Chapter 3 Reaching Within to Find Reacher

In “Jack Reacher,” an essay commissioned by anthologist Otto Penzler for The Lineup (Little, Brown and Company, 2009), Lee Child lays bare the genesis of the Reacher character.

Central to the character is Child’s notion that, as readers, we don’t necessarily remember the character’s author or the story, but we do remember the character. As he explains in his essay, “Character is king . . . People remember characters.”

He has a valid point.

Who among us doesn’t recognize Harry Potter, Rambo, Superman, Sherlock Holmes, or Tarzan? They are among the most iconic figures in pop culture.

But what about their respective creators? They are JK Rowling, David Morrell, Jerry Siegel, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Lee Child Says . . .

“I think that all readers are character people. It’s almost impossible to remember a book solely for its plot or its plot device. You say ‘Agatha Christie,’ and people remember Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple. Almost every book is remembered for character. I know that’s true from the example of the Reacher books.”

As with all literary creations (Tarzan, Holmes, et al.), they didn’t occur to their creators full-blown, springing from the forehead like Athena from Zeus. Often, characters are composites drawn from multiple sources, external and internal. Take, for instance, Sherlock Holmes. His inspirations include a fictional character by Edgar Allan Poe (C. Auguste Dupin) and Joseph Bell, a surgeon who taught Conan Doyle as a medical student.

In Reacher’s case, Child drew from himself to discover a fictional character buried deep within.

University Influence

Though Child earned a law degree from Sheffield University, he had no intention of practicing law. A discipline that he felt pulled together many of his varied interests (“history, politics, economics, sociology . . . and language”)1, the law allowed him to view man in an interdisciplinary mode. Moreover, Child credits the law for teaching him the necessity of concision and clarity through legal writing, in which there is no room for obfuscation.2

Child tempered his legal education with a thorough grounding in the classics. Drawing on Latin, Greek, and Old English studies, he saw how stories came from an oral tradition, and employed archetypal characters that spanned history—most significantly, the knight-errant (see chapter 12).

The classics also reinforced the idea that stories appealed to their largest audiences when they were accessible, a lesson reinforced when he became involved in school plays, in which viewers gave immediate feedback, just as spectators did in Elizabethan England as they watched Shakespeare’s plays at the Globe Theatre in London.

Child’s university experience, in short, was rich soil in which germinated the seed of an idea—the character of Jack Reacher—that eventually took root to flourish.

Reading

As Sir Francis Bacon observed, “Reading maketh a full man.” In Lee Child’s case, reading classical literature at the University of Sheffield gave him a unique, broad perspective, which he supplemented with extensive reading in popular literature. “I naturally gravitated toward crime, adventure, and thrillers,” he wrote in his essay for The Lineup.

Child, though, had no systematic reading plan to provide depth and scope. He simply read what appeared interesting in pop literature, and in result he lacked a comprehensive understanding of the major practitioners in the thriller field.

Case in point: A giant in the field, John D. MacDonald, was an accidental discovery for him. As Child points out in his essay in The Lineup, he serendipitously encountered The Lonely Silver Rain in an airport bookshop; he quickly realized that the Travis McGee novels were exactly the kind of stories he most loved reading and, as it turned out, writing.

A cursory examination of the McGee novels shows their obvious and significant influence in Child’s own series; indeed, McGee himself shares much in common with Reacher: McGee is a loner; a self-described “salvage consultant,” he takes on few cases, on an “as-needed” basis when financial circumstances dictate the same; he has few friends; he’s a decorated US Army veteran and was awarded a Silver Star and a Purple Heart; he has no surviving family (his father, mother, and brother are long dead); he stands six feet five inches tall and was strong enough to play collegiate football; he has superb reflexes and is a skilled, studied fighter; and he can be characterized as a world-weary knight-errant whose romantic worldview seems to him outdated and idealistic.

MacDonald, a former lieutenant colonel in the US Army, wrote twenty-one novels about Travis McGee. The novels sufficiently impressed Child, who read them all over one summer and concluded in the introduction to MacDonald’s Travis McGee novel, The Deep Blue Good-By, “I wanted to do what MacDonald had done.”

