What is it that pushes some novels to the top of the commercial bestseller lists while other books wallow in low bestseller rankings? What makes a blockbuster? great writing? Maybe not.

A while ago I posted a blog, curtain down, in which I speculated on when and why the author of a thriller series should end it and end it. In the article, I mentioned that the writer, Lee Child, was about to publish his 22nd Jack Reacher novel, Midnight line. Well, that’s history and #23, Last, will be available in November 2018; Great news for Lee Child, his publisher, and Jack Reacher fans around the world.

After writing the article, it occurred to me that I had never read a Jack Reacher novel. And since Lee Child is a world-class novelist, with his Jack Reacher Series a worldwide bestseller, I decided it was time to correct that anomaly and find out what all the fuss was about. I’d join the crowd and get some Jack Reacher read to me.

I headed downtown Chiang Mai to The Lost Book Shop, my favorite bookstore, and bought five Jack Reacher paperbacks: Killing Floor, The Hard Way, One Shot, Bad Luck and Trouble Y do me Second hand, they were cheap but in good condition. Back home, I got into them.

i started with killing floor, the first of the series. Written in the first person, the story was solid and quite exciting. But, like many of today’s novels, I found her bloated and overweight. My edition weighed 525 pages. I think that a good comprehensive edition would have reduced it to 350 or even less and would have produced a more compact and much more dynamic book.

the next was the hard way followed by bad luck and trouble. Both were disappointing and, in my opinion, poorly written and edited and horribly scored. Written in the third person, I was struck by its banality. I found the staccato narrative awkward and full of redundant sentences and too much description of people and places. Many sentences lack verbs. And for me the abundance of one-word sentences and even one-word paragraphs was painful. If you had sent this material to an agent, you would no doubt have received an immediate rejection notice. then I read make me and I felt the same. she had started reading deadly shoot when i picked up a copy of Staff what, like killing floorIt is written in the 1st person. It was good and I enjoyed it up to a point. i never went back to deadly shoot. And I stopped reading Lee Child.

Thinking about it, it seems that the series has been written by two different writers. And in a way that is true. In the third-person novels, Lee Child tells the story. In the first-person stories, there are six, Child hands Jack Reacher the pen. And Reacher delivers the best book.

Writing in the first person allows the writer to have their hands free, the opportunity to free themselves from many grammatical and syntactical constraints, and speak as they feel through their narrator, as Mark Twain did with Huckleberry Finn. The language can be crude or elegant. The narrator can be a gentle Dr. Jekyll or a brutal Mr. Hyde. The character of the protagonist is revealed through the narrative tone. And naturally, Jack Reacher, the loner, the rugged individualistic drifter, couldn’t care less about the niceties of English grammar and fine prose as he tells his story. Right?

This freedom, I think, is one of the reasons many writers choose to write in the first person. Third-person narration is a more difficult setting with law and order and rules of engagement that the omniscient narrator must adhere to or face the consequences. Some writers can switch and write well on both. Based on the evidence, Child is not one of them. Lee Child is a freewheeling writer who has completely rejected the discipline of grammatical rules and guidelines. I think he should have stayed in first person for the entire series. And that way he could have blamed Jack Reacher for any crude and vulgar anomaly.

The old advice “show, don’t tell” is good advice. “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the flash of light on broken glass.” (Chekhov). It was the core of Hemingway’s ‘skip iceberg theory’. I think it also reveals a writer’s respect for his reader. Of course, a good writer uses both; he shows and also tells. Lee Child prefers to tell, not show. And that shows us.

The lack of editing in Lee Child’s novels is chronic. You come across a lot of unedited self-published books on Amazon, where many publications aren’t even self-published. But Lee Child’s novels come from a publisher. So why didn’t his publishers put his publishers to work and control him? It may be that now that he is so established they leave him alone. In an interview, he once commented that his editors are “Afraid of making me angry.” Really?

Lee Child seems to be a nice guy. He had setbacks and overcame them. I admire that, and his subsequent success is to be applauded. I’m sure you’d enjoy a good chat and a few beers with him. In interviews, he is open and honest. He has said that he does not seek awards; his goal is to provide entertainment; his way. And this he does, and his books sell like freshly baked bread in a famine. But how come? What he gives?

