Lee Child’s 12th Jack Reacher thriller “Nothing to Lose” (Delacorte Press) debuted in the number one spot on The New York Times bestseller list yesterday.
In a very crowded field, Child’s thrillers stand out for their lean and mean approach to character and story. I’ve talked to more than a few mystery and thriller writers who admire what Child does, but are completely mystified as to how he does it.
Many popular crime novel series present highly detailed settings and protagonists with lots of personal and professional baggage — the more we read Sue Grafton or Patricia Cornwell the more we feel we know about their characters Kinsey Milhone and Kay Scarpetta.
Reacher is a deliberately sketchy man — a retired military policeman who chooses to live a nomadic and largely isolated existence, without a permanent address or a significant other.
Reacher carries an ATM card, a portable toothbrush and little else — we assume there is quite a bit of money in his bank account but our hero lives day-by-day without any of the consumer touchstones of 21st century American society.
The man is neither a hero nor a thug — he simply wants to be on his own living the ultimate in “in the moment” lifestyles.
The stories generally start as simply as possible and then build quickly into complex and thrilling adventures (few of which Reacher enters into deliberately).
“Nothing to Lose” finds Reacher hitching in a leisurely fashion from Maine to California. In the second chapter, the character enters a restaurant in a Colorado town with the unlikely name of Despair simply looking for a good cup of coffee.
Our hero waits patiently at the “Please Wait to Be Seated” sign, but when it becomes clear the waitress will not be seating him anytime soon, he sits himself at a table only to find four goons joining him, who insist that he “get going.”
“Going?,” Reacher asks.
“Out of here.”
“Out of where?”
“Out of this restaurant.”
“You want to tell me why?”
“We don’t like strangers.”
Before we know it — and just eight pages into “Nothing to Lose” — Reacher is off on one of his strangest and scariest adventures (fueled primarily by his escalating annoyance with the weirdly anti-social people in this odd little town in the middle of nowhere).
For the next 400 pages, we join Reacher on a wild ride that becomes crazier — but never unbelievable — with each new chapter. The story expands to include “end of times” religious crazies, a possible military cover-up of dark deeds in Iraq, and a potential terrorist attack on a major city.
Reacher is part James Bond, part hard-bitten Western anti-hero (particularly Clint Eastwood’s “Man with No Name”) and part Charles Kuralt .
Child happens to be one of the funniest deadpan comedy writers in his field. The central joke here is that our whole country might have been plunged into political chaos if Reacher had been served a cup of coffee in that Despair greasy spoon.
One of the marvels of the series — and one of its biggest selling points — is that each book stands alone. You can start with “Nothing to Lose” or in the middle of the 12-book series with no diminishment of the pleasure you will find in the hands of this master entertainer.
