Reacher Season 2 Reaches Back into Reacher’s Past

By

Scott D. Parker

I’ve now watched the second season of Amazon’s “Reacher” and not only am I caught up, I’m all in.

Let’s be fair: I was all in back in the first fifteen minutes of the pilot episode, when Reacher did the Sherlock Holmes thing to the local police detective. Alan Ritchson’s portrayal of Reacher is fantastic. He has the brawn to take on anyone and be scared of no one. He has the brain to outthink any opponent, usually before they even realize it. But it’s Ritchson’s gentle demeanor that is probably my favorite part of the character on screen.

Season 1 is Reacher the Wanderer, the guy who literally walks the earth (a modern day version of David Carradine’s “Kung Fu”?). In this season, we get strangers who question Reacher’s lifestyle choice. In Season 2, we get Reacher’s backstory in the form of his old army unit.

Getting Most of the Band Back Together

The main plot of Season 2–based on the novel Bad Luck and Trouble—involves a mysterious group taking out the members of Reacher’s old army unit, the 110th Special Investigations Unit. Reacher’s ally from Season 1, Neagley, sends Reacher an SOS (in the form of a particular dollar amount on an ATM receipt). Fearing that the entire 110th is on someone’s hit list, they join forces to figure out who’s behind it all.

As a Reacher newbie, I really enjoy this season specifically because we get backstory. Interspersed with the main plot, we get flashbacks to when Reacher commanded the military police unit. We get to see the big man actually be part of a team of people he can rely on to have his back just as he has theirs.

Particularly funny are all the comments his former soldiers give him in the present. Other than Neagley, we are introduced to David O’Donnell who is now a lawyer with a family and Karla Dixon, a forensic accountant and one who pined for Reacher back in the day. I particularly liked O’Donnell because he’s a smaller guy, married (in direct opposition to his earlier life), and who is perfectly willing to stick his neck out for the team, but knows he cannot withstand all the punishment that Reacher can…but still does it.

O’Donnell and Dixon both haven’t seen Reacher in years and they pepper him with questions about his current life, why, and what his future plans are. His calm replies typically broach no follow-up and they just find it odd. As most of us do, to be honest. 

Seeing these four operate together is fantastic. They’ve each acquired new skills since leaving the army, but they remain steadfastly loyal to each other. That kind of camaraderie is something we all would like in our lives. 

Taking No Prisoners

As you can imagine, as Reacher and his team learn more and get closer to the bad guys—lead by Robert Patrick, a guy who can do smarmy with ease—there are numerous set pieces where the bad guys send out ruffians to take out Reacher and his friends. Love every one of them! It’s great to see the different fighting styles of the four former army cops as they dispatch the bad guy, but not always without injuries. 

A New Ally

Season 2 also features an NYC detective, Gaitano Russo, who initially thinks Reacher and his pals are up to no good but, ultimately, comes around to helping them. Russo is played by Dominick Lombardozzi, an actor I know from “The Wire.” The way Lombardozzi reveals what kind of cop he is and why is wonderful and is a great part of this season.

What’s Next?

I know that Reacher Season 3 has been greenlit so when it debuts, I’ll be there on Day One. Both seasons of Reacher are great and I recommend them.

In the meantime, however, I’ll be doing two things. One, I’ll revisit the two Tom Cruise movies. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know they’re not like the books, but I’ve already seen them and enjoyed both. Now I just want to rewatch in light of Ritchson’s portrayal of the character that’s more in line with the books.

And the second thing I plan on doing is the thing Lee Child wished I did twenty-eight books ago: read a Reacher novel or two. Anyone got a Top 5 they’d like to share?

When Reacher Did the Sherlock Holmes Thing, I Was Hooked

By

Scott D. Parker

It took a pair of podcast hosts and Sherlock Holmes to finally get me to watch Season 1 of Reacher. By the time I finished the first episode, I wondered why it had taken so long.

Setting the Hook

Kevin Smith and Marc Bernardin host the Fatman Beyond podcast and in the first episode of this year, Smith discusses Season 2 of Reacher. He was his usual ecstatic self when he loves something and that finally tipped the needle. Granted, when Bernardin mentioned it last year, that should have been my cue to watch because Bernardin is one of the brightest guys I listen to, and his understanding of story and structure is deep and I constantly learn when he talks.

So I tuned into episode 1 of Season 1 on Amazon Prime. All I knew about Reacher going in was a pretty short list. He was a drifter (a “hobo” as he says on the show); he was in the army but now wasn’t. He kills people. Lee Child wrote the books. And Tom Cruise played the character in two movies that I enjoyed.

