Lee Child's "Nothing To Lose"

This summer weather is making me lax (in the nineties three days running now, and no posts from me), so I suppose it's appropriate that I'm already deep into the trashy pleasures of the season.

Well--that's not fair. Lee Child isn't trashy. I've posted about him before, and this new book, if anything, firms up my respect for this writer; he's certainly among the very best writers of actual sentences working in the very limited thriller genre, by which I mean there is no overwriting, no howlers, no fakery, no gratuitous anything. It's just solid, straightforward mystery, suspense, and generous detail. And in spite of a few reviews (well--Amazon customer comments) suggesting that this one isn't up to Child's usual standards, I think it's one of the best ever.

In case you don't recall: Child's hero is an ex-military policeman named Jack Reacher, whose disillusionment with the Army has led him to become a drifter, albeit a spectacularly skillful one who is occasionally called in by his former colleagues to handle some awful situation. In this new book, however, Reacher happens upon the drama by hitchhiking into it: he arrives in a small town in Colorado, enters a diner, and is completely ignored by the waitress. Then, minutes later, a quartet of goons drives up, walks in, and tells him to get out of town. Reacher demands--and gets--his coffee, then he he declines, with understated violence, to obey the goons' commands.

Reacher's curiosity about the town leads him to team up with a cop from the next town over (she's hot stuff, natch), and the two of them uncover a bizarre conspiracy that involves military contracting, stolen uranium, and end-times religion. Along the way, Child takes a few well-aimed potshots at the sorry state of US veterans' hospitals, the Iraq war, and the disastrous stop-loss policy that's been gutting our military. It's good stuff.

But the plot is less interesting than the fabric of the story--Child, British-born, somehow has managed to master all things American, and his remote Colorado towns are incredibly vivid and absorbing. He knows the names of everything, and he knows how everything works, and he sees all the tiny things that bring a place to life. A rental sign has been "lettered in white...by a careful amateur." The Rocky mountains at night are "faintly visible, dim and blue and bulky, with their north-facing snow channels lit up like ghostly blades." In a motel bathroom, "The motel soap was white and came in a small thin paper-wrapped morsel, and he used the whole bar." The key to a long-abandoned rooming house apartment is described this way: "It was a worn brass item with a length of furred string tied through the hole. The string had an old metal eyelet on it, as if the eyelet was all that was left of a paper label." We never have to endure hearing about Reacher's favorite jazz CD's, or his drinking problem, or his rocky relationship with his estranged wife and son. He's just a conduit for all things exciting and interesting and fun; his rootlessness is a profound relief.

At the moment, I'm not in the mood for artful elaboration--it's too hot to show off. Child is just the ticket.

Lee Child

A quick search suggests to me that I haven't posted about Lee Child yet. How is this possible? I am a slavish fan of the guy. Child is a writer of thrillers starring Jack Reacher, a drifter and ex-military-policeman who possesses near-superhuman investigating, shooting, and fighting skills. A typical plot: Reacher is minding his own business in one or another American city--generally drinking coffee or walking down the street--when he suddenly gets swept up in some apparently random crime that ultimately proves to be the first hint of some massive and sinister plot. Or, in another common scenario, the military ferrets him out because he's the only guy they know of who can accomplish some incredibly dangerous and complicated task. Since Reacher has no phone and no address, he has to be tracked down in clever ways--for instance, by depositing an amount of money in his bank account, the amount of which corresponds to some code that only Reacher will recognize.

If this all sounds incredibly dumb, I'm not going to argue with you. But Lee Child is an awesome writer, and he plots these books with such stunning, austere skill that you are willing to fogive him any and all implausibilities. Reacher is a great character, too--tough, intelligent, and highly moral. There's always a girl to bed, of course, and sometimes it's a girl in danger--but invariably the girl is an FBI agent, military officer, or other badass, and at some point she gets the opportunity to snap some Russian mobster's neck or break somebody's wrist with her boot. The heronies of these books end up protecting Reacher as much as they protect him. Later, they like getting it on with him but don't complain when he hits the road--they're no more sentimental than he is.

I think my favorite of the bunch is One Shot, wherein Reacher is supposed to find the cracks in the most airtight murder investigation ever. Child seals up the case so completely that you can't even begin to believe it will ever be broken, and when it is (just as the back flap promised), you can't believe you didn't see it all along. I also like Without Fail, where the Vice-President-elect is being targeted by assassins, and Reacher is called in to find the holes in the Secret Service's plan to protect him.

Child's prose style is declarative, practical, and tough, just like his hero; he is never prone to the kind of cute indulgences most crime writers fall victim to. There's no philosophizing, no gratuitous soundtrack, and no brand names. Chicago is never about to be blown up by terrorists, and there are no genius serial killers who taunt the cops. Child is British, but he is masterful at portraying the blankness of the American landscape; he has his cultural debris down cold. The books are pure escapism, so you won't feel proud of yourself when you're done reading them--all you'll want to do is read another one.

OK, back to the Shakespeare...