Characters
The author is on record frequently as saying that character is what count even in action-oriented stories. People don’t remember plots; they remember interesting heroes. The same goes with quirky minor characters. The author’s most obvious gift is using imagery efficiently to delineate memorable characters:
“An old black man with a fringe of snowwhite hair. Bent up with age. Fragile like a wizened old bird. His orange prison uniform was washed almost white. He must have been eighty. Must have been inside for sixty years. Maybe stole a chicken in the Depression. Still paying his debt to society. He stabbed the broom randomly over the corridor. His spine forced his face parallel to the floor. He rolled his head like a swimmer to see from side to side. He caught sight of Hubble and me and stopped.”
A Literal Mountain of Money
It’s not often that a view of a static image is the most memorable visual in an action-oriented book like a crime thriller, mystery, detective or spy story. Writers who excel in this sort of genre tend to be almost naturally gifted with the ability to writer action so that it easily is pictured in the reader’s mind. Reacher’s secret talent—well, not really secret since he admits to it—is being a great watcher. And this image of his merely watching is, arguably, the single most memorable image from the story:
“Hubble had said a million dollars in singles was a hell of a sight. I was looking at forty million. It was the height of the drift that did it to me. It towered way up. Ten times higher than the two tiny figures working at floor level. Higher than a house. Higher than two houses. It was incredible. It was a huge warehouse. And it was full of a solid mass of money. Full of forty million genuine one-dollar bills.”
Brothers
The bond between brothers can be simultaneously one of the strongest, but not literally one of the closest between any two men. Brothers are typically not like sisters in their bond to each other. Two sisters might not go a week without calling each other from opposite sides of the country while two brothers living a mile apart may not see each other for years. And yet, at a moment of greatest need during a time of least convenience, they can be side by side in what seems the blink of an eye. Maybe that’s why it’s so easy to make men into trained killers willing to die for a person they just met:
“We were only two years apart, but he was born in the fifties and I was born in the sixties. That seemed to make a lot more than two years’ worth of a difference to us. And like any pair of brothers two years apart, we irritated the hell out of each other. We fought and bickered and sullenly waited to grow up and get out from under. Most of those sixteen years, we didn’t know if we loved each other or hated each other. But we had the thing that army families have. Your family was your unit.”
The Watcher
Jack Reacher is an enormous guy; he’s like a walking skyscraper. And yet, his secret power is not brute strength or intimidation. It is attention. At times, he comes across as one of the least like literary characters to ever translate into movie fame because what he does best—and what he does a lot—is simply stay in one place and take notice of everything happening around him:
“It was a quarter to midnight when I settled in for the wait. I could feel the storm boiling up overhead. The air was like soup. It was pitch-dark. About midnight, the storm broke. Heavy drops the size of quarters spattered the leaves around me. They built into a deluge within seconds. It was like sitting in a shower stall. Awesome thunderclaps crashed about. They ripped and banged and the lightning blazed in sheets. The garden around me was lit up like day for seconds at a time. I sat under the lashing rain and waited.”
