Of all the books you’ve written, is there one that stands out to you, you have a special fondness for? Maybe not the best-selling one, maybe not the one that people bring up the most, but one where you look back at your work and say, “That one’s my favorite.”
I like “The Midnight Line” from that point of view, it’s about the opioid addiction issue, but I wrote it with tremendous sympathy from the addict’s point of view. And Reacher is not an addict. Reacher doesn’t necessarily have tremendous sympathy for that, but he’s a human being and he sees another person in trouble and doesn’t comment negatively at all. So I felt that one, it is kind of the one I’m proudest of, in a way. It was a social issue handled through an action thriller that produced a lot of help to people. After what I heard, a lot of people found it helpful and a lot of doctors actually wrote saying, “Thank you for treating it as a human problem rather than a criminal problem.”
That one stands out to me too because it’s one of the very few problems that Reacher can’t punch the way out of. It’s one of the very few books where, I don’t want to say Reacher’s helpless, but he finds himself facing a precipice that he can’t scale. And it is generally upsetting as a reader to see Reacher unable to fix that.
Yeah. Quite a few of the latter ones I’ve tried to introduce that. The one called “Make Me” where it’s basically the dark web-based type of things. Reacher understands he can win the battle, but he can’t win the war. And that’s a little dispiriting to him and it produces a nuance. It’s not clean cut. It’s not total victory. It’s victory today, but the problem will continue tomorrow.
You’ve been very public about this, a few years ago you handed the books off to your brother and he’s been publishing, I think, a few of them now under his name. And I know you said that you wanted the transition to be smooth. You wanted people to be able to continue without issues. I’m wondering, in your opinion, how has the transition gone? Have you noticed any difference in reader reaction, or do you think it’s worked?
Reader reaction has been — it’s kind of validated the theory I had from the start, which was that I had serious discussions with my publishers from the start about leaving the author name off altogether. This is about a character, we should just call it a Jack Reacher book and have no mention of the author because the central thing is the character himself.
So Andrew has taken over and the reader reaction has been fairly seamless. There’s always a few clever dicks who want to point out that, yeah, it’s changed. But you get negative comment about anything. The amount is how many negative comments, and there’s been very few. And I think it’s worked very well.
***
The first three episodes of “Reacher” season 3 are streaming now on Prime Video.