Novels of all types begin with a plot or fabula – a series of logically and chronologically related events, usually involving the same or a related set of characters. The author then creates from this a story, whereby different elements of the fabula are deployed in ways to create suspense, or irony, or mystery.
One of the main pleasures of reading a novel is working your way through the story back towards the fabula underlying it. In detective and thriller novels, this has become the main element of the text Whodunnit, and why?
The fabula
Thirty years ago in the Vietnam War, a U.S. helicopter pilot named Victor Hobie is sent on a mission, carrying a couple of military policemen to collect a notorious crooked American soldier, Carl Allen from a remote part of the jungle. The chopper is shot down and crashes, killing all on board except the criminal Allen who, however, has half his arm chopped off by a rotor blade and half his face burned by kerosene.
In a very bad way, Allen nonetheless swaps dog tags with the nearest body (as it happens, the tags of the pilot, Victor Hobie) and crawls off into the jungle.
Weeks later he is picked up by a U.S. patrol more dead than alive and taken to hospital. But as soon as he is half way mended, he breaks out of the hospital and makes his way, first of all to the secret location in the countryside where he had buried his stash of cash and other valuables; then uses this to buy his way through native villages across Vietnam, into Cambodia and then across the border into Thailand.
Thai doctors fix a prosthetic attachment to his stump of an arm, and he chooses a stainless steel hook. Not much can be done for his half-burned face. Eventually, Allen returns to the States and uses his assets to set himself up in business as a lender of last resort, using intimidation tactics to terrify his debtors.
Thirty years later he has established a respectable front organisation, Cayman Corporate Trust, with swish offices on the 88th floor of the World Trade Centre. He has adopted the name of the man whose dog tags he stole, Hobie, along with a grim nickname, ‘Hook’.
The trigger of the plot is that a man named Chester Stone has inherited the cinema film and projector company set up by his grandfather and expanded by his father, but which is now running into big trouble. Stone needs a loan of a million dollars to tide him over for six weeks until some new business comes in. Stone’s finance director points him towards Hobie, so Stone goes to meet him and takes out a loan, signing over some of the shares in the company as security.
What Stone doesn’t know is that Hobie plans to take over his entire company, by force and physical intimidation if necessary, and then demolish all the properties, factories and so on which it owns along the Long Island shore – and develop it as prime real estate land.
Hobie / Allen’s plan is complicated by the fact that he has been tipped off that someone has been snooping around the U.S. Army’s forensic facility in Hawaii, asking questions about Victor Hobie. And that, as part of the ongoing repatriation programme of U.S. military corpses, the army has just gotten round to crating up and shipping home the bodies from the site of the long-ago helicopter crash, delayed for so long partly because the Vietnamese authorities drove a hard bargain, demanding money for access, and partly because of its inaccessible location.
Hobie is tipped off about both of these situations, which threaten to unmask him and reveal his fake identity to the authorities. That is the meaning of the title, Tripwire. For thirty years Hobie has had in place a set of two ‘tripwires’ which would force him to bolt – the shipment of the bodies from Vietnam, and anybody snooping in Hawaii. Now both tripwires have been triggered at the same time.
His assistant, Tony, begs him to carry out the long-held plan, to liquidate his assets and flee the country, adopting a new identity. But Hobie is mesmerised by his project to fleece Stone, liquidate the Stone company, and sell of the Long Shore property at a vast profit. He wants to complete this last, grand plan.
And so he doesn’t hesitate to take Stone’s wife, Marilyn, hostage, along with the pretty woman estate agent who Marilyn had invited to come and value her and Chester’s house.
The story
This is the long, complicated back story which Jack Reacher (and the reader) has to unravel, starting with a trigger incident and then slowly working back through clues and investigations.
When we meet Reacher he is happily digging holes for swimming pools in Key West in Florida, hard exercise which has made his six foot five body even more formidable and fit. In the evenings he works as ‘muscle’ in a strip bar where the girls, unsurprisingly, are attracted by his size and strength and chivalrous nature. He looks, one of them says, ‘like a condom crammed with walnuts’ (p.23).
In the opening scene a private investigator, name of Costello, comes to the bar asking after a ‘Jack Reacher’. He’s been sent by a Mrs Jacob. Reacher tells him he’s never heard of Reacher or Jacobs. Later Reacher discovers Costello’s body, shot in the face with his fingertips cut off.
Intrigued, Reacher figures Costello must have been a retired cop, from New York by his accent, and with typical ‘Reacher luck’ rings around New York precincts till he is answered by a jaded old cop who says, ‘Sure, Costello, yeah he retired and set up as an investigator to pay off his alimony’ – and helpfully hands over the name and address of Costello’s office.
