Past Tense, published in November, is the 23rd Reacher novel. Approaching the house of a bad guy in Persuader, he notes the varying pitch of “a far-off sprinkler turning slowly and hissing against a soaked sidewalk through sixty degrees of its rotation.” In Die Trying, chained up in a barn by kidnappers, Reacher shuts his body down “like a beach house in winter” and turns his mind into “a huge black space for thinking in.” Remember the Grateful Dead song about the headlight on the northbound train, the one that shines its light through the cool Colorado rain? That’s Reacher. Physically, Reacher is immensely skilled and powerful mentally, he’s a kind of rogue vacancy, a fugue on legs, a field of glittering blank attention in which reality discovers itself, detail by detail.
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Reacher stepped in and kicked the left-hand guy full in the groin, before the guy’s gun was even halfway out of its holster, which meant the right-hand guy had time to get his all the way out, but to no avail, because the next event in his life was the arrival of Reacher’s elbow. Hit men, dealers, bullies, bodyguards, psychopaths, gunrunners, goons. Reacher sleeps with tough, attractive women, and he bashes up bad guys. And so, like children going into the Black Forest, we enter the realm of story, holding Reacher’s huge and dangerous hand. Something might need to be straightened out. What proud West Pointer, wonders Reacher (who went there himself), would pawn her class ring if she didn’t have to? Is there a woman in distress, under duress, somewhere nearby? He must look into it. In The Midnight Line, it’s the glint of a West Point class ring in a pawnshop window, on “the sad side of a small town,” that detains him. Where dwells unrighteousness, where redress is demanded, there goes Reacher.
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Nothing slows him down except a plot, because Reacher is a man for whom the phrase moral compass was invented: His code determines his direction. Bus station to bus station, diner to diner. Jack Reacher is a former military policeman turned super-drifter who roams America with only a toothbrush and the clothes he’s standing up in. It ran through me, leaving a clean and brilliant hole. I read my first Reacher book along Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor, between New York and Boston, and I remember nothing about it except a sensation of empty velocity (with just a hint of train-clatter). And then, as the word count-and the pace-increases, sugar: Snickers bars and bowls of Sugar Smacks. Andy Martin’s fascinating Reacher Said Nothing, in which he literally sits in a room and watches Child write a Reacher novel, is also an account of him sitting in a room and watching Child go through coffee and cigarettes: 20-ish cups, a pack a day.
He has an industrial caffeine habit, and he smokes like a chimney. Tolkien’s old school, and has seen Waiting for Godot at least 39 times. Born James Grant and raised in Birmingham, England, he went to J. Child, the pusher, bangs out a book a year. At transportation hubs across the country, they are clutched and consumed by Americans in motion. An atmosphere of pullulating need surrounds these productions. This is a celebrated factoid, and I believe it. Someone, somewhere, buys one of Child’s Jack Reacher crime thrillers every 13 seconds.