Reacher
The Stories Behind the Stories
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Lee Child tells the stories behind the stories from the bestselling Jack Reacher novels.
Includes a new, never-before-seen Reacher tale.
After making his debut in 1997’s The Killing Floor, Jack Reacher has quickly become one of the most popular—and most enduring—fictional heroes to emerge in the past half century. Now, his creator tells the stories behind the stories.
These are the origin tales of all of the Reacher novels written solely by Lee Child, chock full of colorful anecdotes and intriguing inspirations. One by one, they expand upon each novel and place it in the context not only of the author’s life, but of the world outside the books. And taken together, they chart the rise of an action icon, from 1999’s The Killing Floor to 2019’s Blue Moon. An afterword by crime fiction expert and bookseller Otto Penzler considers the importance of the character and novels in the canon of contemporary crime fiction.
In addition to the essays, this collection also includes an original Reacher short story—the first new Reacher appearance entirely written by Lee Child since 2019. Entertaining and enlightening, Reacher: The Stories Behind the Stories is a must-read for fans of the Jack Reacher series and a capstone to any collection of this excellent author.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this occasionally insightful curio, Child (In Too Deep) shares the inspirations for 24 of his Jack Reacher novels, mostly pulling from introductions he wrote for each book's special edition. He tackles the novels in series order, giving the book a loose narrative arc beginning in the 1990s, when he started writing Killing Floor after being laid off from a TV directing job. After that book's success, the series' popularity gradually gathered steam in the 2000s, and Child writes of his resulting experiments with story structure, shifting from "one-track first-person narrative set in a small no-account rural town" to "a third-person multiple-POV story involving glossy elements like the White House and the Hoover Building." The terse prose and short chapters lend the collection a somewhat phoned-in quality, but personal revelations are scattered among the shop talk. Most memorably, Child writes of responding "OK" to news of his father's death ("This was a typical conversation with most of my family. Short, sharp, to the point, nothing wasted"). Though lacking in broad appeal, this offers a handful of worthwhile tidbits for die-hard Jack Reacher fans.
