![]() In the book, the police empty Reacher’s pockets of “a roll of cash”, “some coins”, “receipts, tickets, scraps” – a harmonica had been deleted from the first draft manuscript the toothbrush didn’t appear until book three, Tripwire and only in book four does it become “a plastic thing that folded in half and clipped into his pocket like a pen”, which the ex-military policeman backdates to a purchase “on mustering out” of the Army. “I know you’re a Harvard postgrad, you’re divorced and you quit smoking in April.” Ritchson has Reacher’s disarming pedantry nailed – “It was last night until 11:59 and 59 seconds and then it becomes this morning” – and in subsequent episodes is properly bookish too, invoking Cato (Reacher has a soft spot for the Stoics) and responding to Roscoe’s choice of Eudora Welty as an alias with the off-the-cuff remark that he likes short stories because “they get straight to the point”. “You’re always so confident in your theories,” says Margrave’s chief detective Finlay, to which the riposte is: “As confident as I am that you went to Harvard, you’re recently divorced and that you quit smoking in the last two weeks.” Book Reacher is even more assertive. So I looked puzzled for him”) there is a hint of the robot who has recently learned to simulate human emotion: the suddenly adjusted expression, the jerky movements, the metronomic walk. As in the first-person voice of the book (“I knew what it was, but I felt polite. In quiet mode his facial expressions still convey a characteristic sense of ratiocination. He is either silent – “I don’t like talking” – or delivering a disquisition (a word Child used of the as yet unnamed hero in early planning notes) in a rapid-fire monotone suggestive of someone whose Holmesian mind works faster than his mouth. Reacher says nothing until six and a half minutes in, staring down a bully before even setting foot in the diner, with those “eyes that could blink and come back different, like changing the channel, from a happy show to some bleak documentary about prehistorical survival a million years ago” ( The Midnight Line). The essentials of character are deftly established by lead writer and showrunner, Nick Santora. Some say Ritchson is too obviously muscular, but there are no bulging veins on his polished torso and his neck is the right side of human. “It’s just Reacher.” Promo shots and tie-in covers opt for the delicate compromise of a backlit hulk seen from behind in profile: carved from bronze, a metallic glint in the eye, the emphasis firmly on Reacher’s 50-inch chest and basketball biceps. “Everyone calls me Reacher,” he insists, doggedly, at the start of the inaugural season of the new television series, Reacher, streaming on Prime Video from February 4th in its eight-episode entirety. Now we have Alan Ritchson, “Reacher” plain and simple. He wasn’t crazy about the prominence of the flag, either. I was present when a new cover image for Never Go Back came through over text: “I said no guns on the cover,” Lee said, tossing his phone aside in disgust. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Then came the Hollywood years, with tie-in editions between 20 proclaiming, against all plausibility, “Tom Cruise IS Jack Reacher”. Not only did they splash Reacher’s face all over Without Fail: they dressed him in one of big brother Joe’s Treasury suits, with white shirt and tie and Men-in-Black shades. Putnam Sons, in an act of petty revenge when Child was in the process of switching over to Bantam. It was first broken by his first publisher, New York’s G.P. For years there was an unwritten rule that Reacher’s face should never be shown on the cover of a Lee Child book. ![]()
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