So Reacher’s Quest begins. He gets a plane to New York and goes to Costello’s office, only to find the door swinging open (as so many doors swing handily open in Reacher’s adventures) and the secretary’s computer handily left on. He uses it to get the address of the client ‘Mrs Jacob’ who Costello had mentioned, hires a car and motors out to her house.
To discover that ‘Mrs Jacob’ is none other than Jodie Garber, daughter of Reacher’s own mentor in the Military Police, Colonel Leon Garber. He knew her when she was an already-beautiful 15-year-old and he 24. Now she is a beautiful 29-year-old, in fact ‘achingly beautiful’ (p.81). Named Jacob because she married a man named Jacob, though she is now conveniently divorced and single again.
Reacher turns up as she is hosting a funeral party for her Dad who has just passed away from heart disease. Lots of Army top brass and officials who Reacher mixes with, embarrassed about his casual Key West clothes.
Once the guests leave Jodie and Reacher do some catching up. She explains that her dad had asked her to find Reacher, because he was involved in a case but, becoming increasingly poorly, needed his best M.P. to help him. Hence she commissioned Costello to find Reacher. Ah so.
But they have barely got chatting before two armed men try to shoot them. Reacher being Reacher handles the situation and he and Jodie roar off in her car. Now she is On The Quest, too. Now she is On The Team.
Reacher always assembles small teams, usually with one male sidekick, and always with a nubile and available woman who he ends up sleeping with. In Make Me it was investigator Chang, who he sleeps with. In Killing Floor it was Police Officer Roscoe, who he sleeps with. In this book it is attractive Wall Street lawyer Jodie Jacob, who… he sleeps with.
(‘Sleep with’ doesn’t really convey the sense of frenzied physical activity which the books tastefully hint at. In several of them there are fleeting references to the woman straddling Reacher. Given that he is six foot five of solid muscle trained to kill in 20 different ways, I can imagine that riding him is the only way to avoid serious physical injury.)
Jodie and Reacher go visit her father’s heart doctor whose receptionist tells them he was always chatting to old Mr Hobie, another patient with heart disease, in the waiting room. So, following this tip, off they go to interview Mr and Mrs Hobie, who tell them that, Yes, they asked the colonel to help them find the remains of their son. He was a model son, a medal-winning soldier and yet for all these years the Army has refused to confirm he is dead. So they are hoping against hope that he is still alive in Vietnam somewhere.
The Hobies had come across a researcher who they paid eighteen thousand dollars to track their son down and who came back with a photo of a gaunt fifty year old man in U.S. combat fatigues apparently in a Vietnam prisoner of war camp. The bounty hunter asked for more money to fund an expedition to liberate him.
Reacher takes Jodie to meet this guy, Rutter, who turns out to be a con artist, who had rigged up the photo in the New York botanical gardens amid tropical plants. Reacher beats the crap out of Rutter, takes his gun and his car and all the cash he has, half to repay the Hobies what he swindled them out of, half to fund what is now Reacher’s Quest.
Thrillers generally have information instead of psychology. Characters don’t develop much, but they often take you to interesting places, and explore interesting subjects. In fact, many thrillers contain at their core a sort of Wikipedia level of basic information on the chosen topic or subject area.
In this case the novel includes extensive information about what happened to the American Missing In Action in the Vietnam War. Using his wartime credentials, and the fact he’s with the daughter of the widely respected Colonel Leon Garber, Reacher blags his way into first the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, and then on to the military Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii, a special facility that identifies the forensic remains of U.S. soldiers.
At the latter Reacher meets up with his old mentor, General Nash Newman, a forensic anthropologist (p.412). Threaded throughout the book we have had descriptions of the bodies of the American soldiers killed in that helicopter crash all those years earlier, being transported from the jungle to a military airport, being loaded aboard a U.S. Air Force plane with full military honours, and flown to Hawaii.
It is here that there is a memorable scene as Newman invites Reacher to study the seven bodies from the helicopter crash, reduced pretty much to charred skeletons, and figure out the puzzle.
The scene features the nearest thing to emotion in a Reacher novel, namely horror at the precise way each of the seven was dismembered, crushed or burned to death as the chopper crashed.
But it is also a Sherlock Holmes-level of close examination and deduction. We follow Reacher as he examines each of the bodies in turn before realising that the truth is staring him in the face — there are seven bodies but fifteen hands. The survivor had his hand chopped off in the disaster. They are looking for a one-armed man.
