He is Rambo, Arnie, a walking, talking Chuck Norris Fact. He is Paul Bunyan, John Henry, Barry Bloody Crump. In Child’s words, he is that eternal wanderer, the Knight Errant. Reacher is Achilles, Samson, Cu’Cullaihnn. Nobody really needs to explain either how these brilliant, brutal, batshit books are so ludicrously successful, or why, but people keep doing it anyway, so here goes mine:Įven though he’s a man for our troubled times, Reacher is a timeless hero of legend. Nobody who thinks they’re clever and literary and cultured and also reads Helen Garner books for fun needs to explain why they love Reacher so hard (or Keyes or King) – but everyone does and has, from Malcolm Gladwell to David Remnick to Antonia Fraser to Margaret Drabble to our own genius Danyl Mclauchlan. And so it’s true that – according to my e-reader – within two months, Read Every Reacher was Mission: Accomplished. But I am a very, very fast reader and a geeky completist, and we all thought it was the end of days, and in my personal life it actually was, so I had reasons to lay awake late every night reading violent and improbable fiction. (“You might have to explain your methods there, for the sceptics.”)įair.

But she spotted that for the tragic exaggeration it was and deftly broke its neck. I read them all in as many days as there are books – or so I told Spinoff editor Madeleine Chapman when I pitched this retrospective Reacher Ranking. I read them late into the night, every night, because (disclosure) I work in book publishing, for Penguin, which publishes Lee Child’s books around the world and released the latest one, No Plan B, this month. It started by accident when I found one – the jokey compendium Reacher’s Rules (not ranked) – in a “ little library”, – but then I read them one after another after another. In March 2020, when New Zealand went into that first lockdown, hard and early, like Jack Reacher would enter an eight-against-one alley fight, I decided to read all of Lee Child’s (now 27) Reacher novels, plus the short stories, plus all the ephemera, in order of publication. Summer read: A comprehensive ranking from someone who read them all in two months.

Jack reachers rules