Reading even a handful of Jack Reacher novels, you can’t help noticing the repeated threads, or tropes, or plot devices, or elements which recur over and again. These thoughts arise from reading The Hard Way but are true of all the others I’ve read.
Violence
Each Jack Reacher novel contains what you could call workaday American, cop thriller violence – fighting, shootouts and so on.
But each one also contains an element which pushes it to the next level of psychopathic cruelty. Hannibal Lector with his advanced and cynical sadism, made his debut appearance in 1986, instantly raising the stakes for any thriller writer who wanted to make an impact. Maybe pulp fiction has always been needlessly cruel, but it’s certainly a key element in the Reacher mix.
In The Hard Way there are two sadistic element:
- Hobart’s account of being held for five years in an African prison and, after the initial beatings and tortures, being selected once a year, on his birthday, to have one of his hands or feet amputated by machete and then the stump dipped in bubbling hot tar.
- Lane’s threats to his wives. We learn that he had threatened the second wife, Kate, that if she ever tried to leave him, he would break her daughter’s Jade’s hymen… with a potato peeler. The idea is to put him beyond the pale, to establish him as not just a bad man, but a monster. It also has the effect of making the reader feel physically sick.
Reacher’s revenge
I’ve read interviews where Child makes it quite clear that Reacher’s motivation in every book is always revenge. This means that the author always has to construct a plot in which someone reasonably innocent has been wronged, damaged or killed.
That’s the trigger Reacher needs to go into obsessive Search and Destroy mode i.e. the mode which most entertains the hunter-killer reader in all of us.
In the first book in the series, Killing Floor, Reacher’s brother is brutally killed by the counterfeiting ring he is investigating. That’s all it takes. From that point Reacher is on a mission to identify and kill them all, and the fact that one of them turns out to be psychopathically cruel, only bolsters the primitive righteousness of Reacher’s cause.
In The Hard Way, the tenth novel in the series, the Person To Be Avenged feels a little more forced. The ostensible hostages are Lane’s second wife and child, Kate and Jade Allen. When the kidnappers fail to return them after receiving payment, everyone assumes they’re dead and Reacher makes a point of telling several people on his team, several times, that he’s doing all this for them.
‘Kate and Jade are probably already dead.’
‘Then I’ll make someone pay.’ (p.169)
‘They’re dead. You said so yourself.’
‘Then they need a story. An explanation. The who, the where, the why. Everyone ought to know what happened to them. They shouldn’t be allowed to just go, quietly. Someone needs to stand up for them.’
‘And that’s you?’
‘I play the hand I’m dealt. No use whining about it.’
‘And?’
‘And they need to be avenged.’ (p.211)
Two hundred pages later, Lane’s second wife spells out the morality, or the psychological logic of the plots, even more clearly. We have, by this stage of the book, had ample evidence that her husband, Edward Lane, is a twisted sadist. So:
‘He deserves whatever he gets, Mr Reacher. He’s truly a monster.’ (p.439)
That is the sentiment which gives completely free rein to Reacher to use whatever force and violence is necessary, to abandon all scruples, the excuse that justifies the fiercest, Old Testament, unflinchingly brutal vengeance. It is the sentiment ‘he deserves what he gets’ – which provides the underpinning to all the books in the series.
The bad guys are not just crooks pulling a caper, ho ho, like in Ocean’s 11. They always include psychopaths and sadists whose extreme cruelty, in return, justifies Reacher’s use of unforgiving, maximum force.
Expertise
Weapons Reacher is master of all forms of combat and weaponry.
Strategy But also capable in all elements of strategic and tactical awareness. In The Hard Way he is working alongside – and then against – some very well-trained mercenaries, and we are continually reminded of their army training in terms of both strategy and combat.
Handbooks This rises to a climax in the final bloody shootout of the book, where a wealth of army training is invoked by Reacher and his antagonists. At moments like this Reacher novels become almost army textbooks in unarmed and/or armed combat. You wonder how closely Child refers to such handbooks.
That said, sometimes Reacher’s tough guy behaviour comes perilously close to clichés from a collection titled How To Be a Hard Man.
