I blame my wife though I shouldn’t. I swore that I would never go head to head with Jack Reacher, never again, but the human heart is a wayward orphan and when I saw Jack pucker up in the local book store I launched in big time. My wife saw me pick up Lee Child’s latest novel, “The Sentinel”, and she urged me to buy it, if I wanted. Oh dear God….I wanted.
And as is ever the case, despite all my smart-arse complaints about Jack, how unbelievable he is, although so believed by absolutely every woman he meets, how no man could be that much dynamite and never crumble before kryptonite of any calibre, how he miraculously knows just what items to take with him into any situation, as if he has already read the next chapter, and…despite all this experiential understanding, I was back, dancing with Jack, up close and personal. Goddam, I should have my head read.
But “The Sentinel” carried some interesting and quite unexpected nuggets of a possible mother lode. I didn’t discover them until the dance was over and Jack was sheepishly looking for a way out. To slip away from us readers and freshen up for his next book.
I had noticed an ominous little pseudo-decal affixed to the front of my book when I finally held it up with the joy and sorrow one feels after finishing; that sweet sweet woodbine after sex. The decal said “Lee Child in conversation with Ian Rankin”. Hmmm! So? But then my eyes drifted up to the book’s title again with Lee Child’s name underneath, and then that tiny glitch in the matrix as I read, “and Andrew Child”.
The end pages of the book listed verbatim a 2018 Q&A session between Ian Rankin and Lee Child. Chalk and cheese you’d think, but no! Lee was born James Dover Grant in Coventry England in 1954 and Ian was born under his own name in Cardenden, Fife, Scotland in 1960. Neither wanted to be a crime writer. While Ian slowly fell into the role while writing a PhD on Muriel Spark, Lee was forced into it by being fired from his TV writing job. Both have created solitary male heroes, Jack Reacher and John Rebus. Both love jazz and both easily fill those big boots marked “ubermensch”. Both writers start their stories by sitting at a key board and launching in. Neither claim to plot out the story in advance. So there is, apparently, some common ground betwixt chalk and cheese.
And Andrew Child, Lee’s younger brother by 15 years. Why is he helping big brother? As Andrew Grant he is a crime writer in his own stead. So what is going on here? Jack Reacher would know. Probably does know. But the rest of us?
Have the Lee and Andrew team changed Jack and his adventures in any way? Well yes. I think so. Jack has suddenly become more tolerant of mobile phones. And this story is about computers, servers, ransonware and the like. Also there has been an ever so slight shift in the male/female balance in this story compared with earlier adventures. The women, always recognised as intelligent seem to have recognised this themselves and act more surefootedly and on their own behalves. Also, is Jack just a tad more gratuitously violent than before, as if he had been given a rejuvenating shot of monkey gland serum just before the story kicked off? A younger hand at the pen, perhaps?
Ah! God bless the power of human imagination at either end of those beloved but eternally binding shackles, writing and reading.
At the End of the Day 