Book Review: The Hard Way by Lee Child

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The Hard Way is the quintessential Jack Reacher novel. When it was first published back in 2006, it was the tenth novel by Lee Child to feature the American ex-military policeman turned drifter and modern-day ‘knight errant’. Child’s publishing schedule had become as regular as Reacher’s inner clock (he has an uncanny knack for mentally keeping track of the passing of time even without a watch).

Every year on 1 September, Child – formerly Jim Grant, a Coventry-born and Birmingham-raised lad who worked in Manchester, England for Granada TV for the best part of 20 years before being made redundant in the mid-1990s – would sit down and start writing a new novel featuring Jack Reacher. Every year, without fail (to use the title of another Reacher adventure), a new Lee Child tome would hit, and dominate, the bestseller lists.

The Hard Way has all of the virtues of a classic Lee Child novel, so it seems like the ideal Jack Reacher book to review here. It is, in every sense of the word, exemplary: as a page-turner, as a satisfying thriller containing ‘lots of fisticuffs’ (in Frederick Forsyth’s endorsement) and a nail-biting denouement, and as a mystery novel.

This last one is often overlooked when people are discussing Lee Child’s fiction. But The Hard Way is a reminder that, at his best, Child is a fine craftsman of a good old-fashioned mystery.

The plot of The Hard Way is easy enough to summarise, though I’ll limit myself to the earlier portions of the book so I don’t give away any spoilers. Jack Reacher is in New York when he is approached by a man who has learnt that Reacher witnessed an important event the day before. Within a few chapters the situation has become clear: the wife and stepdaughter of Edward Lane, a former military man who now does freelance ‘work’ for whoever pays him, have been kidnapped. Lane is complying with the kidnappers’ ransom demands, but he wants to track down those responsible and deal with them. No police are to be involved.

But Reacher is quickly hired to discover the identities of the kidnappers, retrieve Lane’s wife and stepchild, and tell Lane where he can find the guilty parties. What adds an extra layer of tension to this fairly straightforward setup is the character of Lane himself: Reacher is sure there’s something ‘off’ about him, and he proceeds cautiously as he (half-)joins Lane’s group of raggle-taggle ex-military hardmen. As this is Lee Child, we know there will be further twists and revelations to come, and we’re not disappointed.

Without giving away too much about what happens later in the novel, the action shifts from downtown Manhattan to the quiet farmland of East Anglia, in rural England, as Reacher goes in search of the truth. After the first few days, the wife and stepdaughter are presumed dead, but are they really? Who was behind the kidnapping, and was their motive purely mercenary? Did they have a score to settle with the unscrupulous Lane?

These questions are exactly the sort of questions Reacher asks, and a Jack Reacher novel is powered forwards by such questions. Indeed, in numerous interviews, Lee Child has said that the secret to creating ‘suspense’ in a thriller is to ask a question and then refuse to answer it for several pages (or chapters – or even, in the case of some questions, until the very end of the book).

If there are two minor weaknesses in The Hard Way, they are Child’s occasional over-reliance on such tricks to keep the reader engaged. If a thriller writer ends too many chapters with a shock revelation or an enticing question, the reader starts to feel the hand of the author turning the pages of the book before him, and the illusion, the fictional universe in which the novel’s action takes place, comes under threat. It’s a weakness which also occasionally mars the next novel, Bad Luck and Trouble. It’s not that these are rendered ‘bad’ novels as a result, but rather that Child is such a good plotter that his books don’t require quite such hefty signposting and use of cliffhangers at every turn.

The same goes for the other small personal gripe I had with The Hard Way, which was the title itself – or rather, not the title as such but Child’s habit of trying to crowbar it into the characters’ dialogue as many times as he could. I counted at least half a dozen heavy-handed interpellations, and they served to draw attention to the novel a little too self-consciously. Once again, these details aren’t necessary in a page-turning popular thriller that’s plotted so well.

Child is pretty good at delineating character using minimal detail, too. In the first Reacher novel, Killing Floor, one early scene in which Reacher is being held in the local jail at Margrave is marred by a rather over-the-top homage to Sherlock Holmes. By the time he wrote The Hard Way a decade later, Child had learnt how to make Reacher’s ‘Sherlockian’ deductions his own, making them a part of the character’s military training and forensic eye for detail during his former career as an MP (military policeman).

What’s also rather satisfying in The Hard Way is that after Reacher has outlined his deductions to Lane about where the bad guys are most likely hiding out, Child’s third-person narrator intervenes with the devastatingly laconic revelation: ‘But Reacher was completely wrong.’ After allowing us to marvel at the character’s ability to draw conclusions from the tiniest details, Child then pulls the rug out from under us and reminds us that Reacher isn’t perfect.

Of course, we trust that he’ll get his guy in the end and justice will be served. But who really is the bad guy in this novel? That is another question we are encouraged to ask, but the answer will not reveal itself until later in the book.

In a book like The Hard Way, the journey is the real fun of the thing, and this novel is one of the most papyrotropic of all of the Reacher page-turners. Child has always said the newcomer to his books can start with any one of them, as they’re standalone adventures. This one would get my vote.