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One of the things that writers should always keep in mind is that readers get to decide if your character’s cool. “And everything you put on paper has to come across as authentic. “The main character or the hero has got to be a little bit larger than life,” Child notes. That last bit wouldn’t have seemed out of place coming from Reacher himself- through a combination of detective skills, military training as well as physical strength, the 6’ 5”, 240-pound Reacher develops a knack for “seeing things through”.īlue Moon sees Child in top form: the action is as brutal and chilling as ever, the plot twists are genuinely surprising, and Reacher’s larger-than-life, somewhat theatrical persona (Child did a fair bit of theatre in his teens and early 20s) shines through. They have to see things through themselves.” There’s no supporting group of characters, no friends, no partners to keep them company. The big disadvantage, of course, is that they tend to be alone. Therefore, readers everywhere connect to blank-slate heroes quite easily. But we live in the real world, so you may be inhibited or intimated or somehow unable to speak out because of real-world consequences the hero has no such compunctions. We all try to be kind and helpful if we can. “The big advantage of having a ‘blank slate’ hero is that the reader is on the same plane as the hero-we’re all trying to do the right thing if we can. Blue Moon sees Reacher batting for an old couple whose daughter’s cancer treatment bills lead them bang in the middle of a turf war between Ukrainian and Albanian gangs.ĭuring a telephonic interview, Child spoke about Jack Reacher as a kind of “blank slate” hero-the mysterious stranger who comes to town and fixes things. And now, the 65-year-old British author is out with Blue Moon (Bantam Press 384 pages Rs 599), on Jack Reacher’s 24th mission. Meanwhile, Child has sold an eye-popping hundred million copies. One of these days, Harold Bloom will continue to rubbish Jack Reacher beyond the grave. Child’s fellow writers express their admiration frequently, while in the same breath lamenting that he’s simply killing off the competition. Without exception, they all feature vigilante justice, but the causes espoused are generally super progressive. These are thrill-a-minute books, but they often capture the nuances of a time and a place better than an awful lot of so-called literary fiction. Who could have predicted, however, that the Zec would be played by Werner Herzog, the iconic German director ( Fitzcarraldo, Invincible and Lessons of Darkness)? But then, Herzog gleefully hamming it up for a big-budget Hollywood film is precisely the kind of cultural collision Reacher and his creator Lee Child revel in. A brutal murder to kick-start things, Reacher uncovering things layer by frenzied layer and to top things off, a genuinely menacing villain called, quite simply, the Zec (‘prisoner’ in Russian), a former Soviet political prisoner whose gulag years have sapped the last vestiges of empathy. All the signature elements of a good Reacher yarn were in place. But Reacher believes in a certain kind of justice.the kind that comes along once in a blue moon.LEE CHILD FANS had good reason to be excited in 2012 - the film Jack Reacher was released amidst much fanfare and it starred Tom Cruise as the eponymous military cop. He teams up with a fed-up waitress who knows a little more than she’s letting on, and sets out to take down the powerful and make the greedy pay. Reacher has to stay one step ahead of the loan sharks, the thugs, and the assassins. One brazen move leads to another, and suddenly Reacher finds himself a wanted man in the middle of a brutal turf war between rival Ukrainian and Albanian gangs. An elderly couple have made a few well-meaning mistakes, and now they owe big money to some very bad people. But you know what they say about good deeds. Then he steps off the bus to help an old man who is obviously just a victim waiting to happen. Reacher is on a Greyhound bus, minding his own business, with no particular place to go, and all the time in the world to get there. “Once in a blue moon things turn out just right.” “This is a random universe”, Reacher says. “Jack Reacher is today’s James Bond, a thriller hero we can’t get enough of.” (Ken Follett) In the next highly anticipated installment of Lee Child’s acclaimed suspense series, Jack Reacher comes to the aid of an elderly couple.and confronts his most dangerous opponents yet.