Meanwhile back in the World Trade Centre, the torture continues. Two policemen follow up a clue and go up to Hobie’s offices on the 88th floor, where they discover that Hobie is holding Chester, Marilyn and the state agent woman hostage. Hobie and Tony immediately get the drop on the cops, disarm and handcuff them.
Hook Hobie is a psychopath. He takes the woman cop into the bathroom of the swish offices, and tortures her to death to the terror of the other hostages. Chester and Marilyn have bought some time by telling Hobie that the remaining share certificates are held in trust, and can only be handed over with a lawyer as witness.
It’s hardly high feminism in action, but it’s worth pointing out that Marilyn, Chester’s wife, from the get-go is much more tough-minded, focused and practical than her lily-livered husband. While he goes into catatonic shock after being kidnapped, Marilyn becomes a classic Lee Child character, devising strategies to try and redeem the situation. It is she who persuades Hobie to let Sheryl, the estate agent whose nose Hobie had violently smashed, to be taken to hospital.
Grudgingly (and improbably) Hobie consents. Tony drives her to the nearest hospital, drumming into her that if she calls the cops Chester and Marilyn will be killed. She does this, putting off the cops, claiming her broken nose was an accident. But she also follows Marilyn’s instructions and alerts a law firm Marilyn knows, to expect a strange call.
Marilyn tells Hobie she is calling the law firm which must be witness to signing over all the share certificates to Stone’s company. Prepared for the call, the lawyer at the other end says they’re reluctant to do anything in this situation, she should really contact the police etc.
Hobie is standing right by Marilyn and can hear everything she says, so it’s like the scene you’ve seen in hundreds of TV shows and movies where the hostage has to say things which appear anodyne to the bad guy listening, but signal her real intent to the people at the other end of the line.
The climactic shootout
Jodie’s firm tell her she has been booked in for a big business meeting about the liquidation of a multi-million dollar company, and so she and Reacher hasten back from Hawaii mulling over what they’ve learned about the helicopter crash and the likely fate of Victor Hobie.
After having more sex at her Manhattan apartment, and freshening up, Reacher drops Jodie at the World Trade Centre. It is here, on the 88th floor, at Hobie’s offices, that the climax of the novel comes.
In the lift Jodie meets the private detective hired by the law firm Marilyn had contacted. The two of them walk into a trap in Hobie’s office, are disarmed, beaten up a little, and plonked on the sofa next to Chester and Marilyn.
All through the novel Hobie has been kept informed of the researches of Reacher. It was, after all, Hobie’s goons who killed Costello and then, following the same paper trail from Costello’s office that Reacher found, had tried to break in and kidnap Jodie – only to have Reacher save her life and scoot her away.
Hobie also has a paid snitch at the Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii, who tips him off about Reacher’s visit. So for some time Hobie has known that Reacher was on his scent. Now he holds his razor sharp hook against Jodie’s pretty face and tells her to phone Reacher and ask him to meet her there.
Knowing something is wrong, Reacher says he’s still in St Louis and it will take him some time to get there. OK, says Jodie. Hobie hears all this and settles down to wait. Unbeknown to him Reacher is still just outside the World Trade Centre. He bluffs his way past security in the standard Reacher style, and takes the lift to the 88th floor. Takes out the hall bulb so it’s dark in the hallway, and buzzes to say there’s a delivery.
Now throughout this final stage of the story, Hobie has been accompanied only by his fixer, Tony, and another tough guy. The tough guy opens the door and Reacher immediately attacks him, disarms him, pushes him over to the wall and breaks his neck. Using a fire axe he chops his lower arm off, then arranges the body, with severed hand next to it, carefully on the floor, and ducks down behind the reception desk to wait.
Noticing the tough guy’s absence, Hobie himself comes out to the reception area but still holding Jodie by his hook with a shotgun in the other hand. Hobie freezes when he sees the dismembered body, overcome with traumatic memories of the helicopter crash exactly as Reacher had hoped.
But Jodie is entirely blocking his face so Reacher can’t get in a shot. Tony the fixer follows carrying a shotgun and, walking clear of the other two, Reacher has a clear shot and shoots his head off with his handgun. This makes Hobie turn, scoop up the shotgun and before Reacher can re-aim, fire a huge, scattergun blast at the reception desk Reacher’s hiding behind, which blows into smithereens.
Reacher is aware of terrible pain in his head and blood pouring down his face. Jodie tells him he has a nail sticking out of his forehead. After a minute’s stand-off, Jodie ushes backwards against Hobie who trips over the corpse on the floor and shoots the other barrel of the shotgun accidentally into the corpse.
