How Lee Child’s Killing Floor Was Transformed Into “Reacher”

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For years there was an unwritten rule that Reacher’s face should never be shown on the cover of a Lee Child book. It was first broken by his first publisher, New York’s G.P. Putnam Sons, in an act of petty revenge when Child was in the process of switching over to Bantam. Not only did they splash Reacher’s face all over Without Fail: they dressed him in one of big brother Joe’s Treasury suits, with white shirt and tie and Men-in-Black shades.

Then came the Hollywood years, with tie-in editions between 2012 and 2016 proclaiming, against all plausibility, “Tom Cruise IS Jack Reacher”. I was present when a new cover image for Never Go Back came through over text: “I said no guns on the cover,” Lee said, tossing his phone aside in disgust. He wasn’t crazy about the prominence of the flag, either.

Now we have Alan Ritchson, “Reacher” plain and simple. “Everyone calls me Reacher,” he insists, doggedly, at the start of the inaugural season of the new television series, Reacher, streaming on Prime Video from February 4th in its eight-episode entirety. “It’s just Reacher.” Promo shots and tie-in covers opt for the delicate compromise of a backlit hulk seen from behind in profile: carved from bronze, a metallic glint in the eye, the emphasis firmly on Reacher’s 50-inch chest and basketball biceps. Some say Ritchson is too obviously muscular, but there are no bulging veins on his polished torso and his neck is the right side of human.

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The essentials of character are deftly established by lead writer and showrunner, Nick Santora. Reacher says nothing until six and a half minutes in, staring down a bully before even setting foot in the diner, with those “eyes that could blink and come back different, like changing the channel, from a happy show to some bleak documentary about prehistorical survival a million years ago” (The Midnight Line). He is either silent – “I don’t like talking” – or delivering a disquisition (a word Child used of the as yet unnamed hero in early planning notes) in a rapid-fire monotone suggestive of someone whose Holmesian mind works faster than his mouth. In quiet mode his facial expressions still convey a characteristic sense of ratiocination. As in the first-person voice of the book (“I knew what it was, but I felt polite. So I looked puzzled for him”) there is a hint of the robot who has recently learned to simulate human emotion: the suddenly adjusted expression, the jerky movements, the metronomic walk.

“You’re always so confident in your theories,” says Margrave’s chief detective Finlay, to which the riposte is: “As confident as I am that you went to Harvard, you’re recently divorced and that you quit smoking in the last two weeks.” Book Reacher is even more assertive. “I know you’re a Harvard postgrad, you’re divorced and you quit smoking in April.” Ritchson has Reacher’s disarming pedantry nailed – “It was last night until 11:59 and 59 seconds and then it becomes this morning” – and in subsequent episodes is properly bookish too, invoking Cato (Reacher has a soft spot for the Stoics) and responding to Roscoe’s choice of Eudora Welty as an alias with the off-the-cuff remark that he likes short stories because “they get straight to the point”.

In the book, the police empty Reacher’s pockets of “a roll of cash”, “some coins”, “receipts, tickets, scraps” – a harmonica had been deleted from the first draft manuscript; the toothbrush didn’t appear until book three, Tripwire; and only in book four does it become “a plastic thing that folded in half and clipped into his pocket like a pen”, which the ex-military policeman backdates to a purchase “on mustering out” of the Army. Screen Reacher’s pockets reveal $212, a folding toothbrush, a Second World War medal from France that prefaces the family back story, and a passport: the first indication that the events of Killing Floor have been shunted forward in time. “No Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram [none of which existed at time of writing in 1994], no driving license, mortgage, insurance claims,” Roscoe notes on “processing” him: “no online profile at all.” I remember when Reacher first started carrying a passport post 9/11 and wasn’t too happy about it. I wasn’t too happy about it either, since here it deprives him of the chance to introduce himself with those (book) series-defining words from Chapter Two, unchanged from the first draft: “My name is Jack Reacher. No middle name. No address.”

The nudge into the present allows issues that have always riled Reacher/Child to be aired in more 21st-century terms. Black chief detective Finlay, always subject to endemic racism, becomes the victim of white police brutality when he strays off his patch, while Neagley, the fan favourite drafted in ahead of schedule from Without Fail, summarily floors a guy who steps out of line with a lap dancer and follows through with the words: “when a woman says don’t touch me, it means don’t touch me”. “I’m not asking, sir. I’m telling,” officer Roscoe Conklin informs Reacher on his arrival at Margrave police station. “But don’t worry. I won’t kick your ass unless you make me.”

