Lifetime of action

You never know how far you’ve come until you look back. In 1997, Lee Child published the first Jack Reacher novel, Killing Floor. In it, Reacher was a retired American military policeman, wandering around America just for the fun of being rootless. He had a love of jazz music, Sherlock-level detective skills with Hulk-level brawling skills, and very little family background that was revealed as the book went on. When a conspiracy was revealed in the small town he happened to land in, he used all his skills to unearth it.

Killing Floor was a huge hit, and over the years, has spawned 20 other books with Reacher as the lead. Some were prequels to Killing Floor, most sequels, and each elaborated on Reacher’s life bit by bit. No Middle Name is the 22nd Jack Reacher book, and the first short story collection. And it is this collection that really drives home the evolution of the character. Think of it as a Jack Reacher Reader, putting together short adventures from every phase of his life. The stories range from Second Son, from when he was 13 years old, to Too Much Time, which is set in the present day, before the events of the upcoming next novel.

In between, he has been a high-school kid taking on a mob, to a military policeman finding moles, a hitchhiker uncovering secret prisons, and even a guest at an Agatha-Christie-like mansion. Those are all plots of the stories here, by the way. Not all of them are good, a few are too short to be more than vignettes, and the loyal reader has probably read some others before. But they serve the purpose of illustrating Reacher’s journey — both literary and fiction — and show off his evolution.

For my money, the best story in this collection is still High Heat, a novella earlier published as an Amazon Kindle Single. Here, high-school Reacher visits New York with the intention of meeting his elder brother who studies nearby. Typically for him, he intercepts a streetside molestation that turns out to involve a sting operation. To make up for it, he decides to help out with capturing a mob boss — but not before hooking up with a pretty girl, driving to catch a Ramones concert, and figuring out the identity of a serial killer based only on his silhouette. All this on the same night an epic power failure hits the city.

Coming up close is the previously unpublished Too Much Time, where Reacher tries to help a purse-snatching victim. You guessed it — there’s a lot more going on than a random street crime. For some reason, he gets arrested by a passing pair of cops and finds no one is interested in listening to reason and letting him go on his way. And the purse was suspiciously light, anyhow. Will he be able to figure out what’s going on in time?

Of course he will. The big draw of the Reacher books is that we know he’s going to win. He’s going to use both his Sherlock-sized brain and his Rambo-sized biceps on the way. And he’s likely to hook up with someone interesting somewhere. But it isn’t just Reacher’s character that pulls us in. It’s the subtle art that Lee Child brings into the stories. They start with something innocuous — a man sweating too much in a subway train, for example. Or maybe a classified ad naming Reacher, in an old newspaper. There on, the plot develops sinew by sinew, Reacher implacably chasing each lead down, until suddenly, three-fourth of the way through, we’re confronted by something monstrous. Child uses none of the tricks other thriller writers use: no flashbacks, no unreliable narrators, no characters-hiding-in-plain-sight, no parallel threads. The story moves linearly.

The writing style, too, is deceptively simple. Short, sparse sentences; brief, to-the-point dialogue. But hidden in there is a magnetism that draws the reader along. Child has honed his style over the years, and today a regular follower could probably spot his style from a written paragraph. Yes, these are the drawbacks of being so typical — a continuous binge of Reacher’s adventures will probably bore a reader, and of course, there are only so many conspiracies that can be hidden in a typical small American town.

Given all that, No Middle Name makes for a good second or third book for the new Jack Reacher fan — he’s best advised to start with a full-length book, but this one will give him the history. Worth it, as an introduction to the reigning king of action novels.

No Middle Name

Lee Child

Random House

2017, pp 400,Rs 434