Blood flies everywhere. That’s the two barrels of the shotgun used up, so Hobie scoops out of his pocket one of the little handguns he had confiscated off the cop-turned-investigator who had accompanied Jodie to the meeting.
He holds this gun against Jodie’s side. It is a classic movie standoff with Hobie knowing that if he kills Jodie, Reacher will immediately shoot him, but if Reacher tries to shoot Hobie, Hobie will kill Jodie. Impasse.
The two protagonists weigh the situation and discuss it like pros, like all the characters in Reacher novels who spend their entire lives calculating odds and making plans.
‘I’ll shoot her,’ Allen said.
Reacher shook his head again. The pain was fearsome. It was building stronger and spreading behind both his eyes.
‘You won’t shoot her,’ he said. ‘Think about it, Allen. You’re a selfish piece of shit. The way you are, you’re always number one. You shoot her, I’ll shoot you. You’re twelve feet away from me. I’m aiming at your head. You pull your trigger, I’ll pull mine. She dies, you die one-hundredth of a second later. You won’t shoot me either because, you line up on me you go down before you’re even half way there. Think about it. Impasse.’
He stared at him through the pain and the gloom. A classic standoff. (p.521)
The impasse is broken by Jodie who suddenly kicks back against Hobie, giving Reacher just time enough to pull up his gun. Hobie beats him to it by a fraction of a second, fires and hits Reacher full in the chest but Reacher still has the momentum to fire a shot which, with typical Reacher luck, blows Hobie’s head to smithereens.
Days later Reacher regains consciousness in hospital. The doctors have removed the nail and other debris from his head. And it turns out that all that pool building in Key West has built up his musculature to such a peak of toughness that the bullet’s momentum was slowed and it only bruised a rib.
Captain America. Superman. Jack Reacher.
Jack Reacher novels as ternary systems
A binary numeral system has two values, represented as 0 and 1. A binary system has two states, off and on. A ternary system has three states.
Calculating plans As in the other Jack Reacher novels, all the characters spend most of their time calculating what to do next, coming up with plans and schemes.
‘We were chased and attacked there, but nobody out here is paying any attention to us.’
‘You been checking?’ she asked, alarmed.
‘I’m always checking,’ he said. (p. 352)
The other guy was busy calculating the odds. (p.29)
Hobie moved his arm and tapped a little rhythm on the desktop with the point of his hook. Thought hard, and nodded again, decisively. (p.57)
Then he made his second great breakthrough. Similar to the first. It was a process of deep radical thought. A response to a problem. (p.130)
There was silence on the line again. Just the same faint hiss, and breathing. Like the old woman was thinking. Like she needed time to adjust to some new considerations. (p.136)
Hobie nodded, vaguely. He was thinking hard. (p.139)
It was a good plan, almost worked. (p.181)
Reacher changed his plan. (p.287)
Tony laughed. Jodie looked from him to Hobie. She saw that they were very nearly at the end of some long process. (p.495)
Lee Child characters view life as a sequence of problems, to be thought through and solved. Have a problem = unhappy. Have a plan = happy.
He could see Gerber’s problem. In the middle of something, health failing, unwilling to abandon an obligation, needing help. (p.93)
Jodie was the problem. (p.104)
‘Those two assholes playing at being my enforcers will be no problem.’ (p.141)
‘What about this Reacher guy? He’s still a loose end.’
Hobie shrugged in his chair. ‘I’ve got a separate plan for him.’ (p.141)
They paused in the hot Missouri sunshine after they paid off the cab and agreed on how to do it. (p.313)
Hobie has put in place a plan for what to do if the secret of his false identity ever comes out.
When he discovers Mrs Jacob is on his trail he dispatches men to kill her.
He devises a plan to take Chester Stone’s company off him.
Chester, meanwhile, is devising a plan to keep his company afloat.
For her part, Marilyn Stone, sensing the financial trouble her husband is in, devises a plan to sell their house – hence the presence of the estate agent.
And then reacts to the plight of being kidnapped not with panic, but with a series of strategems intended to wrest some control and agency back to her and her husband.
And so on, throughout the text. There is no end to the characters’ scheming and planning.
Binary Therefore, you could say that, for the purpose of these stories, all Lee Child characters operate in a binary system, having just two mental states: problem – where they are confronted with a situation, complexities, barriers – or plan – a solution, a way forward which manages the problem.
Child has Reacher reflect that this simple-minded vision of life as a sequence of problems requiring planning and solving stems from his upbringing in the Army, which gave him a very binary view of life.
