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cyphomandraThe visitor.
Echo burning.
Without Fail.
Persuader.
The Enemy.
One Shot.
All by Lee Child, all in the Jack Reacher series (two more to go and then I’m all caught up). Somewhere, some time ago, I read a discussion of these, which included a bunch of people talking about how Child deftly sneaked literary references into hard-boiled thrillers. There’s a nice scene discussing Marxist theory in one of these, but apart from that either I’m missing something or I've misremembered the discussion. However, these are still good well-written thrillers, which avoid many of the obvious traps of this particular genre (idiot plots, cardboard characters, incoherent fight scenes, appalling female characters… I can go on, having been scarred previously).
Two of them stand out as particularly interesting explorations of odd bits of the US (all of the series so far are set there, with only The Enemy (a prequel) leaving it for various military bases and the Parisian apartment of Reacher’s dying mother). Die Trying has Reacher stopping to help a woman on crutches carry her dry-cleaning and getting kidnapped with her by a small militia group in the Pacific Northwest, the FBI rescue of her neatly complicated by the agency’s belief that Reacher, an unknown man on their security footage, must have been in on it. Echo Burning has him picked up (in over 100 degree temperatures in Texas) by a woman who asks him to kill her husband, in a town with a very murky past with regard to border security. It’s possible that I like reading about these corners of American life, present but often glossed over; I’m also less fond of the larger scale conspiracy ones. Persuader, for example, has probably the strongest beginning, but the endgame loses a lot of tension, and the old enemy who reappears never really becomes the sort of threatening figure he needs to be to pull the novel together.
They’re all well-paced and, as I said, the plots are not stupid. People think about things in these books, the villains as well as Reacher, and it’s never in an “as you know, Bob” style. Reading about Reacher’s plans to shoot someone from a distance without either taking out a hostage or provoking return fire that would blow up a shed packed with explosives and housing the other hostage was, for example, strangely fascinating. There is a certain amount of bowing to genre convention with the number of women who end up sleeping with Reacher (although there’s also a good lesbian character, and his relationship with Jodie – the only one to go past one book – is also well drawn).
Three of the books (nonconcurrent) are in first person, the rest in third. I can’t think of any other series that’s done that, off-hand, and although Child does it well enough I think I prefer the third, even if it does mean going through those scenes where nameless characters perform menacing actions in order to build suspense. Reacher himself, despite the rather hysterical declarations of the back of the nearest paperback (“Men want to be him! Women want to be with him!” (exclamation marks my own but, really, they wanted to be there)) is an interesting example of the mysterious outside character (half-French, for a start, and if we’re moving outside the text this whole series is written by a guy from Cumbria), more common to westerns, who is neither running from nor looking for something, but simply keeping moving (oh hell. Now I have The Littlest Hobo theme tune stuck in my head).
Anyway. I do find the titles often annoyingly non-specific, and some of the plots (specifically The Visitor) were too obvious, but they are, mostly, good reads, and intelligent thrillers. I’m hoping to find the next two at the library soon.
Echo burning.
Without Fail.
Persuader.
The Enemy.
One Shot.
All by Lee Child, all in the Jack Reacher series (two more to go and then I’m all caught up). Somewhere, some time ago, I read a discussion of these, which included a bunch of people talking about how Child deftly sneaked literary references into hard-boiled thrillers. There’s a nice scene discussing Marxist theory in one of these, but apart from that either I’m missing something or I've misremembered the discussion. However, these are still good well-written thrillers, which avoid many of the obvious traps of this particular genre (idiot plots, cardboard characters, incoherent fight scenes, appalling female characters… I can go on, having been scarred previously).
Two of them stand out as particularly interesting explorations of odd bits of the US (all of the series so far are set there, with only The Enemy (a prequel) leaving it for various military bases and the Parisian apartment of Reacher’s dying mother). Die Trying has Reacher stopping to help a woman on crutches carry her dry-cleaning and getting kidnapped with her by a small militia group in the Pacific Northwest, the FBI rescue of her neatly complicated by the agency’s belief that Reacher, an unknown man on their security footage, must have been in on it. Echo Burning has him picked up (in over 100 degree temperatures in Texas) by a woman who asks him to kill her husband, in a town with a very murky past with regard to border security. It’s possible that I like reading about these corners of American life, present but often glossed over; I’m also less fond of the larger scale conspiracy ones. Persuader, for example, has probably the strongest beginning, but the endgame loses a lot of tension, and the old enemy who reappears never really becomes the sort of threatening figure he needs to be to pull the novel together.
They’re all well-paced and, as I said, the plots are not stupid. People think about things in these books, the villains as well as Reacher, and it’s never in an “as you know, Bob” style. Reading about Reacher’s plans to shoot someone from a distance without either taking out a hostage or provoking return fire that would blow up a shed packed with explosives and housing the other hostage was, for example, strangely fascinating. There is a certain amount of bowing to genre convention with the number of women who end up sleeping with Reacher (although there’s also a good lesbian character, and his relationship with Jodie – the only one to go past one book – is also well drawn).
Three of the books (nonconcurrent) are in first person, the rest in third. I can’t think of any other series that’s done that, off-hand, and although Child does it well enough I think I prefer the third, even if it does mean going through those scenes where nameless characters perform menacing actions in order to build suspense. Reacher himself, despite the rather hysterical declarations of the back of the nearest paperback (“Men want to be him! Women want to be with him!” (exclamation marks my own but, really, they wanted to be there)) is an interesting example of the mysterious outside character (half-French, for a start, and if we’re moving outside the text this whole series is written by a guy from Cumbria), more common to westerns, who is neither running from nor looking for something, but simply keeping moving (oh hell. Now I have The Littlest Hobo theme tune stuck in my head).
Anyway. I do find the titles often annoyingly non-specific, and some of the plots (specifically The Visitor) were too obvious, but they are, mostly, good reads, and intelligent thrillers. I’m hoping to find the next two at the library soon.