Cut to an early segment in the TV show. After Reacher has been arrested and then released, he’s walking out of the police station, ready to get the hell out of dodge, when the lead detective, Oscar Finlay (Malcolm Goodwin) makes a challenge to Reacher, our hulking hobo turns around and does the Sherlock Holmes thing. He says all the things he’s learned about Finley just by observation and deduction.

My reaction? A huge grin on my face. A guy who is super smart and can kick your ass? Sold!

The Plot

As the last minute or so of any pilot episode does, the cliffhanger gives Reacher the situation where he chooses to remain in Margrave, Georgia, and help Finlay and patrol cop Roscoe Conklin (Willa Fitzgerald) figure out what’s really going on in the small town. 

I’m always a fan of stories where a seemingly small thing is actually just a single layer of a wider, larger plan by the bad guys and this season is certainly that. In fact, I actively kept processing the clues and how they relate as I watched each of the eight episodes. This was because I was curious how original author Child and the folks that adapted the first book, Killing Fields, into this season’s storyline into a coherent thread. 

And there are multiple threads. It’s all well laid out and explained a few times but as I watched the show, a fact I know about Child’s writing process returned to my mind. Unless he changed, he writes every Reacher story without an outline. He just goes and trusts his creative mind to figure it all out. If that’s how he did it, more power to him.

The Actor and the Character

Alan Ritchson plays Reacher and he’s a giant. I think he mentioned he was six, five at least one time in the season. What I found fascinating was how Ritchson could, with barely changing his face, have Reacher go from kind to determined in a heartbeat. 

His size is intimidating and I appreciated how he would give his opponents the chance to walk away. Few did, but all believed after the fight. Reacher moved with precision. It wasn’t necessarily graceful. It was quite brutal, but his fighting style was efficient. 

There were a few times in which I saw how Ritchson played Reacher and I wondered if the character was somewhere on the spectrum. When a character asked Reacher what took him so long to meet up, Reacher was direct. “I killed five men.” Indeed, as I searched for the IMDB page to verify how to spell actors’ names, one of the top searched phrases was that very same thing. So I wasn’t the only one.

But I’ve come around to thinking that, no, Reacher isn’t autistic. He just takes no BS from anyone. The direct approach was his only approach. Why bother speaking extra words with the exact number will suffice. 

I thoroughly enjoyed Season 1 of Reacher and will start Season 2 soon. What are your thoughts on Reacher?

Review: Reacher

 

By Claire Booth

Finally. After 26 books and a short (ahem) feature film career, Jack Reacher is finally getting the proper treatment. The new TV series, Reacher, premiered Friday on Amazon Prime and after watching a few episodes, I can say it has several things things going for it.

The first is arguably the most important—the physicality of the lead actor. Reacher is a huge guy. It’s not an incidental attribute to the character. As anyone who’s read one of the books knows, it’s key to everything. And the hulking actor Alan Ritchson fits. He also gets the deadpan element of Reacher’s personality: analytical but capable of cracking a joke—if he wants to.

“We were very lucky to find Alan. He nails it on every level,” Child said in an interview with Denver’s ABC 7 (he lives part time in Fort Collins).

Second, it’s a TV series and not a movie. The TV format is just better for crime fiction series. Remember the different beloved series that tried to for successful runs as movies? Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum, Sara Paretsky’s VI Warshawski, and Lee Child’s Reacher are some. Then think about the TV shows, where the characters have time to develop into an ensemble and the plots have time to twist and turn. Think Craig Johnson’s Longmire or Justified (yeah, I know that one was based on just a Elmore Leonard short story, but let’s not quibble when the end product turned out to be genius).

This season of Reacher gives us just one book (the first in the series, The Killing Floor), not an inexplicable mish-mash of several books and a resulting choppy narrative like the movies did. This isn’t to say that the show is a deep and profound look at loss or corrupt law enforcement or small town politics. It’s not. But it’s a head-butting, leg-breaking, no-middle-name good time. Just like the books.

 

Beau looks at MAKE ME

This week, Beau take a look at MAKE ME, from Andrew Grant's older brother.

Your Fight Scene Sucks, Fight Me!

By David Nemeth

When watching a movie, if I can, I'll fast forward through a fight scene, otherwise, I'll get all glassy-eyed until it is over. Don't even get me started on comic book movie fight scenes. When reading, I'll usually scan through the paragraphs of a fight scene to see if anyone happens to die and then I'll catch up with the story in its proper place. Why? Because fight scenes suck.

