Thu 15 Apr 2010
LEE CHILD – One Shot. Delacorte, hardcover, June 2005. Reprint paperback: Dell, March 2006. Deluxe paperback: Dell, October 2009.
I’m not sure what the correct terminology is to describe the new size that publishers have dreamed up to sell their wares in paperback over the past couple of years or so.
Taller and usually thicker than the standard mass market size, but not wider, the primary purpose is to be able to charge two or three dollars more. Some books come out in softcover only in this size, others like One Shot, are repackaging jobs.
They fooled me, just like I’m sure they hoped they would. I thought this was a new book, and here it is, almost five years old. No matter, I suppose, as I don’t seem to have obtained it when it first came out in hardcover or regular-sized paperback, and at 466 pages of relatively small print, I think at $9.99, I got my money’s worth.
This is a Jack Reacher novel, the ninth out of fourteen, and the first I’ve read. Reacher, from all accounts, is very popular, and I can see why. A drifter and a loner and a fighter for justice (as he sees it) at 6 foot 5 and around 250 pounds, he’s quite a force to be reckoned with, if he’s not on your side.
He’s a former military policeman (13 years), but he’s been out of the service and on the road for some time already by the time One Shot starts. A crazed gunman has killed five people in a small Indiana city, and when captured, he asks for Reacher from his hospital bed. Only thing is, Reacher is already on his way there, so if of the other side needs any help.
Seems like the guy has done this sort of thing before, only it was hushed up, and Reacher wants to make sure he’s wrapped up as tight as he can be, so it won’t happen again.
Only thing is, the details are wrong. Tiny ones at first, then small ones, and as time goes on, the wronger they get. Lee Child knows how to structure a story, there is no doubt it. I dare you to read this and take your time about it.
The other only thing is, if you forgive me for this, the longer the story goes on, the less and less likely it gets. You may have guessed that someone and/or something else is behind the killings, and your guess would be correct.
That such a complicated scheme — and yes indeed, it is complicated — why else would 466 pages of relatively small print be needed? — would be put together for such a relatively matter (although I am not a crazed gunman, or anything close to one — I hope) is beyond anything resembling a normal state of affairs, or very nearly so.
Reacher is awfully likable as a hero, though — larger than life, you might say — even though the ending is (in comparison to the rest of the book) fairly perfunctory, falling back on (foolish) bravado and extended gunplay as it does, and Reacher himself rides off into the sunset far too quickly for my own satisfaction.
Will I read another? I’m sure I will.
April 15th, 2010 at 11:12 pm
Better you than me, Steve. I read two Lee Child novel’s and threw them across the room in disgust. Reacher is, at best, a phony rehash of Travis McGee, and Child’s knowledge of the States seems all copped from American television series and worse is sloppily done (in one book he gives Dallas a military base — which it doesn’t have, and has never had — Dallas Naval Air Station is not a base — even the one in Ft. Worth, Travis, is closed now — a fact the simplest of research could have told him). He also describes Dallas/Fort Worth airport as little more than a small airport when it is one of the largest hubs in the country.
He goes on endlessly and tiresomely about guns (note to Mr. Child’s, no one who has ever been shot at is contemptuous of smaller caliber weapons — and by the by a .38 and a 9mm are virtually the same size bullet), his hero is supposedly an ex-military policeman of some skill yet doesn’t know the first thing about the simplest of investigative techniques that the newest rookie would know, and most of the villains are caged from John D. MacDonald Travis McGee novels — and with little variation in the two I read.
In one book he used the word ‘guy’ thirty times in a single chapter — an affectation of false Americanism that makes James Hadley Chase and Peter Cheyney look authentic. At least they were fun.
And his plots … In one book Reacher is hired to try and kill the Vice President as part of a Secret Service training exercise! Sorry, but you have to use some common sense in coming up with a plot even if you are planning on your hero stumbling on lost Atlantis.
Did I mention I didn’t like these? Hope I wasn’t being too obscure.
As for those new format paperbacks, a friend described them best. Not the right size to fit with his regular paperbacks and not well enough made or attractive enough to fit with his trade paperbacks. As for being easier to read — for who? I have large hands and they are awkward for me — I can imagine what they are like for anyone with small hands. About the only thing they have accomplished is some of the particularly thick novels can be read without breaking in two at the spine.
But they are perfect for Child’s books. Awkward and not really the real thing.
