Jack Reacher is a fictional character and the protagonist of a series of crime thriller novels by British author Lee Child. After leaving the US Army as a major in its military police at age 36, Reacher roams the United States taking odd jobs and investigating suspicious and frequently dangerous situations. As of 5 November 2018, 23 novels have been published, the most recent being Past Tense. The character has also appeared in short stories, and two of the novels have been adapted into successful films, starring Tom Cruise as Reacher.
Development and author 's commentary
Development
At the time Lee Child sat down to write his first novel Killing Floor, he was unemployed, having been fired from his position as a presentation director for Granada Television. According to Child, authorship was a purely pragmatic decision: "I wasn't one of these people that felt compelled to write. It had to keep a roof over our heads, so it was totally, totally 110% commercially motivated."Critics have perceived other influences in Jack Reacher's creation. Bob Cornwell quotes Lee Child 's reply in another interview as having created Reacher "as an antidote, to all the depressed and miserable alcoholics that increasingly peopled the genre". Similarly, editor Otto Penzler published an essay by Child explaining that Jack Reacher was created deliberately in contrast to the prevailing trends in crime fiction. His name is short and commonplace, as opposed to quirky or unusual; Reacher's personal ethics and wandering lifestyle are reminiscent of the chivalrous knight errant of medieval lore as opposed to an anti- hero tormented by addiction and haunted by past misbehavior.The character 's name first came to Child in a supermarket when an old lady, noting the span of Child 's arms, asked for his help in reaching out to a can of pears.