A long time ago, ‘in the past’, I had a sweet girlfriend in Toronto. Clare was well read. She loved good books, and her library revealed a Catholic taste in its mix of classics and contemporary writers. She had read George Eliot’s work mid gear in college and wrote an essay about it. He admired a lot of good writers and poets. But he loved Harold Robbins.

Robbins was, and is, one of the best-selling writers of all time, writing more than 25 bestsellers and selling more than 750 million copies worldwide in 32 languages.

Under pressure from Clare, and to please her, I got into it starting with The Carpetbaggers. I moved to A stone for Danny Fisher and so on. I didn’t read all of Robbins’s corpus, but I did read some. And yes, I did enjoy them, although I didn’t rate him too highly as a writer. Like Lee Child, Robbins wrote how he liked. He seemed like he had never heard of the ‘point of view’ rule, so very often you didn’t know which character was thinking what.

One day, Clare was lying on her couch flipping through the pages of Robbins’ latest book, The Adventurers. I joked with her. I told him that I thought Robbins was not a great writer; shit, really. I explained that and she agreed. “You’re right, Tony,” she said with a laugh.

“Do you agree?” I said, surprised.

“Yes,” she agreed. “I agree.”

“Did you read it though?”

“Yes,” she smiled. “She’s crazy, I know. I can’t explain it, but I just can’t get it out.”

Rick Gekowski is a writer, broadcaster, rare book dealer, and former Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Warwick. In 2011 he served as chair of the jury for the 2011 Man Booker International Prize for Fiction. The Guardian newspaper once said “Gekowski likes to be around a better class of books than the rest of us.” Impressive, right?

However, in an article published in The Guardian, Gekowski has come out of the closet and confessed to being a Jack Reacher addict who can’t wait to get his hands on Lee Child’s latest novel and devour it. It’s a bit like discovering that a world-renowned company blue cord The chef secretly sneaks out in disguise to a freeway shuttle cafe for greasy burgers and fries loaded with red sauce.

In his article, Gekowski admits that, “… nobody, I imagine, values ​​Niño for the quality of his prose. One can hardly find, in the entire corpus of the work, a single phrase worthy of independent admiration.” However, like Clare with Robbins, she can’t look down on Lee Child.

One reviewer accused Child of writing ‘garbage’; a little harsh, but true. From my point of view, Child’s prose is boring, clumsy, overwritten, and uninspiring. Compared to Lee Child, Harold Robbins was a disciplined literary genius. To me as a writer, Child is horrible and the Jack Reacher series is bad writing at its core. An English teacher might well use it in class to demonstrate what NOT to do. But does it ever sell! More than 70 million worldwide. Plus all those Amazon downloads. wow. But how? It sure beats me.

Here is a question I ask myself. Would the Jack Reacher series be the success it is if it were well written and thoroughly edited? And answer? Probably not.

Lee Child is British, English and well educated. He speaks the language of Shakespeare. So I have to assume that his poor writing and lack of respect for English is deliberate. It is quite obvious that there is a huge market for this material, and Child, with the full compliance of his publisher and his compliant publishers, is delivering the crap he wants. And getting rich in the process. It seems that his readers not only don’t care, they even seem to love his literary scum. It’s probably another conspiracy from the publisher. But to me, it’s another sad reflection on the dumbing down of Western civilization.

Writing ability was the first to drop. Think of those college grads who can’t write a simple job application letter and need to hire professionals to do it. Now it seems that the ability to read well is running out.

So there you have it. Bad writing sells; great time. But I don’t advise to go there. is a swamp in Quagmire. Lee Child was lucky; most likely you are not. Keep your feet on solid ground and stick with good writing? He also sells, though not as frantically as Jack Reacher’s stuff. But don’t be discouraged. Respect the English language. It’s cool, tough, and virile, with a body of literature behind it that’s second to none. Use it well and write the best you can. And make every word count.

P.S.

Jack Reacher is becoming a small industry. In addition to the movies, with Tom Cruise in the biggest miscast in movie history, there’s now a Jack Reacher online game. And for that morning cup, Jack Reacher Custom Coffee is available: ‘Robust. With body. Battle Tested’ plus a matching coffee mug to drink it with.