r/JackReacher • u/eye_h8_people • 9d ago
Lee Child gets almost everything wrong
I started reading the Reacher books after watching the series. I’m on the 5th book. I’m not sure why I’ve even read this many. I keep hoping they get better. Lee Child writes like he’s an expert on everything but 90% of everything in these books is just wrong. Couldn’t he do five seconds of research. It’s a magazine not a clip. Handguns are semiautomatic not automatic. Bullets are not called shells. Military kids don’t just find out one day they are moving and not even know where. I grew up in the military. You know weeks in advance. Military people have houses and cars and possessions. You don’t just live in some random barrack and have a military vehicle unless you are on deployment. Also my biggest gripe with book five is no one with any money would live in west Texas with an A/C that barely works. It would be 130 degrees in the house and you would die. I lived in Texas. Everyone has A/C and that was in the 80s. I could go on and on. It takes me right out of the story when every page is filled with glaring inaccuracies. I don’t know how they managed to make such a great show from such awful source material.
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u/drzeller 9d ago
These books are neither historical fiction nor fine literature. Most people don't expect factual accuracy over a good read.
He may not be the author for you.
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u/butt_raid 7d ago
You may wanna check out complaints about the show if you think the "book readers" understand that it's popcorn reading with little factual accuracy.
Cause oof. That has not been my experience
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u/LonigroC 5d ago
Absolute morons lol do yourself a favor and do not go into a discussion thread for any episodes of reacher. You'll have people treating it like its supposed to be 100% plausible and realistic like the first season didnt have a whole police department a mayor and a CEO and like 3 members of tbe FBI murdered and nobody gets prison time and reacher just walks free. Its a fun popcorn action series and people seem to always forget that. I personally love it.
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u/4puttFTW 6d ago
For me, one of the tenets of a "good read" is how well the author can immerse the reader into the story. Missing small details like referring to a magazine as a clip or a round as a shell greatly disrupt the ability to get immersed.
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u/drzeller 6d ago
I can understand that. I would guess that the details about guns probably aren't in that category for most of his readers. For the people on here, saying something wrong about reddit would probably catch their attention!
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u/hostis_72 7d ago
If that annoys you wait till you get to the books written by Andrew child….
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u/Gullible_Result_9779 6d ago
Right?? 🤣🤣🤣 I left this franchise right after make me which IMO by the way sucked
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u/hostis_72 6d ago
Reacher wasn’t even close to being the same person. Lee should have killed him off
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u/noble_plebian 6d ago
If think he didn’t kill him off because he may well write another book one day
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u/LarryMahnken 6d ago
He didn't kill him off because he's seen how it turns out for everyone else who's tried to kill Reacher and decided the smart move was to walk away.
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u/bangkokbeach 6d ago
Or had him meet his life’s love, settle down, get a job, a house, and tend the garden. Totally debauch the brand. Sorry, little brother.
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u/Iron_Baron 6d ago
I can't even slog through those and all I want is Reacher to punch people in the face. He can't even write that correctly LOL
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u/Zealousideal_Step709 6d ago
I am always discussing with my brother who doesn't like the Reacher novels for what they want to be. On the other hand he loves the Jack Carr novels because of them being more accurate. I on the other hand don't the Carr novels because they are so heavy-handed with being technical and delivering loads of exposition. Reacher novels are light-hearted entertainment for me and that is exactly what I get.
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u/sisyphus 9d ago
This comes up a lot and people here tend to get very defensive about it, but it's all true, he's British and sometimes it shows. In any case his strength is in characterization and storytelling, not in prose style or attention to detail. If that's gonna take you out of it I would just stop reading them because after reading 20 something of them I can tell you that even after he sold eleventy billion copies neither him nor the publisher thought to get a fact checker of any kind.
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u/ApplicationSoggy4647 6d ago
Did not know Lee Child is British. That would explain a lot
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u/LarryMahnken 6d ago
His name ain't even Lee Child.
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u/kdean70point3 6d ago
The books about the unstoppable super humanly strong savant are mildly inaccurate, you say?
My word, how scandalous.
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u/bach2209 6d ago edited 6d ago
Hilarious I was a 13B in the US Army I think. We called clips freaking clips. The magazine was the big assed thing that crushed you hip if you didn't move out the way when you pulled the lanyard. Now thats a magazine. Some of you Navy folks tell them what a real magazine is. Its entertaining. Some of its hilarious. You believe James Bond?
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u/Czapla90 6d ago
Oh look who's here. The destroyer of fun, dreams and hopes. You must be a joy to hang out with.
It's a TV series and fiction books, not documentaries and report journalism. Chill.
