Abort this Child

Lee Child is the author of ten Jack Reacher thrillers…*

Jack Reacher is a drifter with means. He travels light, a toothbrush and a passport. He is ex military MP and he’s tall and tough when he has to be. He likes to make arrogant statements about who people are, what they do, and what they think. He is often wrong and not funny, yet he never admits mistakes or tells an off color joke to lighten the mood. He likes the Beatles; he considers them ‘his’ music as he was part of that thick generation. He has no remorse and his version of putting things right often involves killing people because he feels they have to go.

Foreign rights in the Jack Reacher series have sold in forty-three nations in twenty-nine languages.

Jack Reacher is a fucking moron. He gets hot and bothered by female fascist versions of himself, like the ex-FBI blondie in the book I just finished, The Hard Way. In Child’s stupid hands, we get to hear (read) Jack Reachers’ internal thought process as he evaluates a crime scene, cases a building, evades a tail. This is supposed to make us see how smart Reacher is. It makes me want to punch Child in his nuts.

Child, a native of England and a former television writer…

The Hard Way is a bad book. I know something about the genre, and I can tell you a number of things wrong in the details as presented by Child. Reacher knows nothing of his environment, and Child thinks that by listing street names and intersections, he’s making Reacher seem smart; he’s not – he’s making him a priggish cunt. Reacher has insight into everyone and everything. When he walks into a café, he knows how they make their money. When he hears of a man’s past military experience, he knows whether or not he can take them. What he doesn’t know is how to be human.

…he is at work on his eleventh Jack Reacher thriller…

This is one of those mysteries where the ‘aha’ moment came and went about 280 pages in, and having seen it coming 150 pages prior, I lingered at that point and said aloud “why the fuck am I reading this? Lew Archer would verbally disarm Reacher until he had tears of blood pouring from his eyes. Hammet’s Continental Op would have brained the prude Reacher with a sap by page three and gotten on with a romp of a story. Parker’s Spenser would have had Hawk empty the .44 Magnum into Reacher’s gut just for being a bore. Good ol’ Phil Marlowe (and I’m not a fan) would have mentally toyed with the goon Reacher until he begged for mercy and forgiveness. Any of Ellroy’s cat’s would wipe the floor with Reacher while disarming Jack Ruby at the same time.”

Lee Child enjoys sex with goats and lesser farm animals.

Child has no idea what he is doing. Women dig and buy his books. His Reacher is a handsome, available, vigilante thug, just like Dick Cheney, if Dick Cheney looked human. Do you want your women fantasizing about Dick Cheney? Me neither. Do you want to stick the broken half of a Heineken bottle into Lee Child’s writing hand? I do. And like Jack Reacher, I’d call it justice.

*Italics denote line items from Lee Child’s ABOUT THE AUTHOR section and some shit I made up. They also denote, in the book I read, when and what Jack Reacher is thinking. See how easy it is to get inside someone’s mind? Italics!