He never sat any other way than with his back to a wall. (p.179)
A to Z Reacher’s knowledge of the street layout, and traffic patterns, of Downtown and Mid-Town Manhattan is demonstrated in dazzling detail. You can’t help feeling that Child himself must have walked every inch of the routes which Reacher follows, and that all the buildings, shops and street furniture would be exactly as he describes.
The chocolatier The building where Lane is told by the kidnapper to drop off the keys to the cars which contain the bags of ransom money, is next to a chocolatier. Reacher and Pauling go through this shop and out into the back where the chocolate is made and moulded, on several occasions. The shop, and all the chocolate-making equipment out back, is described in minute detail. I’d be surprised if it doesn’t exist.
Knowing the time In this book more than the others I’ve read, it becomes a leitmotif that Reacher always knows the time without consulting a clock or watch. It becomes a running joke between him and this book’s Reacher Girl, Pauling.
‘I always know what time it is.’ (p.42)
Of course he does. Repeatedly, Reacher is shown the precise time better than mere watches or clocks, which generally turn out to be fast or slow or broken. Reacher is never broken.
Cars and guns
If you’re a real man you know guns and cars inside out. The car the ransom money is dropped off in is not just a Mercedes Benz. It is a:
‘Silver, four-door sedan, an S-420, New York vanity plates starting OSC, a lot of city miles on it. Dirty paint, scuffed tyres, dinged rims, dents and scrapes on both bumpers.’ (p.15)
And the guns? Don’t get Reacher started on guns.
After they finished their tea Jackson took Reacher into a small mudroom off the back of the kitchen and opened a double-door wall cupboard above a washing machine. In it were racked four Heckler & Koch G36 automatic rifles. The G36 was a very modern design that had shown up in service just before Reacher’s military career had ended…. It had a nineteen-inch barrel and an open folding stock and was basically fairly conventional apart from a huge superstructure that carried a bulky optical sight integrated into an oversized carrying handle. It was chambered for the standard 5.56mm NATO round and like most German weapons it looked very expensive and beautifully engineered.’ (p.440)
In the final firefight, more guns, knives, explosives and night vision goggles are used. Lots of kit, and all of it described in loving detail, and with the knowledge and insight of a true aficionado.
Expert vocabulary
A bit more subtly I was struck by the way Child – in the manner of American thriller writers – always knows the correct terminology for everything. He and his character never say ‘the thingummy, the wotsit’ like most of us. He always knows the correct word.
- charging cradle – for a mobile phone
- crosswalk – American term for pedestrian crossing
- frost heave – uplift on a road surface caused by expansion of groundwater on freezing
Especially in kidnap situations:
- demand call – from the kidnappers, specifying the amount
- destination figure – final demand in a ransom
- instruction call – from the kidnappers, specifying payment details
Reacher knows the name for everything because his author does. Child and his books impress with their confident familiarity with technical terms, military practice, arms and cars, and all aspects of common American phraseology.
- squawk box – loudspeaker part of an intercom box, especially of a front door buzzer
Humour
I don’t think Reacher says anything funny in books 1 and 3 but numbers 9 and 10 are noticeable for a couple of bits of snappy repartee.
‘You got a name?’
‘Most people do.’ (p.18)
‘Tell me about your career,’ Lane said.
‘It’s been over a long time. That’s its main feature.’ (p.25)
On the move
Do you know the French comic strip Lucky Luke books? Set in the 1870s West, cowboy Luke rambles from town to town with his loyal horse, Jolly Jumper, in each book getting tangled up in a new adventure, defeating the bad guys, tipping his hat to the lady, and moving on.
Each book ends with a picture of Luke riding off into the sunset singing his theme song, ‘I’m a poor lonesome cowboy and a long way from home.’
It’s one of the central American myths, the mysterious, super-capable stranger who rides into town, gets tangled in other people’s troubles, helps out women and children, shoots the bad guys (after enough provocation to be ‘morally’ justified in doing so), then disappears as mysteriously as he came.
It goes back at least as far as James Fenimore Cooper’s novels about the tough capable frontiersman, Natty Bumppo, also known as Leatherstocking, The Pathfinder, Deerslayer, Long Rifle and Hawkeye, and stretches through to the man with no name in numerous Clint Eastwood movies.
Got nothing against women
But I wave them all goodbye…
My horse and me keep riding
We don’t like being tied.
