Once in a Blue Moon a Lee Child

LEE CHILD FANS had good reason to be excited in 2012 — the film Jack Reacher was released amidst much fanfare and it starred Tom Cruise as the eponymous military cop. All the signature elements of a good Reacher yarn were in place. A brutal murder to kick-start things, Reacher uncovering things layer by frenzied layer and to top things off, a genuinely menacing villain called, quite simply, the Zec (‘prisoner’ in Russian), a former Soviet political prisoner whose gulag years have sapped the last vestiges of empathy. Who could have predicted, however, that the Zec would be played by Werner Herzog, the iconic German director (Fitzcarraldo, Invincible and Lessons of Darkness)? But then, Herzog gleefully hamming it up for a big-budget Hollywood film is precisely the kind of cultural collision Reacher and his creator Lee Child revel in. These are thrill-a-minute books, but they often capture the nuances of a time and a place better than an awful lot of so-called literary fiction. Without exception, they all feature vigilante justice, but the causes espoused are generally super progressive. Child’s fellow writers express their admiration frequently, while in the same breath lamenting that he’s simply killing off the competition. One of these days, Harold Bloom will continue to rubbish Jack Reacher beyond the grave. Meanwhile, Child has sold an eye-popping hundred million copies. And now, the 65-year-old British author is out with Blue Moon (Bantam Press; 384 pages; Rs 599), on Jack Reacher’s 24th mission. Blue Moon sees Reacher batting for an old couple whose daughter’s cancer treatment bills lead them bang in the middle of a turf war between Ukrainian and Albanian gangs.

During a telephonic interview, Child spoke about Jack Reacher as a kind of “blank slate” hero—the mysterious stranger who comes to town and fixes things. “The big advantage of having a ‘blank slate’ hero is that the reader is on the same plane as the hero—we’re all trying to do the right thing if we can. We all try to be kind and helpful if we can. But we live in the real world, so you may be inhibited or intimated or somehow unable to speak out because of real-world consequences; the hero has no such compunctions. Therefore, readers everywhere connect to blank-slate heroes quite easily. The big disadvantage, of course, is that they tend to be alone. There’s no supporting group of characters, no friends, no partners to keep them company. They have to see things through themselves.”

That last bit wouldn’t have seemed out of place coming from Reacher himself— through a combination of detective skills, military training as well as physical strength, the 6’ 5”, 240-pound Reacher develops a knack for “seeing things through”.

Blue Moon sees Child in top form: the action is as brutal and chilling as ever, the plot twists are genuinely surprising, and Reacher’s larger-than-life, somewhat theatrical persona (Child did a fair bit of theatre in his teens and early 20s) shines through. “The main character or the hero has got to be a little bit larger than life,” Child notes. “And everything you put on paper has to come across as authentic. One of the things that writers should always keep in mind is that readers get to decide if your character’s cool. You shouldn’t have to spell it out for them, readers don’t like that. Like theatre, in a way: all you can do is present your character onstage. But once the entry’s over, it’s the audience that decides, on the spot, whether they’re likeable or not!”

Child was born James Dover Grant in Coventry in 1954, not far from World War II-ravaged fields that still contained identifiable war debris. “I haven’t had the chance to revisit those places in fiction yet, but I may do so in the future. I enjoy reading Joseph Kanon’s books. Many of them [like The Good German] are set in that period, during or just after World War II in various parts of Europe.”

By 1977, Child had finished a law degree, but decided to work in television instead, at ITV, the oldest commercial network in the UK. You can see the ways in which working in television (on shows such as Brideshead Revisited) has influenced Child’s writing—his kinetic prose keeps the action moving along at a steady clip, while the cliffhangers and the other emotional inflection points in the narrative are expertly timed. Speaking about his equation with TV, Child says: “Although I don’t watch a lot of TV now—I prefer to read when I have some time to myself—there is no doubt that streaming television is the medium of choice today, if you’re looking to tell a long, complex story without having to worry about audience ratings. Are they a big deal in India, too?” Upon being assured that this was indeed the case, he adds, “If your ability to reach an audience depends upon sanitising the narrative in certain ways, that’s a kind of censorship, too. This is why I have moved Jack Reacher to the online space.” (Amazon is currently adapting the Reacher books into a webseries.)

