Amazon’s Reacher season one is now streaming on Prime and well worth watching. It’s a mostly-faithful adaptation of the first of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels, Killing Floor. Alan Ritchson is a better Reacher than Tom Cruise (the movies are not good) and young enough that he could make a career out of this role, with 20+ more novels to come - most of them better than the first.
My purpose is not to review the Amazon series, but rather to contextualize Jack Reacher. And to do that we must go back to the 60’s and take a look at the inspiration for Reacher, John D MacDonald’s Travis McGee.
You may not be familiar with McGee, for MacDonald has fallen out of fashion and his novels barely remain in print. The McGee character is a sort of activist who takes on real estate developers and such who have committed crimes against Nature. Imagine a taciturn tough guy loner in endless internal soliquy about the evils of developing over a red breasted thrush nest and you have a picture of Travis McGee. The cancerous brain of an academic tortured into the body of a would-be working class hero. He’s not a realistic character. It’s jarring to have such radical messaging pushed in a pulp detective novel. We can’t read MacDonald today for the same reason we can’t read the even more overbearing Upton Sinclair.
Yet MacDonald was an excellent writer who leveraged the machinery of genre fiction in a way that is beyond Sinclair’s childish conception. And credit Lee Child for seeing through the message to the structure, and adapting that structure to a somewhat more timeless series of novels. Jack Reacher is Travis McGee minus the academic: a big tough do-gooder who gets laid a lot, rarely says what’s on his mind, and lives like a bum. Like McGee, Reacher spends each novel swaggering through and unraveling the sinister plan of some group of bullies.
The real signature of both series is that there is little suspense in the conventional sense. It’s clear Reacher/McGee are far better equipped mentally and physically than their enemies, who prey on the weak. So each novel is a carefully released orgasm of bullies getting their comeuppance, from henchmen to boss. We know it’s going to happen, in every scene (with some exceptions). The primary suspense for the reader is in the mystery of what’s gone wrong here, who is behind it, and what is their motive. When Jack Reacher is bundled into a car trunk, we don’t worry for his safety: we only chuckle over the dire consequences he must have planned for the bundler.
Lee Child shares MacDonald’s radical politics, but is savvy enough to limit Reacher’s focus to traditional crime - which is why Reacher will be so much more enduring than the painfully anachronistic McGee. In Killing Floor, for example, Reacher’s enemy are counterfeiters swimming in cash who have taken over an entire town. We can all get behind that. In some novels Child goes too far thematically, as when he dabbles in right-wing nationalist tropes, or worse, when he has Reacher battling the chimera of Russian disinformation in 2019’s Blue Moon. But mostly, the villains are tightly dialed (drug dealers, human traffickers, etc.) and Child often sheds fresh insight on the issues he pits Reacher against.
Child eclipses MacDonald stylistically, with spartan sentence structure and intriguing repurposing of verbs. A bunch of dogs “foam” at Reacher’s feet. Reacher doesn’t climb a ladder, he “swarms up” it. On a purely technical level the Reacher novels are a pleasure to read. The apparent simplicity of the prose masks an overall challenge to the usual grammar, an innovation of sorts. This type of innovating seems more common from British authors (if I may make a gross and barely founded generalization).
So I highly recommend the Jack Reacher books to anyone looking to make their flight (or jail time) go by faster. As for John D MacDonald, his work is hopelessly dated, contra Lee Child’s assertion that he was “ahead of his time”. Even MacDonald’s seminal work, The Executioners, was improved by either film version of Cape Fear. Starting from the most clever of premises, he deliberately flubbed the ending as a sort of fuck you to conventionality, like a songwriter choosing atonality in lieu of a catchy chorus. He struggled with cultural self-loathing the way only an American can.