Supersleuths in the mode of Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey, and Hercule Poirot are an endangered species. With scattered exceptions, the Great Detective has fallen out of fashion in favor of mere smart people—driven cops, dogged private eyes, curious amateurs—without special deductive powers.
Holmes and Poirot are always with us. The Baker Street master is reimagined each year by various hands, and the fussy Belgian has a new case in Sophie Hannah’s The Monogram Murders, authorized by the Agatha Christie estate. (The result is ambitious and well-meant but ultimately unsatisfactory: If Christie had any plots as far-fetched as this one, she could at least make them believable in the reading, which Hannah does not.)
The original books by Christie and Doyle live on, but where are their contemporary successors? One of them has come to the mystery masquerade in the most deceptive of disguises, as a writer of action thrillers: Lee Child. And the 21st-century Sherlock Holmes is a six-foot-five bruiser named Jack Reacher.
Child, an Englishman who worked in television before turning to novels, now lives in the United States and nails the American idiom. His character shares his outsider viewpoint. Reacher’s childhood as the son of a well-traveled U.S. Marine, and his equally nomadic adult career as an Army military policeman, have made him a stranger in his own country. Retired with the rank of major, he is a happily homeless drifter, constitutionally unable to stay in one place for long. Fully exploring his home country for the first time, he takes odd jobs—bouncer, swimming pool digger—and avoids possessions. He wears one set of clothes until he throws it away, and then he replaces it with another. He is unfamiliar with, or wary of, everyday accoutrements (bank accounts, credit cards, mortgages) that others take for granted, but he is incomparable at helping people in danger and at solving problems through his physical and mental prowess.
The Reacher novels have violent action, beautiful women, lovingly detailed weaponry, sexual encounters, macho confrontations, daring rescues, and James Bondian assaults on the bad guy’s lair. But they are much more than mere thrillers. They are a rarer and finer thing: classical detective stories.
Killing Floor (1997) introduced Jack Reacher in the first-person narrative format Child says comes naturally to him, though he uses the third person for its suspense-building advantages in most later novels. While having a late breakfast in a diner after a long walk in the rain from the highway to a small Georgia town, Reacher is arrested for murder. He stays mute while mentally grading the cops’ performance. Later, he treats the local detective to his first series of pointedly Sherlockian deductions: “I know you’re a Harvard postgrad, you’re divorced and you quit smoking in April.” He can explain it all, of course, and, in a situation somewhat reminiscent of John Ball’s In the Heat of the Night, he goes from wrongful arrestee to police consultant—except that here it’s a white detective advising a black local lawman.
Though one early review described Reacher as “creepily amoral” and decried the level of violence, most greeted the novel for the landmark it was. Tersely told, with a plethora of short sentence fragments, the novel includes a great Hitchcockian suspense scene in an airport baggage claim area, as well as a fairly clued puzzle plot, with an ingenious punctuation clue the Ellery Queen team would have loved. There is also a subtle Sherlockian parallel: Like Holmes, Reacher has an even smarter brother. Joe Reacher, similar to Mycroft Holmes, works in government and is unknown to the general public; but his accomplishments as a Treasury agent include getting rid of all American counterfeiting.
Some have fairly criticized this first outing for coincidences and plot lacunae; but with it all, Lee Child was a great mystery writer from the first. Later novels would be slicker, but this one must stand as one of the genre’s best debuts.
Every Reacher novel has some measure of puzzles, but the success of Child’s formula depends on combining elements. Running Blind (2000), fourth in the series, is his purest detective plot, but possibly his weakest novel. Reacher becomes an FBI consultant, part guest and part prisoner, helping in the search for a serial killer of former servicewomen who had won sexual harassment cases while in the military. The situation is as outré as anything in classical detective fiction: The killer leaves his victims naked in a bathtub covered with green paint. How he kills them, and how he comes and goes without leaving a trace, are unknown. Alert readers should guess the central element of the solution, one of the oldest chestnuts in the mystery writer’s pantry.
Reacher’s romantic dilemma, based on his brush with domesticity after inheriting a house and acquiring a girlfriend in Tripwire (1999), slows the action. Some of the conversations with his FBI handler reminded me (and not favorably) of Spenser and Susan Silverman in Robert B. Parker’s novels. Yet, hard to swallow as it is, it’s still entertaining and a genuine Golden-Age-style variation on the serial-killer story, including Reacher’s version of Ellery Queen’s challenge to the reader, presented before the final revelations: “We know everything we need to know. Some of it, we’ve known for days. But we screwed up everywhere. . . . Big mistakes and wrong assumptions.”
Later books manage the mystery/thriller combination more successfully. Three outstanding examples are: The Enemy (2004), The Affair (2011), and One Shot (2005), which was made into a pretty good movie starring the vertically challenged but otherwise convincing Tom Cruise.
The current Jack Reacher novel, Personal, is another strong example of Child’s specialty: applying the analytical technique of detective fiction to the practical problems of thriller fiction. In common with about a third of the novels, this one is written in first person, with a style that recalls the easy confidence of Donald Hamilton and John D. MacDonald.
Will the world-class sniper whose attempt on the French president was foiled only by the improved bulletproof glass in front of the podium next attack the G8 leaders meeting at a castle in England? The number of marksmen capable of such a job has been narrowed to 21 worldwide, of which all but 4 have airtight alibis: one American, one Israeli, one Briton, one Russian. Reacher’s initial job is to find the American candidate, whom he was responsible for putting in a military prison for 15 years. When he meets the other possibilities (not yet knowing who is from which country) a touch of verisimilitude is created by contrasting reality with cinematic artifice. Reacher sizes up a candidate in a tan Burberry trenchcoat over a Savile Row suit with “English shoes the color of horse chestnuts, buffed up to a gleaming shine”—and concludes this has to be the Russian: “No Brit operative would dress that way, unless he was trying out for a part in a James Bond movie.”
As usual, the Reacher equivalent of Ian Fleming’s Bond girl is not just eye candy but a highly capable and resourceful professional, though State Department employee Casey Nice seems to be dependent on pills. The operation of her beat-up vehicle demonstrates Child’s narrative gift:
Child again recalls the earlier classics by surprising the reader with the ultimate solution and clearly explaining the generous clues that led there. In some stories, Reacher’s deductions seem almost clairvoyant, or at least remarkably lucky, and the plots sometimes stretch credulity; but there is no more consistently entertaining writer on the mystery scene than Lee Child. And perennial bestseller though he is, he may be missing some of his potential audience: detective-story purists who revere the work of past masters like Christie, Queen, and John Dickson Carr.
Jon L. Breen is the author, most recently, of Probable Claus.
