How Jack Reacher Was Formed To Combat This Detective Trope

If you've been reading No Film School long enough, you know I am a massive Jack Reacher fan. The show (and the movies) scratches an itch for just a rogue guy out there trying to do what's right, with any means necessary.

It's a simple look at right and wrong that I think activates a part of our brain that wants the world to be simpler, and finds moral fortitude and ultimate justice.

I could wax poetic about how much I love the character, and that's why I always give props to the author behind him, Lee Child.

In a recent interview with The New York Times, Lee Child discussed how the character of Jack Reacher was inspired by a common detective trope, and I wanted to explore this further.

Let's dive in.

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Jack Reacher Is A New Kind of Detective

If you want a character to be memorable, they need to stand out and be different than what people expect. They need to feel original and lived-in.

And that's what Child set out to do when he was formulating who Reacher is and building into who he would become inside his books.

This was a guy who had to stand out from other detective novels.

Child told The New York Times, "The detective was an alcoholic," and then he continued, "which was great the first time out, a real issue, real characterization. But then the next guy is a divorced alcoholic. Then a divorced alcoholic whose teenage daughter hates him. Then, a divorced alcoholic whose teenage daughter hates him, and he's accidentally shot a kid in the dark, so he has to go and live in a cabin in the woods for the rest of his life."

In order to combat this, Child worked Reacher to be "much more of an old-fashioned guy."

At Reacher's core was something different than every other character Child was reading.

He said, "I wanted to get rid of misery because, ultimately, nobody likes miserable people."

Lessons For Writers

Child's approach is a direct and actionable lesson in character creation.

As writers and filmmakers, we are often told to "add conflict," and many interpret that as piling on misery onto our leads. So we'll go create traumatic backstories in order to provide reasons for our characters to act.

But Child’s success proves there is another way.

Your takeaway? Analyze the tropes in your genre and find a new angle. Subverting a trope doesn't mean you can't have conflict; it just means the conflict won't come from the same, tired places.

The conflict in Reacher is not "Will he overcome his alcoholism to solve the case?" The conflict is, "Reacher wants to be left alone, but the world is full of bad people who won't let him."

This is such a fun way to give us a hero, a guy who wants to be on the move but stops when he sees something bad happening and knows someone needs his help.

Child didn't set out to write a "miserable person." He set out to write a character people would want to be. And they want to be him so badly that they followed him across books, movies, and a TV show, making him one of the most popular characters of all time.

Summing It All Up

The key to Jack Reacher's iconic status is a brilliant act of subversion. Lee Child saw a genre saturated with heroes defined by their trauma and decided to build one defined by his capability.

that not only defined Jack Reacher on the page, but also on the screen.

Let me know what you think in the comments.