher’s world, Child is a Tier 1 asset, spec ops: Delta Force. I am merely… a civilian.

But all old soldiers deserve a rest. Child has been at this for thirty years; no wonder he wants to retire. Thanks to Younger Child, however, Reacher won’t. In the years to come, Reacher will always be there, always headbutting someone – and that someone will always, always, deserve it. For those of us out here, in the grey and desolate moral wasteland of the real world, that is, I suppose, a kind of comfort.

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Richie Jones is an English-Irish writer from Liverpool, based in London. He was runner-up in the Desperate Literature Prize 2024, shortlisted in The London Magazine Short Story Prize 2023, the Bridport Short Story Prize 2024 and the Scratch A4 Competition, and has been published in The London Magazine and HOWL New Irish Writing. He is currently working on a collection of short fiction and a novel.

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