I was arrested in Eno's diner. At twelve o'clock. I was eating eggs and drinking coffee. A late breakfast, not lunch. I was wet and tired after a long walk in heavy rain.
These are the opening words of the novel. But, of course, they are much more than that now than they were when the novel was first published. Since then, the narrator of these words, Jack Reacher, has gone to be played by Hollywood superstar Tom Cruise. That announcement was met with a slightly scaled down version of the same outrage which had greeted the casting of Cruise as the vampire Lestat in the film adaptation of Interview with the Vampire due to the Reacher measuring nearly a foot taller than the notoriously short-statured actor. In 2022, a series based on Reacher debuted on Amazon. In addition to these visual representations, Reacher has appeared in almost fifty different novels, novellas or short stories. Thus, this now seems a rather inauspicious introduction to a character that would become a marketing and branding dynamo. But, as they say, everybody’s story has to begin somewhere.
Details. Evidence gathering. Surveillance. It's the basis of everything. You've got to settle down and watch long enough and hard enough to get what you need.
It is hard to say exactly what it is that makes Jack Reacher such a popular character. Or, rather, to be more precise, it is hard to pin down just one singe thing about him that has allowed his popularity to swell to the degree it has. Sherlock is popular because you know there is probably going to be that moment when he explains an entire character’s life based on the way he ties his shoes or something. With Mike Hammer, you are just waiting for that moment when somebody gets their comeuppance at end of his fists. About the closest thing to character-defining elements like that in Reacher’s stories is the moment when the revenge he is usually chasing after is accomplished. But as for the rest, it is usually just an extension of this basic philosophy. Unless you happen to Steven Spielberg, however, creating drama out of someone simply looking at something is about the hardest thing for a storyteller to do. Maybe Spielberg should try his hand at making a Jack Reacher movie someday.
“They're scouring the country for one-dollar bills…They're using bank cheques and wire transfers and bogus hundreds and they're buying in genuine one-dollar bills from all over the US. About a ton a week…À ton in singles is a million dollars. They need forty tons a year. Forty million dollars in singles.”
No doubt about it, this novel features what has to be one of the most bizarrely conceived criminal plots in the history of crime fiction. In theory, mind you, it is almost brilliant. And yet, even in theory, one cannot help but imagine that there must surely—certainly—be easier ways to make the same amount of money. What are the criminal masterminds going to do with all these tons of dollar bills? (Which, you know—c’mon, man!, just the transporation logistics of moving tons of bills seems beyond all comprehension.) They are going to bleach the ink and turn each dollar bill into a perfectly counterfeited $100 bill.
For the sake of comparison, consider that there is an episode of the 1990’s Nickelodeon cartoon Hey, Arnold! in which two pretty stupid low-life petty crooks work really, really hard making counterfeit pennies from the nearly $1,000 in copper they had to buy to pull the plan off. That plan is ludicrous even to the kids in the show yet it almost seems like something more more doable in comparison to hijacking, bleaching and adding a couple of zeros to dollar bills. And when you get really right down to it, it also sort of sounds like something the Batman would have to stop the Joker from doing.
