Jack Reacher
| Jack Reacher | |
|---|---|
Jack Reacher, as played by Tom Cruise, appearing in the theatrical poster of the 2012 film Jack Reacher
|
|
| First appearance | Killing Floor (March 1997) |
| Created by | Lee Child |
| Portrayed by | Tom Cruise |
| Information | |
| Nickname(s) | Reacher |
| Gender | Male |
| Occupation | |
| Family |
|
| Nationality | American |
Jack Reacher is a fictional character and the protagonist of a series of books by British author Lee Child. A former major in the United States Army Military Police Corps, Reacher quit at age 36, and now roams the United States taking odd jobs and investigating suspicious and frequently dangerous situations. The series comprises twenty-one novels as of January 2017, the latest of which is titled Night School.
At the time Lee Child sat down to write his first novel Killing Floor, he was unemployed, having been fired from his position as a presentation director for Granada Television. According to Child, this was a purely pragmatic decision: "I wasn't one of these people that felt compelled to write. It had to keep a roof over our heads, so it was totally, totally 110% commercially motivated."
Critics have perceived other influences in Jack Reacher's creation. Bob Cornwell quotes Lee Child's reply in another interview as having created Reacher "as an antidote, to all the depressed and miserable alcoholics that increasingly peopled the genre".
The character's name first came to Child in a supermarket when an old lady, noting the span of Child's arms, asked for his help in reaching out to a can of pears. On seeing this, Child's wife commented that if his writing career did not work out he could "always get a job as a reacher in a supermarket". Reacher's ex-military background was a specific and tactical choice on his behalf. Child has explained, "I thought that I would do a book that's not the same as everybody else's. Everybody else had their guy working: a private guy in Boston or a police lieutenant in L.A., or wherever. I thought, 'Well, he won't be working, and he won't live anywhere, and let's just take it from there.'" Child also felt that this origin would lend itself to the character's personality and nomadic lifestyle: "This idea of the rootless alienation has got to come from somewhere, and I noticed that the most alienated people are always ex-military, because it’s like going from one solar system to the other, it’s so different. So that was an easy choice: Make him ex-military. Then make him ex-military police because, broadly speaking, these would be crime novels, and he had to have some investigative experience, and he had to understand procedures and forensics and so on. So that part was all set in stone".
...
Wikipedia