I probably should have said, "Most fight scenes suck because they are too long and there are usually no ramifications for the characters afterward." Characters need to get injured in their fights and these injuries need to be long lasting, not forgotten by the next chapter. Also, fight scenese are way too long. I really don't know if "way too long" even covers it. Go to Youtube and search for "street fights" and you'll see that most fights are only seconds long and usual end in some sort of grappling, fleeing, or one-punch knockouts.

What fight scenes should not be are chapter-length episodes that one might read in a typical New York Times thriller. Let's join Jack Reacher after 778 words of fighting and beating three opponents in "Night School": "By that point the clock in Reacher’s head told him the fight had been running a little over four seconds." That's almost 200 words a second! Yawn, so much yawn. And there are still five more bad guys for Reacher to take down. I'm aware that these superman characters are supposed to be all that but having a fight drag on like this is as boring as it is preposterous:

Reacher exploded at the guy and got there three inches into the bat’s forward swing, which gave him time to catch its sweet spot in the meat of his palm, and jerk it away, and add his other hand, and stab the knob of the handle at the guy’s head like a rifle butt, and connect, like a ferocious punch through a single knuckle.

James Bond is infamous for its crappy fight scenes.

# # #

But why do fight scenes suck? JD Stanley has an interesting article on this topic. Stanley breaks the problem down into three sections: No Injuries, Too Much Dialogue, and Most people aren't Rambo. Stanley also gives a few suggestions on how to make your fight scene work.

Here's a fight scene that worked, it's from JJ Hensley's "Bolt Action Remedy" (Down & Out Books).

“I’ve talked enough,” he said as he raised a fist and stepped forward to put me within striking distance. 

Snapping my left foot forward, I managed to kick a heap of snow into the larger man’s eyes. He instinctively raised his hands to his face and I took one long stride and used my right arm to deliver a solid straight punch to his diaphragm. People engaged in hand-to-hand combat often make a mistake by focusing on hitting an opponent in the head. But if you ask any experienced fighter, he’ll tell you that he’d rather take ten punches to the head than one good shot to the body. 

The human torso contains all sorts of important organs and most of them are protected by little more than thin rib bones. But most importantly, every fighter needs one very important thing to keep fighting: oxygen. If you take your opponent’s oxygen, you take your opponent. I took Mark Letterman’s oxygen and it was going to take him a while to get it back.

The fight continues a little bit afterward, but Hensley has this fight end almost a quickly as it started which is one of the reasons why it worked. The other, it was basically over with one punch. Maybe the fight lasted two seconds long which comes out to maybe 90 words a second which as a reader I appreciated–my eyes didn't have a chance to glaze over.

The other week, Hensley also had a good piece about how to write a successful action scene over at The Thrill Begins. This guy knows what he's doing.

Every time I write a fight scene, I think of the judo class I took or my first experience with boxing. Every…single…time. Each time, I can feel the leather of the headgear on my face and see the white strings dangling from the boxing gloves. Details like that make action scenes more authentic and relatable to the reader. 

Are you writing a car chase scene? I bet at some point in your life you’ve smelled rubber burning and can describe it to the reader. 

Do you have [a] character being chased down a spiral staircase? What do the echoes sound like? What does the railing look like? What does it feel like? How hard is the character breathing? How can you relate?

So please when you are writing a fight scene keep it short, keep it realistic and for god sakes have people get hurt. Otherwise, I might just tell you that your fight scene sucks. ;-)

---

I reviewed Hensley's "Bolt Action Remedy" last month over at Unlawful Acts and Hensley's latest book, "Record Scratch" (Down & Out Books) comes out in late October. 

Packing My Bags

Toronto!

By Claire Booth

I’m spending today getting ready for Bouchercon*, the world mystery convention. It’s a convention for fans of crime fiction. Of which there are a great many. And despite loving murder, mayhem, suspense, and the occasional well-crafted arson or bank robbery, these people are the nicest you’ll ever meet.

They love books, they love authors, they love each other. I went to my first when it was in Long Beach in 2014. I didn’t have a book contract then, so I was strictly a fan. Which was fantastic. I went to all sorts of panels and met all sorts of people, many of whom are now close friends. And I had a few spectacular fan girl moments.

I’ve gone in 2015 (Raleigh, North Carolina) and 2016 (New Orleans). They’re great opportunities to meet with readers in a more meaningful setting than just a few minutes at a book signing. And getting to connect with other writers is beyond great – for camaraderie, inspiration, and sometimes commiseration.

Every year seems better than the last. This year it’s Toronto. It starts Thursday. I can’t wait.