April 16th, 2010 at 12:33 am
Hmm, I don’t know. I see tendencies in ONE SHOT toward all of Child’s weaknesses, let’s call them, but going back and reading my review again, I see that I limited my complaints to false bravado and excessive gunplay. True enough, but there was a small bit of actual detective work that was done, just to spice things up.
More problematic was the overly complicated scheme by the Bad Guys. It was way over the top, that’s for sure, and there’s no getting around that. And yet, even so, there wasn’t anything in any of the above that might have made me to throw the book across the room, not even close.
You and I usually agree on books and authors. Maybe ONE SHOT is one of his more coherent ones, and I dodged a bullet.
— Steve
PS. Agreed on these super-sized paperbacks, but to read some books, they can’t be avoided. Well, I could go to the library and take out the hardcover, but since I have more books than the library, I seldom do that.
They’re the wrong size, they’re awkward, and they don’t feel right in my hands either, and if they’re made with thick paper, you can’t keep them open to read without cracking the spines.
So some I buy and some I don’t, but I never pay list price, even if I suggest that I did in my comments above. I wait until Borders sends me an email coupon, which they do every week, or even better, I hold off until Educators Week, when everything is 30% off.
Makes the $9.99 price a whole lot easier to swallow.
April 16th, 2010 at 7:19 am
I agree about the new format paperbacks — if you want to read some books in paperback they are your only option. But whoever designed them isn’t a reader. The are the literary equivalent of NEW COKE.
It’s certainly possible Child wrote a better than usual book than the two I read. My biggest complaint was that he lifted so much from John D. MacDonald and McGee without getting it right, and that I didn’t for one instant believe in Reacher.
Child is a British television writer and the books read to me like a British television version of America.
I have no problem with elaborate plots but I expect them to be well worked out and plausible within the context of the book. I’m generally willing to give writers a lot of leeway if they make an effort. But Child is sloppy, and worse he doesn’t seem willing to make the small effort.
The gun thing is a small example. It doesn’t take a lot of research to find out about guns if — like Child — you are going to have your hero ranting about them as part of your plot. That’s why I gave Ian Fleming a pass about James Bond’s Beretta but didn’t give Donald Hamilton one.
Fleming never went off on diatribes about hand guns so if he made a mistake no big deal, but Hamilton frequently did make guns in general one of Matt Helm’s pet peeves so when he made obvious mistakes that even I was aware of it hurt my enjoyment of the novel (it was THE BETRAYERS for anyone interested — Helm gives a Luger to an amateur with no experience and takes the .22 for himself — which is the same as giving a pre school child an erector set to build while you play with Leggos).
It would have taken Child’s all of five minutes to get the details about guns and Dallas right. It would have taken a little more time, but not much more, to find out how an actual private detective searches for someone. Child didn’t bother in the first book I read. The second one was the idiotic plot about the Secret Service seeking out fugitive Reacher (not a wanted criminal, but he’s had dropped off the radar so to speak) and hiring him to participate in a security test involving an attempted assassination of the Vice President. I wouldn’t buy that one as an episode of THE A TEAM much less a novel.
Ted Bell’s Alex Hawke books can be hilariously off with his British hero (the scene where he goes in a pub in top hat and tails is hilarious), but they are written tongue in cheek and with a wink of the eye, and even when he has his hero drive from Gibralter to Cannes in two hours you just sort of shake your head and smile. But Child is trying for a more realistic style of tale and gets much less leeway because of it. If your hero is seeking lost Atlantis I’m likely to give you more leeway than if he is looking for a missing woman.
But, at least, unlike a Brad Thor I tried to read, he didn’t have a midget terrorist jump on a giant dog and ride away like Jerome Troh’s, the shyster lawyer from DICK TRACY. Readers enjoy a vivid imagination, and love audacity in a writer, but we do require that you have the skill and talent to pull if off.
If Child has improved I apologize to him, but he lost me early on, and I just didn’t feel the need to try again.
April 16th, 2010 at 12:55 pm
Never read any of his books, but I googled him and in several newspaper articles he is quoted as being one the biggest selling authors in America. He is married to an American, and has spent some time in the USA. It’s not really the same as being a naturalised American (I always take a special pleasure in looking at US TV series/Books taking place in the UK, and noting all of the little mistakes. I’m not really sneering. As a would-be writer, I’m aware of the mistakes that I’ve made when placing a story in another culture). Apparently Childs has made enough to endow a British University with £100,000 for 50 or so ‘Jack Reacher’ scholarships. The mind boggles!
