Chapter 4
Principal Literary Influences
Lee Child takes considerable pride in being a storyteller, an entertainer. He has no respect for literary writers who complain that storytellers earn more money and get more publicity. Members of the literati feel that Child and his contemporaries’ thrillers are markedly inferior to their own work, which they consider serious fiction.
As Child has pointed out, he could easily write a literary novel, but when the literati attempt to write thrillers, they often can’t. Child takes pride in that.
No apologist for his craft—indeed, he’s an ardent vocalist extolling the virtues of thriller fiction, especially his own as vicarious fiction—Child has firm ideas on the art and craft of storytelling, to which many readers aspire: A surprising number of them harbor dreams of becoming a best-selling thriller writer, just like him.
Every writer builds on what has come before, and in Child’s case, he learned from Alistair MacLean, Raymond Chandler, and most significantly, John D. MacDonald. Here we learn about Child, and therefore Reacher, by digging into these influencers: We see how he learned the importance of character, plot, and setting in storytelling, which he puts to good use in his Reacher novels.
As novelist Stephen King pointed out in On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, “If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time (or tools) to write.”
Lee Child Says . . .
“I think that adventure fiction, suspense, whatever you want to call it, was the fiction. That’s how it started and it has continued in an unbroken line for 100,000 years. As everything has got much more [civilized], more coddled, then all these other genres grew up alongside it, including literary fiction, as a luxury, as a kind of barnacle on our boat.”
Alistair MacLean
(fan website: www.alistairmaclean.com)
Lee Child was ten years old when he first read MacLean’s classic thriller Ice Station Zebra. MacLean, a Scot who served as an enlisted man in the Royal Navy, is best known for three novels: Ice Station Zebra, The Guns of Navarone, and Where Eagles Dare. His novels, wrote Child, “are perfect hybrids of Agatha Christie-style country house mysteries and extreme-environment Cold War thrillers.”1
Long on action and short on sex, MacLean’s novels are plot-driven; they typically feature a Reacher-like character who is a “physically and morally indestructible”2 male protagonist against a “coldly competent and ruthless mastermind paired with a hulking, brutishly powerful subordinate.”3
When Robert Bidinotto asked Child if it was true that “there seem to be echoes of MacLean in the Jack Reacher character,” Child affirmed it: “Yes, because what MacLean could do better than anybody was to write a hero that, in every possible way, should have been a cartoon character— too perfect. It should have been laughable, but for some reason, it was always just the right side of the line. He could do, unashamed, these one-hundred-percent heroes better than anybody, without them appearing grotesque.”4
The three novels cited are well worth reading, but as MacLean’s latter output was uneven in terms of quality, pick and choose carefully.
On what he learned from reading MacLean, Child said in At the Scene eNews that, “to this day I apply the lessons I learned. I try to balance the need for suspense and twists and reveals with the equal need to play fair with the reader. The clues must be there. Because if the reader doesn’t like the book, it’s my fault, not his.”
Raymond Chandler
(fan website: https://www.facebook.com/RaymondChandlerAuthor/)
Known for protagonist Philip Marlowe, a private detective whose stomping grounds include the greater Los Angeles area, Chandler’s hard-boiled detective fiction is required reading for any fans of the genre. His most popular novels in the Marlowe series include Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Little Sister (1949), and The Long Goodbye (1953).
Chandler described his formula for writing detective fiction:
The emotional basis of the standard detective story was and had always been that murder will out and justice will be done. Its technical basis was the relative insignificance of everything except the final denouement. What led up to that was more or less passage work. The denouement would justify everything . . . The ideal mystery was one you would read if the end was missing.5
Mystery writer Robert B. Parker explains Marlowe’s character. “He is of course [idealized]. He is immune to the forces that shape most of us. He cannot be deterred by fear, bought for money, or sex, or love. Update Sir Gawain to the 20th century and plunk him down in Los Angeles, a real knight in an illusory Camelot.”6
Reacher, of course, comes to mind: Because of his intimidating size and strength, his self-confidence, his intelligence, and his street-fighting capabilities, he doesn’t live in fear of anyone; because money is not a prime motivator for him, he cannot be bought off; because he’s not obsessed with sex, he’s immune from come-ons; and because the prospect of love, with all the complications it brings (emotionally and, as an anchor, geographically), can’t hold him hostage. In short, he’s his own man and not motivated by what necessarily motivates other men.
John D. MacDonald
(fan website: www.jdmhomepage.org)
More than any other writer, John D. MacDonald was Child’s principal literary inspiration. As Child explained to Bidinotto in the same interview, citing MacDonald (and Parker as well), “They were all very influential, either proactively or reactively . . . John D. MacDonald with Travis McGee—he just had this stealthy way of sucking you into the story. There’s only one of those books where anything sensational happens on page one. Mostly, what happens on page one is nothing at all; and yet by page two, there’s no physical way that you can put the book down. That was a trick that I studied for a long time: How was he doing it? I never really figured out what he was doing. The other thing I knew that I could not do is, he wrote twenty-one books all basically starting from the same place. Travis McGee lived on a houseboat in Florida. So it was all very similar in terms of beginnings; but he kept that fresh for twenty-one books, which was amazing. One of the reasons I made Reacher rootless is that I didn’t want to always be starting from the same place every page one.”
For more information on MacDonald, see chapter 6.
Lee Child Says . . .
“I felt like MacDonald was pointing down the road I wanted to travel, and there was something about the McGee series that let me see the skeleton beneath the skin. On one level they were great stories, obviously, but on another they were how-to manuals for me.”
Robert B. Parker
Parker, who wrote several series—Jesse Stone, Sunny Randall, and Virgil Cole/Everett Hitch—is best known for his private eye in Boston named Spenser.
The Spenser character, whose first name remains unknown, recalls Marlowe. Spenser’s friend is an African-American man known only as Hawk.
In addition to the canon, comprised of forty novels, five posthumous novels featuring the Spenser character were published: Ace Atkins’s Lullaby (2012), Wonderland (2013), Cheap Shot (2014), and Kickback (2015), and Helen Brann’s Silent Night (2013).
“From Robert Parker,” Lee Child explained to Bidinotto, “I learned some negative stuff. He was clearly one of those guys who was into it for the first eight or so books and then just completely lost interest. I’m not exclusively negative. I really liked Spenser’s impregnable sense of self. He didn’t spend any time at all worrying or agonizing. That I liked. All of the details, I didn’t like—like, Spenser is forever cooking.”7