“Vigilantes need to be different from the normal, in order to have that popular appeal. But today we have the sort of political mood, especially in the US, where vigilantism is the new normal,” says Lee Child

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After working at ITV for close to two decades, downsizing forced Child’s hands in the mid-’90s—he decided to become a full-time author, and in 1997, Killing Floor, the first Jack Reacher book, was published. Since then, the indefatigable author has produced at least one new Reacher book every year, like clockwork.

Married to an American, Child now lives in New York. Through these last two decades, Reacher has traversed the American landscape (his iconic folded toothbrush being the only luggage he cares for) and mowed down all kinds of bad guys—White supremacists in Mississippi, Machiavellian tycoons in Colorado, even a few illegal operations within his own beloved US Army. Reacher is compelling because he embraces his contradictions. He’s adept at using every kind of war machine, but is a Luddite in general (during the interview, Child admits that this bit comes from his own nature). At some level, he is a big old softie who cannot resist tilting at windmills, taking up underdog causes impulsively. But he is also downright cold while handing out punishment, seldom expressing remorse for killing those who stand in his way. His intimidating presence and the contradictions in his character were both depicted in a memorable passage from Never Go Back (2013)—classic Child, these lines, with not a word wasted.

‘He was one of the largest men she had ever seen outside the NFL. He was extremely tall, and extremely broad, and long-armed, and long-legged. The lawn chair was regular size, but it looked tiny under him. It was bent and crushed out of shape. His knuckles were nearly touching the ground. His neck was thick and his hands were the size of dinner plates… a wild man. But not really. Underneath everything else seemed strangely civilized. […] His gaze was both wise and appealing, both friendly and bleak, both frank and utterly cynical.’

While Child is grateful for Reacher’s success, he admits that the appeal of a lone wolf vigilante is waning because of today’s political realities. “It depends on the national mood in the country where the book’s being read. To be honest with you, the vigilante aspect worked better when the world was, more or less, a liberal democracy,” he says. “Vigilantes need to be different from the normal, in order to have that popular appeal. But today we have the sort of political mood, especially in the US, where vigilantism is the new normal. It’s more mainstream than it needs to be, anyway.”

This doesn’t mean that structural or institutional decay is ignored wholesale by the Reacher books. In Blue Moon, for example, the old couple suffers because of America’s broken healthcare system (their daughter’s medical bills have bankrupted them). And this is something that has been on Child’s mind for a while now— the opioid crisis was an important part of The Midnight Line (2017). Child speaks about this choice. “The point I was hoping to make was that in America, that part of the story is ordinary. It’s quite normal, it happens every day. It’s something that I think American readers wouldn’t even necessarily notice. I think readers from the rest of the world will see that and think, ‘Yeah, that’s awful, you need a better system’. It’s the same with the opioid crisis: you can’t just punish people for wanting those drugs, drugs that perhaps made them feel better than they have for years. You have to address the underlying need.’

There’s a story from Child’s childhood that he has mentioned in a few interviews down the years. It involves a car, the Ford Cortina, which was released when Child was still a boy. Ford had apparently redesigned the steering wheel plenty of times, in order to develop the most cost-efficient version. Purists and aesthetes thought commerce had ruined the Cortina, while businessmen thought it was a savvy move. Child, not yet eight years of age, realised that the fight was futile, that art was commerce. Being reminded of this still gets a chuckle out of him. “You can create the most lovingly crafted piece of art but if it doesn’t reach people, what’s the point,” he says, adding, “This is something I always tell writers or artists—or even journalists like yourself. When you write something, whether it’s a newspaper or a website, you want people to read it, right? Whatever you’re writing or creating, you have to keep this in mind: it should reach people, they should consume what you’ve made.”

So we can debate the merits of the Jack Reacher books endlessly, but the fact remains: in the last 15 minutes, Child would have sold another 50 books or so. How can anybody who is even remotely invested in the future of books or reading (which looks far from rosy) resent this? The commercial fiction scene in Indian publishing, meanwhile, is largely disappointing in terms of both literary quality and sales figures. Moreover, most Indian action thrillers tend to be fascist in spirit, either nakedly or less obviously so. The interests of the nation state tend to dominate the narratives. In contrast, Reacher is a protagonist with an instinctive distrust for institutions, and an even bigger bone to pick with totalitarian bullies. What wouldn’t we do for an unstoppable force of our own, an Indian Reacher with the wits and the upper-body strength to fight homegrown zealots!

But until that happens, you’d do well to pick up Blue Moon where even as we speak, a bunch of villains are being introduced to Reacher’s dinner plate-sized hands.

About The Author

Aditya Mani Jha

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