![]() ![]() ![]() Where dwells unrighteousness, where redress is demanded, there goes Reacher. 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. ![]()
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