Book Roscoe has “spirit”, but when danger threatens in her own home she needs not only Reacher’s protection, but a little psychological management too.

“‘I’ll tell you what, Roscoe, someone even thinks about hurting you, they die before they finish thinking.’

It was working. I was convincing her. I needed her to be bright, tough, self-confident. I was willing her to pick it up. It was working. Her amazing eyes were filling with spirit.

‘I mean it, Roscoe,’ I said. ‘Stick with me and you’ll be OK.’

She looked at me again. Pushed her hair back.

‘Promise?’ she said.

‘You got it, babe,’ I said. Held my breath.

She sighed a ragged sigh. Pushed off the wall and stepped over. Tried a brave smile. The crisis was gone. She was up and running.”

Screen Roscoe isn’t having any of that, and though Reacher is immutably programmed to act on those ancient protective instincts, he learns, in her presence, to bury them deep. It isn’t possible to intimidate Roscoe, he informs an adversary late on in the season. While also letting him know that should he even think about trying he’ll be dead before the thought is half-formed.

Like all characters Lee favours, in a trend that became more pronounced the more Reacher stories he wrote, Roscoe shares not only the hero’s bravery but his intelligence too. In Chapter Four of Killing Floor she offers Reacher coffee, which he accepts with another defining line: “No cream, no sugar.” While she fetches it, he assesses her from his cell. She’s “about thirty, dark, not tall”, “but to call her medium would be unfair”, and when she hands the drink through the bars it isn’t only the coffee that smells good. But screen Roscoe doesn’t offer him coffee. She just delivers it. Black. No cream and sugar. How did she know? he wonders. “Cream and sugar are nonsense,” she says, channelling her inner Lee Child, and Reacher seems like “a no-nonsense guy”. Perhaps this closer approximation to Reacher/Child goes some way to explaining her fair colouring.

The update has historical consequences for Reacher’s mother, too. Nonetheless, Mme Reacher (also blond) – referred to in Killing Floor only once as “a French civilian” – stars in this first season, which plunders the books for her finest moments and some of Lee’s most moving prose. Interpolated flashbacks loosely based on 2004’s The Enemy and 2011’s Second Son (both prequels to Killing Floor) establish her as the guiding light for her sons. It is she who teaches Joe to curb his idealism and accept his limitations, and she who permits Reacher, who has no limitations but rather “the strength of three boys”, to trust his instinct for what is right. The medal Reacher carries is a reminder of a wisdom he detects in Roscoe too: as Finlay remarks, Roscoe is the one he first listens to.

“Why does trouble always find you, Reacher?” his mother asks him as a boy. It’s a purely rhetorical question. She knows why: because trouble needs fixing, and the universe has chosen Reacher for the job. Or as Reacher puts it in the present: “Trouble just kinda seems to find me.” “Thinking I’m supposed to do something about it.” The flashbacks to boyhood reveal his formation as “unstoppable”, “a force of nature”, and “a nightmare for somebody” (according to his father in Second Son). A nightmare for a whole lot of people, more like – even Finlay loses track of the body count as Reacher dispatches the forces of evil in Margrave.

“I guess I’ll find everyone responsible,” Reacher says at one point, “and kill every last one of them.” Roscoe decries his decision to shoot a couple of bad guys in the back. “I had an opportunity to take them out,” he explains, “so I did.” She sees him lie and cheat, as have we all since those first electric fights back in the Killing Floor jail. But like Reacher’s mother, like us, Roscoe never seriously doubts his sense of right and wrong. “I know people,” she observes in Episode One, “and you’ve got kind eyes.” And later: “You’re a good man.” Seems Jim Grant’s storytelling instincts were spot on when, back in sleepy Kirkby Lonsdale on the fringes of England’s Lake District, in his notes under “Character of H [for hero]”, he wrote: “Must be some moral base albeit probably bleak & cynical to a degree.”

Reacher never paints himself in a flattering light. He rarely shies away from the truth, however brutal. “No,” is his monosyllabic rejoinder whenever his adopted colleagues plead with him to observe the niceties of the law, or simply, for once, stay out of trouble. But he’s polite for a thug. Well brought up. Even when he’s about to be arrested at gun point he replaces his cutlery quietly and remembers to tip the waitress. He’s kind to children and dogs. The developing relationships with Finlay and Roscoe in this opening season shine a light on his empathy, even luring him briefly out of his emotional shell. But book readers already know Reacher’s heart is not made of stone, however impregnable his exterior.

