"Worth Dying For': The appeal of Jack Reacher

Jack Reacher is a modern-day knight errant: a six-five, 250-pound wanderer of the American landscape in search of adventure. Well, kind of, because even when he's minding his own business, not really searching, adventures seek him out"“ strange, evil-laden, mysterious adventures that Reacher deals with in a combination of brilliant, logical, knowledgeable sleuthing as well as his own brand of practiced, lethal violence.

Bad guys definitely shouldn't challenge Jack Reacher. In the long run, he's smarter and tougher than they are, and he'll take them down hard and final.

But evildoers do go after Jack Reacher, thank God, which gives his creator, Lee Child, the opportunity to strut his stuff as one of today's premier writers of literary thrillers.

I can't speak for Reacher's legion of fanatical fans, but, for me, his attraction has a great deal to do with who I find myself to be. And that is a slightly pot-bellied, five-foot-eight, 73-year-old two-time divorcee, living alone with a beautiful Calico cat in a 1956 Marlette trailer by the sea.

Walter Mitty's dream

I've always been the archetypical little guy, and Reacher is big"“ very big"“ and handles his body with a precise, skilled, trained, almost infallible ease that I can only identify with in the most Walter Mitty stretches of my admittedly limited imagination. He is my vicarious alter ego, and at my age I don't give a rat's rectum who knows it or how they feel about it. Jack Reacher moves me in that way— a harmless and deeply satisfying indulgence at an age when I'm able to easily forgive myself for this kind of literary luxury.

Year in and year out, the news media confront me with people behaving truly badly and suffering no apparent consequences. In an age when the closest thing to accountability is Alan Greenspan finally admitting that"“ oops"“ he got the '90s wrong, Jack Reacher's summary brand of accountability is very appealing. He kicks bad guys' asses, period. And he's kicking them for me.

In realistic terms, I know, Reacher is a vigilante and a bit of a fascist. But his brand of fascist justice exists only on the printed page. A Reacher novel is a little bit like reading porn.

Like Sherlock Holmes

The second part of the Reacher novels' appeal to me is literary. Although Lee Child is a Brit, he's nevertheless able to capture the growing isolation and desolation that is increasingly the American mood today. In most of the Reacher books, the hero's ultimate triumph is in great measure due to rallying the citizenry he encounters to hearken back to America's better times, the times of true community and shared responsibility.

The other appealing literary aspect of the Reacher saga is how damned smart he is— how he uses every intellectual tool at his command to unravel the seemingly Gordian knots that confront him. It's close to awe-inspiring to be privy to the workings of the Child/Reacher minds. I suspect Victorians felt the same way about Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes.

Child's latest Reacher romance takes place on the endless corn and alfalfa flats of Nebraska, that grim heartland of Cornhusker football and relentless wind. Of all the 16 Reacher novels to date, Worth Dying For is the most thoroughly saturated with truly irredeemable evil. The only solution to the ghastly answer to Reacher's probing is total eradication, which he performs with the gimlet-eyed wrath of an avenging angel, laying total waste to the indescribable horror that lies beneath the calm exterior of this Norman Rockwell America.

Battered housewife

As befits a steedless knight in good standing, Worth Dying For begins with Reacher riding to the aid of a damsel in distress, in this case a bloody-nosed housewife. One look and Reacher sees that she is the victim of frequent and merciless spousal abuse. He seeks out her sleazebag bully of a husband, who is carousing with his toady cronies in a prairie steakhouse, and summarily breaks the wife-beater's own nose with one devastating right hand, delivered with the moral and physical force of long overdue payback.

First, though, Reacher had offhandedly dispatched one of the coward's hulking force of ten ex-University of Nebraska football players, known to the cowed local populace as simply "the Cornhuskers." These brutes— interior linemen who weren't quite good enough for the National Football League— are the personal SS of the boss hogs of Worth Dying For: the scabrous Duncans, three brothers and the now broken-nosed son of Jacob, the eldest and smartest of these porcine prairie plutocrats.

Mysterious cargo

The Duncan brothers and their only son ostensibly run a trucking company, and they and their Cornhusker minions have cowed every farmer in the county into blind obeisance— serfs in a modern day fiefdom based on fear and intimidation. But behind their day-to-day legitimate trucking activities, the Duncans are transporting other cargo from Vancouver Island, through Canada, down to Nebraska, and then on to their criminal partners in Las Vegas.

This cargo is part of the mystery at the heart of Worth Dying For, and author Lee Child plays it close to the vest, taking the reader with the single large van as it wends its way across Canada and prepares to slip through the border undetected. What is this innocuous white panel truck carrying that has so riled the Duncans' Las Vegas partners that they have sent two teams of professional hitters to Nebraska to expedite things when the truck is late?

Setting his broken nose

Reacher ultimately answers that question, and disposes of the Vegas shooters, but first he must escape Houdini-style from several seemingly insoluble, fatal situations, which he does with a cool head and a mind that sees logical light at the end of even the darkest and most dire tunnel. His physical courage is tested to its limits, as well: After being clubbed unconscious with the stock of a shotgun by one of the Cornhuskers, he sets his own nose, which he later fixes in place with duct tape, which he vows is the best field dressing ever created. Reacher emerges from this self-applied first aid looking like a warrior in full war paint.

And then Jack Reacher, after discovering the Duncans' ghastly secret, wreaks full and equivalent justice, leaving nothing in his wake but the scorched earth of the Duncans' once impregnable citadel.

Then this knight of the open road heads for the nearest Interstate, sticks out his thumb, smiles, and tries to look friendly.

Go well, Sir Jack.♦


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