But at times, Child’s claim is somewhat convincing, because “Killing Floor” sure could have used more revision than it got. This was Child’s first novel, and he seems to have fallen into a classic beginner’s trap: The motivation hole. We begin with a neat set-up. Jack Reacher is a former MP who decided to drop off the grid and become a hobo. His only living relative is a brother he hasn’t seen in years, but the last time her heard from him, his brother mentioned that he’d passed through a town in Georgia and heard some rumors about a Depression-era blues guitarist they both like. One day Reacher is on a greyhound bus that passes a few miles away from the town and impulsive gets off and walks into town. But an unidentified corpse is found nearby and the cops decide that the drifter must be the killer. And then we’re off to the races.
This is a neat set up for a book: A falsely-accused drifter in a small town has to clear his name. We haven’t seen that a lot before. It’s more compelling than just a cop on the job. And it’s fun to root for a homeless guy for once.
But then we run into the motivation hole, because after about 100 pages, Reacher has convinced the local detective Finlay he couldn’t have done it (the bus driver alibied him). Normally, at this point, our hero could have decided to keep helping with the murder because he’s intrigued, or out of civic duty, and maybe that was the original plan, but Child, to his credit, seems to have listened to his hero, who told him that he didn’t really care. Reacher was free to go, and he was inclined to do so, so the book was over without the crime being solved.
To keep him there, Child pulls out the world’s biggest coincidence: before Reacher can leave town, the corpse is identified as his brother. True, his brother had told him about the town, but it’s sheer coincidence that Reacher showed up an hour after his brother was killed, especially because, as far as Reacher knew, his brother had just passed through once, months ago.
Obviously, this gives Reacher the secondary motivation he needs to get through the rest of the book: revenge, resulting in a far more clichéd book.
But how do we deal with that massive coincidence? Child simply has Reacher marvel over it for a minute:
- I leaned up against his warm metal flank and thought.
- The United States is a giant country. Millions of square miles. Best part of three hundred million people. I hadn’t seen Joe for seven years, and he hadn’t seen me, but we’d ended up in exactly the same tiny spot, eight hours apart. I’d walked within fifty yards of where his body had been lying. That was one hell of a big coincidence. It was almost unbelievable. So Finlay was doing me a big favor by treating it like a coincidence. He should be trying to tear my alibi apart. Maybe he already was. Maybe he was already on the phone to Tampa, checking again.
- But he wouldn’t find anything, because it was a coincidence. No point going over and over it. I was only in Margrave because of a crazy last-minute whim. If I’d taken a minute longer looking at the guy’s map, the bus would have been past the cloverleaf and I’d have forgotten all about Margrave. I’d have gone on up to Atlanta and never known anything about Joe. It might have taken another seven years before the news caught up with me. So there was no point getting all stirred up about the coincidence. The only thing I had to do was to decide what the hell I was going to do about it.
Got that, reader? “No point going over and over it.” “No point getting all stirred up about the coincidence.” We’re moving on.
Now John August has a rule of coincidences which states that you can get away with one big coincidence in each story as long as it hurts the hero instead of helping him. And this seems to fit at first: The victim being Reacher’s brother makes no sense in the current narrative, but it makes perfect sense if Reacher came to town to kill his estranged brother. So he should be back in the detective’s crosshairs.
But he’s not. The detective just accepts the coincidence. Moving on. It’s absurd.
This fits what I said last time: Novel readers love voice, and its close cousin, character. At this point, we love Reacher, and we’ll go anywhere with him, even into absurdity. We’re glad he didn’t stick around out of civic duty, because this is a fully-realized character who wouldn’t do that, so we accept the coincidence so that the book can keep going.
Don’t get me wrong: We’re annoyed, and we wish Child had revised to avoid creating a motivation hole that could only be patched by a big coincidence. We’re a little alienated by that, but ultimately, we go with it, because we like this guy and we like this case and we want to see how he kicks everybody’s ass (and shoots a lot of them in the head.)
Next time: Another thing that should have been revised!
4 comments:
Coupla semi-connected thoughts:
The opening to Killing Floor parallels the start of David Morrell's First Blood. A homeless man who is secretly the baddest of all soldier badasses drifts into a small town, gets hassled by the law at a diner, and ends up part of a large, violent story. There's no way Jack Reacher isn't a descendant of John Rambo.
Two of your axioms come to mind in your descriptions of the Reacher book. First, "genre is what it feels like." To a certain subset of people, the book's division of the world into the categories Guys What Know How It's Done and Get It Done and Know the Score and Everyone Else What Is Got-Damned Amateurs is what everyday life feels like. The books resonate with that audience because they think "yeah, that's how it really goes...goddamned amateurs messing everything up..."
The other axiom is "Life doesn't work like that." Because as real life teaches us, it doesn't.
Fiction usually intends to show us how to live. It explores our interiors, helps us learn our own ways. Child’s novels intends to show us how to survive, teaching us skills theoretically useful in navigating the dangers of the outside world. It engages with and lessens our anxieties like literary fiction, but they’re anxieties of incompetence and fear of violence instead of fears about love, hate, or truth.
You gotta love that Child combined the two roles exalted the Cult of the Professional to create his crypto-Batman. He's a soldier! He's a cop! He's both! He's TROOPCOP!
I have never seen nor read "First Blood", but it certainly seems indebted. I like the phrase "anxiety of incompetence", which is the flipside to the phrase I've used: "fetishization of expertise." I guess this is what unites Sorkin on the left with Child on the right.
This isn't the exact piece I was thinking of (I thought I remembered it being in the NYTimes Magazine), but if by chance you haven't read about this guy following Child around and studying his technique during the writing of Make Me, I think you'll enjoy it. (And it seems to bear out the incredible claim about the way he writes -- outliers, I guess.)
https://theconversation.com/the-man-with-no-plot-how-i-watched-lee-child-write-a-jack-reacher-novel-51220
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