Make Me

Lee Child is such a massive success that nothing I say is going to change anybody’s opinion of his books.  So here are a few random thoughts.

If he’d been writing in the 1930s, then Jack Reacher would have been a cowboy or a private eye, the quintessential male loner righting wrongs and living to fight another lonely day. He would have been the Man With No Name, riding from town to dusty town. He would have been the shamus sitting in his office, nursing a pint of bourbon. Today he’s an ex-MP with no possessions, travelling by bus and train, stopping when he feels like it. (At least, I think so, on the evidence of the three books I’ve read and the two Tom Cruise films. Perhaps he has another existence in the others.)

I think it’s a fine fantasy. I like stories in which the hero is always three steps ahead of everyone else and can dish out justice to those who deserve it. I just wish that one day, just once, when a doctor tells him to stay in bed to recover from a severe beating, he doesn’t immediately rip off the monitors and check himself out… but stays in bed to recover!

For all his blunt, direct, readable prose, Lee Child can’t write action. Instead he offers rambling, almost semi-poetic musings on movement and anticipation that always manage to avoid specifics and leave the reader not precisely sure as to what just happened.

I never remember the plots of the stories. There’s usually a good hook to get things going, but after that they all tend to fade away into something not quite believable. Or memorable. Not so Make Me. It’s a great read, with a good hook that keeps on building and sustains its mystery right up to the final pages. When the solution comes, everything clicks satisfyingly, and this time memorably, into place.

And I love the fact that much of the action takes place in a mid-Western farming town called Mother’s Rest.