This hoary trope is central to the Reacher stories. Almost every one commences with our hero stepping off a train, bus or plane into a new town, then getting drawn into a 500-page action adventure, then, when the last shot has finished echoing around the corral, tipping his hat to the ladies (particularly the one he has seduced and slept with during the course of the adventure) and ridin’ on out.
Child continually reminds us of this aspect of Reacher’s character, thus plugging him into a deep psychological and cultural archetype.
Reacher always arranged the smallest details in his life so he could move on at a split second’s notice. It was an obsessive habit. He owned nothing and carried nothing. Physically he was a big man, but he cast a small shadow and left very little in his wake. (p.12)
He cast a small shadow. Gee.
The Reacher Girl
Like a Bond girl, there’s a Reacher Girl in every novel. In The Hard Way it’s Private Investigator Lauren Pauling, ex-Special Agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. She was on the original FBI investigation of the kidnapping of Lane’s first wife and has felt oppressed by guilt for five years that she and her colleagues screwed up the investigation and allowed the first wife to be killed.
Once he’s been introduced to her, Reacher and Pauling spend a lot of time together pounding the streets of New York, finding Hobart and his sister, then sharing the stressful moment when Lane and his goons show up at the apartment and Pauling, Hobart and his sister hide in the bathroom while Reacher faces the others down and tries to throw them off the scent.
They spend a long night working through theories, Pauling using her contacts at the Pentagon to follow up leads. They become a very tight team. And then they go to bed. Inevitable. From the start she had that look.
Pauling had changed. She was wearing jeans and a t-shirt. She looked good. (p.284)
He stopped talking and watched her, silent. She looked great in the candlelight. Liquid eyes, soft skin… He could smell her fragrance. Subtle perfume, soap, clear skin, clean cotton. The shoulder-seams on her T-shirt stood up a little and made enticing shadowy tunnels. She was slim and toned, except where she shouldn’t be… (p306)
Pauling came out of the bedroom looking spectacular. Shoes, stockings, tight skirt, silk blouse, all in black. Brushed hair, light make-up. Great eyes, open, frank, intelligent. (p.320)
The ‘inevitably will get shagged’ look which is universal in Hollywood movies and thrillers like this. In the era of Me Too and militant feminism I find it a bit mind-boggling that so many books and movies still include the slender, busty, nubile young woman whose main purpose – alongside useful detective work and a bit of expert knowledge – is to get her clothes ripped off and be penetrated by the male hero.
In this respect, as in the wandering avenger trope, the stories feel as old as the hills.
The title
‘I’m going to have to do it the hard way,’ Reacher said.
‘What way is that?’
‘It’s what we call it in the service when we didn’t catch a break. When we actually had to work for a living. You know, start over at square one, re-examine everything, sweat the details, work the clues.’ (p.169)
‘What exactly is going on?’
‘We’re sweating the details and we’re working the clues. That’s what’s going on here. We’re doing it the hard way. One step at a time…’ (p.322)
So the title refers to Reacher’s modus operandi, which is the thorough, systematic application of logic and experience to work out complicated problems and situations.
At the same time, it also refers to the inevitable bursts of violence, particularly towards the end of each story.
There are always points where the sidekick says, ‘Shouldn’t we call the police or the FBI or someone?’ to which Reacher always replies, in effect, ‘No, they’d let the bad guys get away – the investigation would be long and drawn out – we know they’re psychopaths so we’re going to kill them. We’re going to do this my way. The hard way.’
Quite simply, forget the forces of law and order. You are in the presence of the masked avenger, the embodiment of vigilante law.
Epilogue
Unlike the other four Reacher books I’ve read, The Hard Way has an epilogue. A page and a half shows us how all the characters we’ve met are faring a year later, and it reads like a fairy tale.
The surviving bad guys get killed in Iraq. Patti, who had carried the cause of her murdered sister for so long, now has a good job and a boyfriend (after all, a woman isn’t complete without a man, right?).
Investigator Pauling is thriving. The severely crippled Hobart and his sister are benefiting from the money Reacher ended up getting from Lane, and handed straight on to them, to get him proper hospital treatment and decent prosthetic limbs.
The good guys are thriving. The bad guys got their just desserts. God is in his heaven.
And Reacher? Like the poor, lonesome cowboy, Reacher has disappeared into the sunset.
Until the next time…
Books & Boots 