Earlier today, Graham "Bookman" Beattie, the doyen of Downunder book bloggers, republished an article from The Bookseller, where Lee Child's publisher Transworld posed a question to make many crime fiction fans go weak at the knees: has Lee Child killed off Jack Reacher?The latest Child novel, 61 HOURS, includes a cliff-hanger ending, and, unusually, there is a second Child book due out later in 2010 (he usually writes one per year, always published around March).
I will be interviewing Lee Child by phone in the coming weeks, for an article to time with his visit to New Zealand in April, so I will see what I can get out of him (if anything) then. Publicity move, or is he about to pull a Rankin, and 'retire' his main hero so he can move on to something else?
You can follow the conversation about the news on Beattie's blog, HERE. It's a blog well worth visiting regularly, as Beattie is always at the forefront of book-related news and happenings.
For Reacher fans, this flashback novel on Reacher's last days in the Army is historically interesting because it fills gaps in his resume. It provides a different reason for why he left the Army than given in earlier novels. It also shows how Reacher's "no suitcase, will travel" ethos got started. Unfortunately, the novel is marred by excessive violence than exceeds the violence of any previous Reacher book and the aftermath is simply not credible. It's been a long series and Childs has done a good job in keeping the quality level up, but we may look at this novel as the beginning of a marked decline in the series.
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