At the core of the McGee novels, and indeed the Reacher novels, is a shared theme, from A Deadly Shade of Gold (and also this book’s epigraph): “The only thing in the world worth a damn is the strange, touching, pathetic, awesome nobility of the individual human spirit.” It’s a theme that appeals to Child, who also wrote in his introduction to The Deep Blue Good-By that living an ethical life is all about “the need to—maybe reluctantly, possibly even grumpily—stand up and be counted on behalf of the weak, helpless, and downtrodden.”

“The fight,” writes Child, “was never easy and, one feels, never actually winnable. But it had to be waged. The strange, weary blend of nobility and cynicism is MacDonald’s signature emotion.”

It’s also Reacher’s signature emotion.

Writing Makes an Exact Man3

Child would have been happy to spend a career at Granada Television, which was his ambition, but that was not to be. After shepherding an estimated 40,000 hours worth of programming for the company, he envisioned spending thirty years on the job and then retiring with a pension. But circumstances forced his hand: As the company began cost-cutting measures and the corporate climate became increasingly hostile, Child stepped up to become the shop steward, the union representative for the rank-and-file employees. It was, as Child recalled, his “Jack Reacher moment.” He’d stood up to look after the employees’ interests, pitting them and himself against the company, firmly entrenched in a battle to the death.

In the end, Child became a victim of the internecine war. He saw the handwriting on the wall just months before the ax fell in May 1995. After eighteen years on the job, Child was suddenly unemployed, with a small pension as his only safety net. The family scrambled to make ends meet, while Child decided he’d write novels for a living.

Reacher Within

Unlike other aspiring novelists, Child had several advantages: He saw writing fiction as essentially the same as working in the television industry. In both instances, the entertainment needs of the customer are paramount. Child didn’t see himself writing literary fiction, but instead chose to write the kind of fiction he enjoyed reading—popular fiction.

The Travis McGee novels gave him a time-tested template—an ongoing series with a recurring character— and a broad canvas with which to work, and after studying what was currently popular in the suspense field, with dysfunctional heroes plagued with personal problems, Child decided to march to the beat of a different drummer.

Drawing on himself as a principal resource, Child began writing a novel about a modern-day knight-errant who lived in the United States, which he had visited on numerous occasions because his wife is American. He realized the expansiveness of the country allowed him plenty of room to tell whatever stories he chose to write.

Lee Child Says . . .

“The stories that I love are basically about the knight-errant, the mysterious stranger. And the reason why people think that’s an essentially American paradigm is the Westerns. The Westerns were absolutely rock solid with that stuff. You know, the mysterious rider comes in off the range, sorts out the problem, and rides off into the sunset. It is just such a total paradigm, but not invented in America. That was imported from the medieval tales of Europe. The knight-errant: literally a knight, somehow banished and forced to wander the land doing good deeds. It’s part of storytelling in every culture . . . that character was forced out of Europe as Europe became more densely populated and more civilized . . . it had to migrate to where the frontier was still open and dangerous, which was America, essentially. So the character, I think, is actually universal and historic, most recently, normally represented in America.

Like Robert A. Heinlein’s “competent man,” Child’s fictional character would be larger than life in many ways: He would stand six feet five inches (only one inch taller than Child himself), have a strong sense of morality (like Child), and be highly skilled in street fighting (again, like Child), but with considerably more bulk (Child is tall and slender; Reacher is tall, with little body fat, and heavily muscled).

His fictional protagonist would be an ex-Army officer, a wanderer who would right wrongs as he saw them; he’d be a contemporary avenger with ethics, and not a deranged, obsessed vigilante. The character, in short, would be a personification of Child himself: an idealized image, a noble knight traversing a blighted landscape.

Reacher, Child knew, would have to be supremely confident, larger-than-life, and smart. And even though he’d find himself walking through the valley of the shadow of death, he’d fear no evil because he’d be the toughest son of a bitch in the valley.

On March 17, 1997, Jack Reacher was “born.” On that date, Putnam published Killing Floor in hardback, launching Lee Child’s career. Killing Floor’s appearance heralded the arrival of a new, major talent whose literary ambition scaled big: Child sought an international audience for his lengthy, carefully crafted novels.

An estimated 40 million Reacher books have sold in over 100 territories, prompting Child to remark, “I’ve been very pleasantly surprised, yes. Obviously I hoped people all over the world would like them, but as I said before, you can’t guarantee anything where public taste is concerned.”4

Child, to be sure, has not taken his good fortune for granted; he instead has used it to build a solid platform on which rests his productive writing career.