His own career had been locked tight inside the service itself, where things were always simple, either happening or not happening, good or bad, legal or not legal. (p.474)
And, in a later passage, we are also shown how Reacher’s obsession with planning everything out, about thinking in terms of strategic advantage, combat and victory, is also the legacy of his army training.
Combat is about time and space and opposing forces. Like a huge four-dimensional diagram… Stay calm and plan. (p.508)
Stage 1: analyse threat. Stage 2: implement plan. OK. But I think there is another, third, element.
Shrugging I couldn’t help noticing that the characters are always shrugging. I began to underline the word ‘shrug’ and realised that it occurs on almost every page, sometimes twice a page.
DeWitt just shrugged. (p.374)
DeWitt shrugged. (p.376)
DeWitt just shrugged again. (p.378)
DeWitt shrugged. (p.379)
Why? In practice there’s a variety of reasons, but at its simplest it’s because a character doesn’t know what to do or say next.
She looked up at him, astonished. ‘But why?’
He shrugged. (p.91)
McBannerman shrugged and looked blank. (p.122)
‘OK,’ she said. ‘Where to first?’
Reacher shrugged. This was not his area of expertise. (p.149)
‘But when? How?’
He shrugged. ‘Maybe early one morning…’ (p.277)
‘I need to call somebody’s lawyer.’
The doctor looked at her and shrugged. (p.319)
‘Why list them as missing?’
Major Conrad shrugged. (p.327)
‘And what do we tell ourselves? That we were attacked by a ghost?’
He shrugged and made no reply. (p.359)
‘Why would she say she walked into a door if it was really a car wreck?’
O’Hallinen shrugged. ‘Don’t know.’ (p.361)
‘So what are you going to do?’ she asked.
‘About what?’
‘About the future?’
He shrugged again. ‘I don’t know.’ (p.449)
‘Are you going to look for Hobie?’
He shrugged again. ‘Maybe.’ (p.466)
Why do characters shrug on every page?
I realised it is often a third ‘state’ to add to the ‘Problem / Plan’ dyad. It denotes a moment when a character is presented with a question or challenge which they can’t, at that moment, process. Which doesn’t fit with any existing plan or strategem. Which needs to be processed in order to generate a new plan. Or, quite often, a question which the character hasn’t considered yet. Or a question the character is deliberately not answering.
Whatever the precise motivation, it represents a kind of third state, intermediate between 1. being faced with a threatening problem, and 2. coming up with a planned solution. Neither 1 nor 0, it is in between. Neither yes nor no, it is the ‘maybe’ state.
Thus Lee Child characters can be said to exist in one of three possible states.
- Problem – where they’re presented with a challenge or threat, long-term strategic or physical and immediate
- Plan – where they have devised a plan to solve the problem
- Shrug – the intermediate stage, where a character has a problem but hasn’t yet formulated a plan, or is simply batting the problem aside
(In fact, rereading the shrug moments, I realise there’s an alternative explanation to some of the shrugs. They are a response to elements which are outside of the current game. What is Reacher going to do after he’s solved the Hobie mystery, Jodie asks. Reacher shrugs, because that is a scenario beyond the current game, outside current concerns. Not relevant. Ignore. This is particularly true of poor Chester Stone who is kidnapped and beaten up and stripped early in the story, held prisoner in Hobie’s office and does nothing but shrug whenever anyone talks to him or asks him a question. His persistent shrugging indicates that he is hors de combat.
‘You ready?’ she asked.
Chester shrugged. ‘For what?’ (p.481)
Also, there might be a lot of shrugging for the same reason that all the characters are described simply as ‘saying’ things – he said, she said. Because Child is deliberately reducing all verbs (and lots of human variety) down to a bare minimum.)
Pauses Quite often in the novels, characters pause.
She gazed at the photograph for a long moment, something in her face. (p.96)
They paused a beat… (p. 296)
She was quiet for a beat. Amazed. (p.357)
She was silent for a moment. (p.495)
Child uses a handful of distinctive phrases to describe this moment, a long pause, a long moment, occasionally stretching out to the verge of discomfort (i.e. making the other person in the conversation uncomfortable).
The long pauses struck me as another marker for when a character hasn’t yet formulated a plan. Remember the old icons you used to get on Microsoft computers where a timer or an hourglass icon jiggled for a few seconds while a programme opened or closed or saved.
That’s what the pauses indicate a character is doing in a Jack Reacher novel. Processing information. Preparing another plan.
Related links
Reviews of other Jack Reacher novels
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