April 16th, 2010 at 1:22 pm
ONE SHOT takes place in a medium-small city in the Midwest — Indiana, I believe. The details felt right, and I had no difficulty finding myself pretty much at home there.
April 16th, 2010 at 2:17 pm
In my previous comment, I wrote a second paragraph along the lines of, if you don’t live there yourself, maybe it’s easier to write stories taking place in small cities and towns than in larger ones, but I deleted it.
Mostly because I don’t think that’s true. Small towns have a flavor and atmosphere all their own, just the same as big cities do, and getting it right can’t be all that easy.
But if Childs has trouble getting details of a Dallas-sized city right, maybe he got them right in ONE SHOT because I don’t believe the town that it takes place in was actually named. It was made up. The essence was there, but there weren’t any details to get wrong.
As for his other books, Childs is not the only one who gets details of real cities wrong, and that he’s British may not have all that much to do with it.
I remember an Emma Lathen book, for example, one of her John Putnam Thatcher mysteries, that took place in Detroit, and since I lived in Ann Arbor at the time, I knew enough about the city down the road to cringe with all of the errors that I found in it.
Streets that intersected instead of being parallel to each other, landmark building misidentified or located wrongly, and so on. Not a long list, but long enough to all but give up on the book, whether it was a good mystery or not. (And that I don’t remember.)
April 16th, 2010 at 11:14 pm
Understand I don’t mind if a writer gets a street wrong — Dumas has a street in THE THREE MUSKETEERS named for one of Napoleon’s marshals — and he certainly knew Paris. For that matter Doyle has the trains out of Victoria Station running the wrong direction.
But DFW is one of the major hub airports in the nation — an entry point for international flights — and notoriously large and hard to get around in. So when Child gets that wrong it really cuts into my enjoyment of the book, a bit as if a modern writer called JFK by it’s original name or didn’t know which street the White House was on.
Elizabeth George and Martha Grimes both seem to do a good job with the British settings of their books as did John Dickson Carr, and Leslie Charteris did quite well with books and stories set in New York, Galveston, the Southwest, and Palm Springs, so did John Creasey and Georges Simenon.
The gun thing was a bit more disturbing because Child made it a particular diatribe of his hero’s and chose the wrong gun to rant about. When you choose to make a stand on a subject you owe it to readers and yourself to get it right. Otherwise you sound like a poseur and inauthentic. With a character like Reacher an awful lot depends on the readers identification with and acceptance of the hero. When he proves to be full of absolute twaddle it certainly hurts the mood.
But I admit I would probably forgiven all that if I bought Reacher as a character for one moment. But for me he is all exterior — there’s no interior man. There is nothing that I could hook onto or enjoy. I didn’t buy his story, his character, or his motivation.
Child is hugely successful, and readers love his books and Reacher. That’s fine, readers love Jackie Collins too, and I find her unreadable and could never finish a Sidney Sheldon novel despite liking many of the films he wrote. There are plenty of bad writers I admit to liking, and some good ones I don’t care for — it’s all very subjective, but in Child’s case there were some very real reasons I didn’t care for his book or Reacher, and I’m afraid once burnt twice shy.
For that matter there is a huge selling author, who I will not name, who has stolen plots and characters from other writers and films for years — and not that subtly. He’s a good writer, but I don’t read him anymore because he never even acknowledged his borrowings. Not inspiration, but outright stolen plots. It doesn’t bother others, and the way he does it and who he chooses to borrow from protects him from plagiarism charges, but again it puts me off. It’s strictly personal.
Child hasn’t stolen anything that I know of, but he as ‘borrowed’ much from MacDonald and Travis McGee, which is fine — I’ve no problem with inspiration, homage, or pastiche — but he doesn’t do it very well, which I do hold against him. it boils down to this, neither Reacher or his adventures work for me as a reader — which is the ultimate reason not to read a book.