In The Enemy we learn how he is shaped by a mother’s love – the newly made beds, the fresh flowers on the nightstand, the table laid each morning for breakfast – and of the meaning such tokens of affection hold. We are reminded of his humanity when tears roll down his cheeks in Die Trying, by the grieving Dorothy Coe in Worth Dying For, the desperate Hobies in Tripwire, and their latter-day counterparts in Blue Moon; in Make Me he is touched by Chang’s unsolicited concern for his health; in The Midnight Line his compassion is off the scale. It’s this emotional vulnerability, the expression of an innate sensitivity to injustice, that triggers his most righteous rages, where at the flick of a switch he shifts from placid observer to avenging angel.

But both book and script writers err on the side of less is more in regard to feelings.

Child has often described how he consciously set out to create a simpler, old-style hero, relatively free of the quintessentially modern burden of introspection (the opposite of immediate precursor Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch): he didn’t want to write the kind of story that added to real-life woes. But it took a while, and approximately two hundred pages of cuts, to scrub the Reacher of Killing Floor clean of navel-gazing. First-draft Reacher is less confident and more self-questioning; he engages in plenty of soul-searching and even remorse. But gradually, as the novice writer finds his feet, the hero becomes less explicit about his feelings, cooler and less hot-headed. He stops saying he hates people, and muttering “smug bastard” under his breath. He stops analysing his shortcomings and agonising over his failures. He becomes that rare creature: someone who does what he thinks is right then moves on, without beating himself up over his actions or attempting to revisit the past.

“I was arrested in Eno’s diner” is one of the most celebrated opening lines in contemporary popular fiction. So why swap out Eno for Margrave? And why scrap the eggs in favour of peach pie? The answer to the second question is revealed as the season progresses, and both menu choices are straight from the Reacher/Child playbook, unlike the okra that gets a surprise cameo at Jolene’s Chicken Shack. But surely to stick with Eno and his eggs would have been an easy way of giving the watching reader what she wants, for so many years Child’s mantra?

At least it was still raining when Reacher stepped off the bus, though I’m not sure the glass of the diner was “pebbled with bright drops” or the red and blue lights of the police cruisers were reflected in the window. At least Reacher’s first fight move is the head butt, and he still threatens to have the leading “fat boy” carried out in a bucket. And Roscoe takes him to a thrift store because he got blood on his clothes, and there are periodic conversations about his lifestyle choices and appearance, and we are schooled in the difference between vagrant and hobo.

In a story, as in an investigation, details matter. Though personally – book and television differ on this particular detail – I choose not to dwell on who gets to eat whose balls.

As the season progresses it develops its own rhythm, exactly as it must. Prime Video’s Reacher is its own story, “based on Killing Floor by Lee Child and his character, Jack Reacher”. It’s a cover of the hit original, someone else’s interpretation of the Howlin’ Wolf song. But Lee is fine with that. Always has been. Always was, even with Tom Cruise. It’s why first sentences are his favourites. In the beginning the possibilities are infinite. Anything can happen. Then, to his way of thinking, the possibilities are reduced by half, then by half again, and so it continues, with the constraints increasing and the possibilities decreasing until finally you reach the end: the last, inescapable, necessary word. The book follows its own evolutionary logic, almost as though it were writing itself. It’s like a funnel that narrows with every decision the writer makes, and when you get far enough along there’s only one way to go.

Perhaps that’s why, in that Skydance writers’ room, they changed the name of the diner. Trying merely to reproduce the 25-year-old Killing Floor was never going to work. But swap out a single word from the opening line of the story, and you end up in a parallel, yet intimately related, universe.

It was last November that I had my first glimpse of the new Reacher, at an impromptu advance screening at London’s Sea Containers. Not only the first two episodes, but the man himself. Ritchson has presence, and that’s for damn sure. A degree of charisma too. In conversation beforehand he asked if, in the course of writing my biography of Lee Child, I had seen the original handwritten manuscript of Killing Floor. He was pleased that I had. I was struck by Ritchson’s interest in the deep background of the immense character he has been called upon to embody, and the sense of responsibility he feels towards its disembodied textual origins. In the last week of January I watched the whole season. I could be persuaded to watch it again.

Alan Ritchson is the face of Jack Reacher now. But check out the profile shot at 00:02 of Episode Four (I prefer to avert the gaze from what comes immediately before and after, which I couldn’t help noticing involves the trunk of a car). For that split second, Reacher looks just like Lee Child.

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Heather Martin’s authorized biography of Lee Child, The Reacher Guy, is published by Constable at Little, Brown in the UK, and in the US by Pegasus Books.

Reacher launches on Prime Video on February 4th.

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