The coming years will take place in:

St. Petersburg, Florida: Sept. 6-9, 2018

Dallas, Texas: Oct. 31-Nov. 3, 2019

Sacramento, California: Oct. 15-19, 2020

So if you’re anywhere near one in the coming years, or even if you’re not, consider traveling to attend. I promise you a good time.

* Named in honor of Anthony Boucher, a long-time book critic and author who championed the crime fiction genre.

(Literary) Fight Club

By Russel D McLean

So here we go again. And before we start, let me state straight up that I am not about to pass judgement on any writer's output or value, but I am going to try and tear down an ongoing literary slanging match that is, in my opinion, becoming increasingly harmful to both sides.

For those who haven't been keeping up, it seems that bestselling thriller writer Lee Child has either made a horrific faux-pas or, worse, he genuinely believes that literary writers “know in their heart that we could write their books but they could not write our books.”

It’s the kind of quote that, even from its alleged context (a TV debate on literary vs genre, precisely the argument that's beginning to get me down) sounds childish, petulant and plain baiting.

Reading the full quote, things start out nicely. Child claims that since his and Ian McEwan’s books were released at the same time (Child's latest is 61 HOURS, Ian McEwan's is SOLAR), the media were trying to set up some kind of grudge match. Child asks “why should I be worried about Iain McEwan’s books?” which is a fair enough question. And, I assumed, was going to go down the “look, we’re aiming for two vastly different sectors of the market, like asking whether John Woo should be worried by the latest Judd Apatow flick” kind of response.

But no, he goes for the previously mentioned statement and proceeds to make crime and thriller writers sound particularly full of themselves in the worst possible way. In the same kind of way that many literary writers have sounded when claiming that thriller and crime writers don't need to work as hard at what they do and that we're all about formula.

It doesn't help that Child picked a peculiarly poor example when it came to McEwan because, let’s face facts, McEwan sells by the boatload even though his output is less frequent than Childs. McEwan also has five movies adaptions to Child’s zero. And yet Child makes the case – however indirectly – that McEwan should somehow be jealous of him?

Here are the publishers stats on Child (as reiterated across the proofs of 61 hours): one book by Child is sold in the world every second. But does this really mean anything? Do those sales make him better or more talented than McEwan?

Here’s the thing: I’m getting fed up of the literary/genre debate. From both sides. I do believe that certain literary types have stereotyped genre as being empty of brain and purpose (which is true in some cases) while some of us genre writers have come to regard literary as so much empty posturing with only the appearance of intelligence (again, true in some cases).

However, in amongst all this mud slinging we’re forgetting an important thing:

None of it matters.

No, seriously. Because we’re all in the same damn boat, us authors of fiction. Every kind of fiction is intended to have a different effect upon the audience. Hence, McEwan’s books are attempting to induce very different emotions and reactions than a Child thriller. But they share many common features, and come from a similar spring of inspiration and creation.

So why can’t the two co-exist? Literary and genre side by side, proud to be fictional?

Why do they have to be in competition at all?

And as to Child’s later assertion that why wouldn’t a starving literary writer write a “bestseller” in the vein of Child, or even just a crime novel, let me point out from experience that many crime writers are also starving and believe me, if we could hit on that magic and very lucky formula for bestsellerdom (which McEwan has as equally as Child, despite the protestations of Child) we would be doing it. Its not like we – or our literary equivalents – are saying, “Tell you what, we’re going to write an inadequate book that’s not going to sell”. Because all writing is about connecting with an audience, and the widest audience possible. Yes, literary writers may talk less about money and audience and more about art and theme, but when you think about what sales mean you’re connecting with an audience, so money and connection to readers are concepts which have to be linked.

I’m speaking here as a man more likely to pick up a crime thriller than a literary novel, but that’s not to say that literary novels are all without merit or that all crime novels are brilliant (in fact there are many, many shitty crime novels and some translucently wondrous literary novels as well as brilliance in nearly all genres). I think – I believe – that a good book is a good book, and one that connects with an audience will do so no matter who has written it or for what reason. Maybe I’m naïve, but I honestly wish any writer – yes, even James Patterson and Dan Brown – well in what they do because, even if I don’t approve of it, clearly their work is connecting with someone somewhere. And, frankly, getting bogged down in genre wars, in macho-bullshit posturing over whose work is more important or enduring, over whether or not a literary novel could be “written in three weeks” or any number of these petty arguments, distracts us from what’s really important: writing books for readers like ourselves, books that connect with readers, that slip into people's lives, that make them say, for whatever reason, "I am glad to have read that".

In the end, it doesn’t matter what you write. Or even how big your audience is. If we all wrote the same kind of books, then the world, believe me, would be a poorer place.