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Posted in: Amazon Studios, Books, Pop Culture, Review, TV | Tagged: Andrew Child, crime fiction, jack reacher, lee child, Prime, Reacher, short stories
Safe Enough: Reacher Author Lee Child Delivers Bite-Sized Thrills
Reacher author Lee Child's collection of stand-alone crime stories offers bite-sized thrills that explore various styles and themes.
Reacher creator Lee Child has published his first solo book for nearly five years, Safe Enough: Crime Stories, the first collection of his standalone crime stories he wrote every now and then between writing the Jack Reacher novels over the years. Let's get this out of the way: Jack Reacher is in none of these twenty stories. Even if you were only here for Reacher, stick around – there might still be some fun treats for you.
Reacher-less Lee Child is Still Lots of Fun
Safe Enough features crime stories because that is what Child has based his writing career on. He's not going to write a bodice-ripping period romance anytime soon, nor is he going to write a drama about a middle-class office worker going through a midlife crisis unless it involves crime and murder. No, his entire career took off due to the Jack Reacher novels selling. He was invited to write short stories for crime anthologies on the strength of the Reacher books. Child admits in his introduction that he often weighed up the pros and cons of writing a new Reacher book because he knew it would sell versus a short story that wouldn't pay that much and not that many people would read, but he came to enjoy writing stories as palette cleansers and occasionally to test out ideas and writing techniques he would later bring to the novels.
Copyright: Brooke Palmer
Thus, you get a story about a professional bodyguard whose new client turns out to be something unexpected and changes his life forever, a rookie cop finds connections between old crimes that everyone else has missed or ignored, a hit man for a drug cartel realizes he may have skimmed a bit too much to go unnoticed by his bosses, another hitman plays all sides to get more money, and there are stories featuring CIA agents, military operators, Feds, gangsters. Some of these characters might have ended up as allies or bad guys in a Reacher novel. The bad ones, major or minor, would have a 100% chance of getting violently killed by Reacher if they showed up in his books. And Reacher wouldn't have batted an eyelash either. He would have just continued his merry way. To kill more bad guys. Has anyone noticed that with his body count spread over 30 books and still rising, Reacher might be the most prolific killer in American pop culture?
Following Hardboiled Crime Tradition
It might be useful to note that Lee Child grew up on and then worked in British television at a time when crime and horror anthology TV series were a regular fixture there. Series like Tales of the Unexpected, Thriller, Scorpion Tales, Mystery and Imagination, and many more were shows kids and people grew up with since the 1960s. Each episode of those anthology series followed a simple structure: set up the situation for the main characters to deal with, ramp up the suspense of how they'll do it or if they can get out of danger, then end with a twist. The stories in Safe Enough follow that dynamic. Unlike the Reacher novels, they're bite-sized chunks and vignettes and are over just before a bigger story might unfold because that's the nature of short stories. In the Reacher novels, Child always knew how to start a plot with an engine that kept escalating the conflict for Reacher to have to untangle. The stories share Child's terse, economical prose style to get the point across with as little fuss as possible, with a smidge of dry humour here and there along the way. Without the pressure of a franchise, you can tell Child had fun writing these stories – and that fun proves infectious in all of the right ways.
Safe Enough: Crime Stories is now available, while Andrew Child's next Reacher novel, In Too Deep, will be released in November. Reacher Season 3 will premiere on Prime in 2025.
Safe Enough: Crime Stories
8/10
Jack Reacher creator Lee Child's collection of standalone crime stories offer fun, bite-sized stories without the need to feature his hero - as he experimented with ideas, characters and techniques he could use in his later works, offering a fascinating selection of crime and thriller stories.
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