April 17th, 2010 at 2:50 pm
It’s slightly off-topic, but I remember reading Dennis Wheatley warning authors not to write about things that they had not researched properly. He said that his publishers had given him a first-time novel to comment upon. After carefully perusing it, he wrote back with his opinions. One of his comments was about the hero’s drinking habits. At one point in the story, he goes to his club and orders a magnum of champagne. Downing it within a few minutes, he then sets off to rescue the heroine from the villains. Wheatley suggested that the hero might like to stop at the hospital and get his stomach pumped first, as a magnum is equivalent to two full bottles of champagne…
April 18th, 2010 at 7:24 am
Bradstreet
You hit on a good point. I think most of us give writers a lot of leeway, but something like that Wheatley anecdote is exactly the sort of thing that can ruin a book. I’m not talking about getting a street wrong (of all things quite a few people were upset by Dan Brown getting a street in Paris wrong in THE DA VINCI CODE), but something like not knowing what a magnum of champagne is, or that example I gave of Ted Bell having his hero drive from Gibralter to Cannes in two hours — a distance of close to a thousand miles and the Spanish Corniche not exactly the Autobahn. Hell, the trip from Gibralter to Spain by ferry is going to eat up a chunk of two hours — one wonders if Mr. Bell is under the illusion there is a bridge. Once you reach France you are still two hours from Cannes.
Edgar Rice Burroughs had a tiger in Africa in the original TARZAN OF THE APES and in GEORGES Alexandre Dumas hero encounters a deadly African rattlesnake, but those things can be overlooked if the work is as entertaining as those are — but if you have a problem with a book, as I did with Child’s two books I didn’t have enough good will to give him that pass for his mistakes.
I seldom pay any attention if a writer gets some minor detail of a gun wrong unless his plot turns on ballistics or he goes off on a rant about something he obviously doesn’t know about, but when say Donald Hamilton lectures me in book after book about guns and then gets a simple matter wrong about two popular handguns I notice. In mystery and thriller fiction you need to research the things you are going to deal with. Then if you make an honest mistake no big deal, at least you tried,
In CARNAL HOURS Max Allan Collins takes on the Sir Harry Oakes murder, and does his usual fine job of research — but he has Ian Fleming as a character in the book and has him talking like a stage Englsihman, dropping “old boy” and “old man” every other word — when any reader of Fleming could have told him that in FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE Fleming writes a memorable passage on how much he and Bond loathe the type of Englishman who specifically tosses “old boy” and “old man” around like that. There are plenty of interviews of Fleming around in print and on radio and television to have gotten his speech pattern right. It doesn’t hurt the book for most people, and shouldn’t, but it did for me a bit. And Collins and his Nate Heller books are among my favorites.
I guess though if something doesn’t bother you it doesn’t bother you, and there are some great writers with some real bombs out there, from Fleming calling Bond’s knees his “Achilles heel” to Ross Macdonald’s unfortunate “prone on his face.” But I can forgive that and yet I’m not as willing to forgive Child because frankly Jack Reacher leaves me cold as a not very believable Travis McGee wanna-be. At least Peter Cheyney’s Lemme Caution was funny.
April 18th, 2010 at 1:40 pm
It’s not really fair, but I guess that we do give some authors and some genres more leeway than others. No-one is really bothered if Tarzan’s Africa is a fantasy, because it’s a fantasy that we love, and I’m willing to bet that Burrough’s fantasy continent is more real to a lot of readers and viewers than the actual place.
Writers like Frederic Forsyth have upped the bar as regards realism in thrillers. If your lead character starts writing about the CIA, or the drugs trade, or which hand gun is more lethal, then the reader should feel that they are getting genuine information. I don’t suppose that it should matter, but it does, and when the author starts making mistakes about something that you know about… The more that you can convince the reader about the little things, the more likely they are to accept the whoppers that you are going to tell them later on!
I know what you mean about the Collins book. I’ve seen Arthur Conan Doyle played as a bluff Englishman, whereas all of the surviving recordings of him show a man with a marked Scots accent. I still remember Peter Cushing talk about how he played Baron Frankenstein: “Only one person in the audience might know if I do a brain operation incorrectly, but it will spoil the film for them, so I take the trouble to find out the correct way for that viewer.”
August 30th, 2010 at 9:27 am
I’m reading this right now (it was a freebie promotion for the Nook) and I am thoroughly enjoying it. I don’t normally read police/detective/thrillers. I really don’t know much about police work or the military or weapons, so I just let myself become totally immersed in the novel. I can understand how mistakes in detail can really wreck a story though–I remember this one movie where the guy was given this supposedly brilliant computer code, and they showed it on the screen and it was just gibberish along with simple stuff like a = 4.
