I Haven't Loved a Loner Killer Like This Since Mack Bolan

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Jack Reacher has me the way Mack Bolan had me when I was a kid, and I didn't expect to feel that again. I've been burning through Lee Child's Reacher novels on audiobook, one straight into the next, the way I used to go through Executioner paperbacks, and somewhere in the middle of the series I realized I'm in love with a loner killer for the second time in my life.

I found The Executioner when I was nine or ten, living in Salt Lake, the neighborhood by the Honolulu airport. Don Pendleton launched Mack Bolan in 1969 with War Against the Mafia. Bolan is a Green Beret sniper who comes home from Vietnam after Mafia loan sharks destroy his family, and he declares war on the mob. Pendleton wrote the early books himself. After he sold the character to Gold Eagle in 1980, a stable of ghostwriters kept a new one on the rack every month, which meant that for a boy in Honolulu there was always another Bolan waiting.

In 1985 my mom flew me from Honolulu to San Francisco for the first Mack Bolan convention. Pendleton arrived at the Presidio by helicopter for the press conference. Doug Lennox, a Canadian actor, played Bolan for the fans. Gil Cohen, who painted the covers I'd been staring at for years, was there too, and Pendleton and his ghostwriters took me to dinner. Linda Pendleton's photos from that weekend are still online, and one of them is Don standing with me, captioned as the kid "who traveled from Honolulu to meet Don."

Bolan killed a great many men, and Pendleton was careful about who he was anyway: "Mack Bolan was not born to kill, as many of his comrades and superiors secretly believed. He was not a mechanically functioning killer-robot." That sentence is the reason a ten-year-old could love him. Bolan had a code and a reason, and he carried his grief into every book. He fought his war alone, and he never took any pleasure in it.

Lee Child published Killing Floor in 1997, and the series now runs to thirty books. Reacher is a former Army military police major, six foot five, with no address, no car, no luggage, and a folding toothbrush in his pocket. He drifts into his wars. He gets off a bus in the wrong town, notices what nobody else noticed, and stays exactly as long as it takes to settle it. Most of Child's readers turn out to be women, which I wrote about on Substack, and I'm delighted to be in that club.

Most of my Reacher has come through my ears, and the voice in my ears belongs to Dick Hill, who read the series for American listeners for years. He is the best thing about these books, at least the way I take them in. Rumor has it that Lee Child called him his favorite narrator, and I believe it. His Reacher is slow and dry, so calm that the violence lands like weather. Hill narrated more than a thousand audiobooks and won three Audie Awards, and before he was an actor he was a Marine in Vietnam, a soldier who came home. I hear that in his Reacher, a man who has already seen the worst and has decided to stay polite about it. Hill died in October 2022, and every Reacher he recorded is still on the shelf, waiting for me.

To me they're the same animal, forty years apart. Each is a soldier who came home and kept soldiering, a man whose skills the civilian world has no use for, living by a code that sits outside the law and holds tighter than it does. Each does the arithmetic before the violence, the angles and the distances and who moves first, and each stays polite right up until the moment he isn't. They're both alone, and I've always read their solitude as freedom.

Where they differ is the shape of the war. Bolan's war was personal and it never ended. He turned it into a profession, with a rolling arsenal and a body count that ran across hundreds of books. Reacher's wars are incidental and short, fought with his hands, his head, and whatever happens to be lying around, and when the job is finished he walks to the edge of town and sticks out his thumb.

I loved Bolan as a boy because he never quit. I love Reacher as a grown man because he knows exactly when to leave, and because, like Bolan, there's always another one waiting.

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