Reach for a New Hero: Lee Child and Elizabeth George's mysteries

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(originally written for the Gazette in Feb. 2013) by Kasey Cox
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In winter, I tend to read a lot of mysteries. Even the most well-written mysteries are still brain candy, a plot meant to engage our minds, a story spun to draw us in. Perhaps this is the reason I love mystery series this time of year: TV doesn’t offer much; Hollywood saves the big blockbuster releases for the holidays and for summer; and I don’t do winter sports, so mysteries take me away, just like Calgon in the 1980s.

I’ve noticed a lot of bookstore customers working their way through a mystery series or two right now, just like I am. This past week, a man asked me for a recommendation from that section of the store, and I asked him if he liked police procedurals. When he said yes, I suggested Elizabeth George’s books about Scotland Yard cases in modern-day England. Honestly, I was a bit taken aback with his response – “No, I don’t want any of those mysteries written for women.” Certainly, there are many authors who write a cross-genre approach with the “romantic suspense” theme, but I would never classify Elizabeth George as one of them. As we talked further about it, I realized this man meant that he didn’t want “all that relationship and psychological stuff”. George’s characters have complicated pasts, elaborate motives, and, yes, intricate relationships with each other. George delves deeply into the psychology of the cast of characters she has created, for both the detectives, the killers and their victims.

Since my best recommendations come from books I’ve read personally, I mentioned that I’d just recently starting reading Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series. The customer’s face lit up as he told me he’s read every book. While I couldn’t sell him a Lee Child book, at least I knew we were on the same page.

Lee Child is the yang to Elizabeth George’s yin. As Child explains in his new author’s introduction to his first book, The Killing Floor, Child created his main character, Jack Reacher, to be the anti-hero of his day, the opposite of the sensitive, vulnerable male protagonists who were the height of popularity when Child started writing in 1995. Jack Reacher’s archetype hearkens back to John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, a cowboy who rides into town, smashes the heads of the bad guys together, gets the pretty girl, but then, inevitably, must ride off into the sunset. Many readers have called the Jack Reacher books a modern take on the Western, an ironic situation where British writer Lee Child creates the epitome of an American hero. (Elizabeth George, by the way, is an American author who writes so convincingly about England and Scotland Yard that many Brits don’t realize she’s an American.)

Jack Reacher is ex-military, but he’s the perfect example of how you take the man out of the army, but you can’t take the army out of the man. Born on an American military base, carted around the world with his military father’s job, Jack and his brother moved right from being military brats into being military men in their own right. After the Cold War ends, Jack finds himself honorably discharged in a downsizing military, and at loose ends. An American who has hardly spent any time in the United States, Jack decides to carefully spend his pension to travel as far as it will take him. His parents are deceased, he’s estranged from his brother, and he has no ties to any place in particular.

When I say Reacher is ex-military, a cowboy figure who rides into town and cleans up the bad guys he happens to run into, don’t confuse Reacher with Rambo. Reacher doesn’t spit out great one-liners while humping ridiculously huge weapons through the jungle. Though Lee Child’s plot lines are occasionally a little contrived to get Reacher into an exciting situation, his learning curve as a writer is impressive. Each book in this series is more sure-footed, the plot twists more complicated yet less forced, Reacher’s back story slowly but solidly filling in to create a character who really takes up residence in your brain, leaving you wanting more.

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, Lee Child may be the perfect brain candy for you and readers you love. Hero and protagonist Jack Reacher isn’t sweet, but he is satisfying and that satisfaction lasts through an ongoing series of seventeen books, many of which have won awards in the crowded mystery-and-thriller genre.

Brit or Yank, woman or man? Hobo never tells. Dance the Lynley, or Reach for the gun? Send Hobo your opinion at from_my_shelf@yahoo.com. Watch for Hobo’s new mystery, Paws to Find the Missing Tuna Fish, coming soon to a bookstore near you.

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