Why else would he be reinvented so often? He turns out to be a go-to character that was reinvented over and over again, in every culture with a storytelling tradition, whenever necessary, which was frequently. Like Robin Hood, for example, who I always assumed was a part-true, part-myth, partfable guy who had a beef with the Sheriff of Nottingham about 800 years ago.īut no. That's a character who has been around forever, in one form or another, for thousands of years, just about everywhere.
But I turned my back.Ĭlearly I was tapping into an even more ancient storytelling tradition - the noble loner, the mysterious stranger, the knight errant, the kind of guy most recently seen in Westerns, like a Zane Grey novel, or the movie Shane, or any Lone Ranger episode: a lonely, embattled community has a problem a mysterious stranger rides in off the range, solves the problem, and rides off again into the sunset.
I saw that up close - they put food on my table during my ITV years. In fact, I'm a little envious - soap operas are incredibly powerful narrative engines.
Because most series are soap operas - and I don't mean that in a derogatory way at all. Most series heroes have partners, friends, jobs, houses or apartments, favourite bars and restaurants, cars, bills, neighbours, family, and even dogs and cats. He remains detached, uneasy, bemused, unconvinced - and always alone. Reacher's transition from the rough, tough world of an army cop makes him a fish out of water in normal life. I made Reacher an ex-army officer, because I was interested in dislocation and alienation, and I had noticed that people who have spent their lives in the military have trouble adjusting to civilian life. Why and how? There must be a timeless element in there somewhere. Yet he gets Reacher perfectly, just like the 101-year-old lady, and the nine-year-old boy. He's a definite Gen X member, whose earliest childhood memories must be from the 1970s and 1980s, when the post-war consensus was well and truly over, and the world was a completely different place.
A "bonus issue", according to our accountant father. He's much, much younger than me - a late and unexpected addition to the family. Why are they so into my Boomer One fantasy?Īnd above all, how is my brother Andrew so good at it too? I'm stepping back from the series, we're working together for a few books, and then he will take over solo. Roscoe, Reacher's temporary partner in the story, is played by Willa Fitzgerald, and she's fantastic. REACHER is played by the actor Alan Ritchson, and he totally nails it.