There are some minor irritations in One Shot for me though–like how they keep calling the guy “puppet master”–that just seems a bit silly to me, or how he keeps referring to the place as a “heartland” city. I don’t know, do people in the midwest keep saying to themselves, “hey, I’m in the heartland!”
But overall I really enjoy his writing style. It’s pretty good prose. I like how he notices things like when barbers hold the mirror behind your head for approval, and how doors make that suction sound when you open it and it breaks the seal with the weatherstripping.
November 4th, 2011 at 6:45 pm
Sir
Gone Tomorrow
61 hours
I have read many of his novels but when I came to read the two mentioned above, I became a bit concerned. I read his books as they are easy to read, no deep thought process being necessary and are entertaining. Although up until this point they seemed extremely violent, but harmless, I found that in the two books above, he seems to have had a problem with Afghans. In the first book he talks about how cruel they are as a people and that they torture their enemies, in many cases peeling their skin for hours and hours. In the second book he again mentions them, in relationship to an American captain who is wanted for the murder of his wife, and was selling/ giving secrets/ aid to the Afghans. He described this man as probably being seduced by the bull, and having been used. Obviously I cannot put his words down per see as it comes under copy right. The gist of what he said made the Afghans out to be a highly organised war mongering, secret stealing murderers. He seems to have a serious problem with them, maybe it is something personal. With this latter of the two books it has caused my loss of interest, as the reference he made had very little if anything to do with the actual plot, and would not in the least be missed. Like the character in his books I managed to spend many years in the military, twenty to be exact, this included working with the US at various times, whom I know first hand have had governments along with other western countries that try to brainwash them, even down to only permitting their own radio broadcasts to be heard in their overseas camps. (The camps I refer to were actually in the UK, their so called “special friendâ€, not in Russia or Korea.) If he studies the history of the average Afghan, he will find a people who have been abused by various countries, including UK, US and Russia to name but three, for hundreds and hundreds of years, most recently by the US and UK, who have managed to kill many more innocent Afghans, than so called terrorists. You may, trace it back through books, and /or the internet. I do not for one minute condone the giving of secrets to foreign governments, unlike many western government that pay for and steal secrets from one another all the time. It is a real pity that these governments are not half as loyal to their citizens, especially their military, who give their lives unquestionably to a government who’s only interest seems to be in getting more power, destroying everyone who disagrees with them, and making themselves and their friends richer than is humanly necessary. I do not think he realizes the effect that this can have on people, especially those who are easily influenced, and who are capable of becoming aggressive towards people who have done absolutely nothing to them or their country. I find this very strange considering the programs you used to be involved with, i.e. Prime suspect and Cracker.
Michael Evans
August 7th, 2012 at 3:06 am
To add to all the discrepancies mentioned above, to me as Russian speaker the descriptions of the Russians were weird. The Russian language mentioned in several places didn’t have any connection to real Russian, the bad guys’ names were names of American Jews originating from Russia, not of ethnic Russians (there is a difference). The scene where the Zeck character thinks of his Stalingrad-battle experience was totally lifted from the movie ‘Enemy at the Gate’, without any connection to how things actually were in reality. Plus, Reacher is supposed to know French, not Russian, then how did he know what ‘Zeck’ and ‘Chelovek’ mean?
This is a small thing and I don’t expect someone who is not Russian to be correct in all details, but because of this and all the other mentioned points I found this to be the weakest Reacher book out of the six I read so far.
May 13th, 2019 at 4:58 pm
Did anyone else find some of the shot distances in ‘One Shot’ to be weird? Barr supposedly takes his 6 from a range of 35 yards. The better position that Reacher finds is 70 yards away. Why in the world would anyone be using a sniper rifle for a target that close? Later in the book, there’s a statement about how easy it is to hit a bird flying across your field of view at 100 yards. I have to wonder if Mr. Child has ever hunted birds. When I read the bit about 35 yards, I first thought it was a typo. But then I read the 70 yard part and the crazy comment about hitting a bird at 100 yards, and I started to lose some of my enjoyment. I’ve shot most of my life, and it wouldn’t be hard for anyone to do a modicum of research to determine realistic ranges for such critical parts of the plot. Am I the only one who noticed this???
May 13th, 2019 at 9:15 pm
Stuff like that really takes a reader out of a story, doesn’t it?