Jack Reacher — or just Reacher — is the hero of a growing number of action/adventure novels by Lee Child.

Of the three characters I mentioned in a previous post, Reacher is, in certain ways, a bit of a cipher. He has a back-story, given in greatest detail in The Enemy, but what you quickly learn about him in almost every Reacher novel is:

• he prefers Reacher
• he is a big man, 6’5″, weighing 240+ pounds
• he is ex-Military, Army MP and investigator
• he is a crack shot
• he travels with no baggage, mostly just a bank card and a toothbrush
• he does not bother to do laundry, when his clothes are soiled, he goes (mostly) to an Army supply shops, purchases plain, and throws away the soiled
• he travels by bus or occasionally hitch-hikes
• he likes coffee and rarely drinks
• he knows how to wait

and that’s about it.

Each novel is self-contained, almost without history, in an unrelenting present, although there are very occasional references to past or possible future events, and at the end of one novel, he may set out on a journey that puts him into the temporal scope of the next.

Likewise, in each novel, he falls into the main situation without any active involvement on his part, things simply happen to him, and he is swept away by events. However, once engaged, he devotes his undivided attention to discovering and rectifying the events that have been thrust upon him, becoming, as each novel progress, the driving force behind the action and the resolution.

While large cities, Washington mostly, figure in his landscape, he travels mostly in the broad expanse of small-city Middle America, dotted with coffee shops, diners, small town police, and small-town politics, where a few central figures may control the destiny of others.

His opponents, or villains, if you will because villains they are, are extremely violet, sadistic torturers or killers. With few exceptions some of the meanest of the mean and vilest of the vile, driven in turn by money (Killing Floor, the first Reacher novel, is an excellent example), trading in sex slaves (Worth Dying For), terrorism (Gone Tomorrow), or power (Never Go Back, among others). At the end of the day their demise through the hands of Reacher is also violent and final. No one who opposes Reacher walks out alive, and in one notable example, the entire population of evil doers, along with their automobiles, are buried in a mass grave to conceal what has happened. Because no matter how he gets out, there are no consequences for Reacher himself. Though he may be physically damaged himself, he walks alone into the sunset, most often because the revelation of full extent of the stain would cover others even higher in power, and is so obliterated or washed over. In the best of the Reacher novels (Killing Floor, Tripwire), the bad guys are really bad, in the lesser ones (Never Go Back), less so.

What is perhaps most interesting about the Reacher novels, beyond their break-neck pacing, dark humor, and violence, is that most of the real action takes place in Reacher’s head. We see him work out the puzzles of the current situation, talk through his approach, measure his actions, and then carry them out. He is not always right, or not always right soon enough, but it the interplay between the action and the thought before and after is particularly satisfying.

Child is a deft story-teller, using a variety of techniques to keep the Reacher stories fresh and engaging. He is not beyond the cliff hanger — see 61 Hours, for example, a novel which also uses the bomb countdown metaphor to generate an excellent frisson in this reader — even when the cliff off of which Reacher was hung in this one, is not adequately explained in the next (so how did he escape?).

I have called Reacher a knight-errant, and in a modern sense, he is. He seeks out adventures (more likely they seek out him) , not so much to prove his values as the courtly knight of old, but to establish them once he is called on. The medieval figure would also be interested in pursuing the object of his courtly love, and while women do figure in the Reacher novels, love is rarely involved, but certainly strong physical attraction is present. There is sex in every Reacher novel, but it is demure, often humorous, and always non-explicit. The women in the Rearcher novels are usually strong, intellegent, sometimes his near match, but always engaging, and anything but caricatures, which may account in part for the strong response from women to the series.

There is the whole question of verisimilitude, I suppose, since the Reacher novels are set as mentioned mostly in a present or near present. Logically Reacher at this point would have to be nearing 60, but I doubt that anyone but me thinks too much about that. In point of fact, the last four Reacher novels have probably taken place in the course of less than a year, and then there’s also the back story that could be pursued.

Whatever. If you’ve not read any of the Reacher novels, you’ve got a meaty pile you should dive into, and I’ve just noticed — can’t wait — that the next one is due in September. Let’s see if I can make the next one stretch out more than two days, because that’s about the maximum number of days I can go without racing to the finish.

Lee Child is a dynamite story-teller, Reacher a compelling guy who sets the world in order. Enjoy.