In 2022, when the TV series Reacher debuted, Alan Ritchson’s take on the character fully embodied what millions of readers had in their minds since 1997, when the first novel, Killing Floor, was published. And yet, TV-Reacher wasn’t presented as a period piece — and all the Prime Video seasons of the show have updated and adapted specific Lee Child novels from the past. This means that certain references and pieces of technology have been changed throughout the TV series, putting the novels in their own separate timeline and continuity. So, while Ritchson’s Reacher can be roughly in his late 30s or early 40s, how old is book-Reacher?
With the release of the 31st novel in the series, Chain Reaction, Reacher teams up with a returning fan-favorite character, Susan Turner, who most famously appeared in the book Never Go Back. But that book was published in 2013, and Reacher’s first adventure was in 1997. So how old is Jack now? Shouldn’t he be like 60? Speaking to Men’s Journal, Lee Child and Andrew Child have made the case for imagining book-Reacher as ageless. Here’s why.
“The most practical answer is we are just ignoring it because that enables us to have Reacher doing what the readers want Reacher doing,” Andrew Child tells Men’s Journal when directly asked about the question of Jack’s age in the just-released novel, Chain Reaction. “We could obviously start writing stories where he’s lining up at the drug store with a Zimmer frame [walker] waiting to pick up his arthritis medicine. We could do that, but we don’t think anybody wants it.”
In a sense, this solution is a lot like the general approach of the cinematic James Bond franchise; simply keep the character at a fixed age, loosely honor the continuity of existing characters, but don’t worry too much about the exact chronology.
Then again, if one wanted to get really creative, a reader could simply imagine that, like the TV series, a version of Never Go Back still happened in the backstory of Chain Reaction, but perhaps it was just in a different year. Which, Andrew Child points out, is basically what the TV series has done: “In Season 1, when you have the bit where Reacher gets arrested and taken to jail, and you’ve got Roscoe looking for his social media presence, I mean it was hilarious,” he says. “Because back in ’97 there wasn’t any such thing as a social media presence. So Reacher naturally didn’t have one. But it doesn’t matter, because he wouldn’t have one anyway.”
Lee Child, Andrew’s elder brother, and the creator and sole writer of the first 24 Reacher novels, agrees that the only way forward with the books is to create a basically timelessness to Jack himself, which works, because even in 1997, the character was a bit of a throwback.
“He was still fundamentally a 19th-century guy in the 21st century,” Child says of Reacher’s analog preferences. In Chain Reaction, the larger mystery of the book is connected to shady data centers and unscrupulous young tech moguls in a grab for power. Reacher may not understand the specifics of the tech involved, but he is adaptable.
“Reacher is not a guy who will ever care about what happened yesterday or worry about what’s going to happen tomorrow,” Lee Child says. “He lives purely for today.”
Like one of Reacher’s literary inspirations, Sherlock Holmes, Child admits that there are bound to be some minor inconsistencies with a character that’s been around for this long. But he wants readers, like Reacher himself, to stay in the moment and accept whatever is the most current version to be the correct version.
“If there’s something contradictory between book 21 and book five, I would like people to just assume 21 is right,” Child says. “Because we should believe in the myth in the moment.”
The 31st Reacher novel, Chain Reaction by Lee Child and Andrew Child, is for sale from Bantam (Penguin Random House) now.
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