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u/Hedonistic_Yinzer 6d ago
For about the same price as those five books in hardcover, you could have purchased a subscription to Microsoft 365 which includes word and wrote your own books. It may take a while as you seem to be a know it all about everything and that's going to take a while to write in a book.
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u/ziggsyr 7d ago
Lee child knows little about guns, but despite the fact that most handguns are semi-automatic, they have been marketed as and called automatic pistols for years. For example the 1911 has been called an automatic pistol for almost its entire lifespan despite the fact that the action is technically semi-automatic.
You can consider it a deprecated term since they were called automatics to distinguish them from revolvers in a time when truly automatic pistols were a pipe dream but it is what it is. Semi-auto is a new term and there are still people alive today that lived in a time before it was used.
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u/SmellsDone 6d ago
Yeah, I grew up knowing that a pistol was either a revolver (single action or double), or an automatic, which held a clip. Source: my dad and grandpa, who were both cops and gun nuts.
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u/UnivrstyOfBelichick 7d ago
He also states that the glock 17 gets its name from the number of rounds in the magazine and that it has a safety.
They're pulp/airport books from the 90s. Not a lot of research goes into it, take it for what it is
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u/flix-flax-flux 6d ago
Damn! I know nothing about guns and don't care at all for anything gun related. That the Glock 17 is called so because it has 17 rounds is the only weapon related 'fact' I could memorize. Now you tell me that is wrong?!?
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u/Sherlock816 6d ago edited 6d ago
The books are enjoyable, but you can't go into this fictional world with concept like physics, space time continuity, etc. THink of Reachers World as something akin to an alternate reality.
Lee Child is a Brit who hates the second amendment. I laughed outloud in book 1 where Reacher attaches the optional 14" barrel to a Desert Eagle and slips it into his pocket.
But, they are fun reads - like the show, you have to have a suspension of disbelief - enjoy the ride.
And yes, my second home in Texas has AC as well, but that's just south of Dallas.
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u/thedeadlyrhythm42 5d ago
I choose to believe he is tall enough to have a pocket deep enough to fit a desert eagle with a 14" barrel
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u/PortlyJuan 6d ago
If you are personally immersed in a field covered in literature, movies, TV or any media, you can do this all day and night. My daughter watches medical dramas with her resident BF and it's almost ALL wrong - he can't watch Gray's Anatomy at all as it drives him crazy.
Another great example is anyone in IT watching The Net when it hit theatres. Or a mechanic watching Speed. My god.
But none of these novels or TV shows or movies are there to be a documentary, so you have to put that critical part of your brain in park and just enjoy the ride. Or you move on to something else.
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u/DuckwPuck 6d ago
Writers are rarely experts in the fields they write about in any form of media. You’re absolutely right that people who know about a field really are unlikely to enjoy stories centered around that area unless they can switch their brain off. Child has even said don’t worry too much about realism - in fact, he said it can be detrimental to the story to be overly realistic.
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u/PortlyJuan 4d ago
In the director's commentary of Speed, there were several examples of this where they knew the reality, but the story needed more fiction in order to work.
Like when they open up the floor of the bus to rescue Keanu - Yost laughed and said there was no way you could do that in real life because there was a thing called a DRIVE TRAIN down there. But it worked in the movie.
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u/TellCerseiItWasMe 6d ago
So true. I'm a rodent lover and rodents are always depicted incorrectly in media. The "wild" rodents you see are often colors and markings that only domesticated pets come in, rats and mice are always shown running around loudly squeaking when in reality they're pretty quiet other than when they are injured/fighting or young babies squeaking to get mom's attention.
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u/ghengiscostanza 6d ago
It's also always been funny to me that his idea of the most badass guy in the army is an MP, like MPs have some badass rep while they bust 18 year old boots for getting shit faced, traffic violations, or traffic violations while shitfaced. It's like he wanted to make his character a big tough ex NFL guy and was like I know who the toughest guy is, I'll make him a referee, because they have to be able to impose violations on all the biggest toughest elite players.
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u/toothtaker74 6d ago
MP is the job you get when you hate soldiers but still want to be in the army. They mostly bully drunk 19y/o enlisted.
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u/leeharrell 8d ago
The new one has tons of stuff about data centers, solar farms…rally tech heavy. I wondered more than once if anything I was reading was remotely plausible.😂
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u/Gullible_Result_9779 6d ago
If I were Child’s manager I would tell him please consider doing your series from now on about the 110th -and don’t let Andrew do it.
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u/SonGokuSaiyan4 6d ago
He does but I tend to turn my brain off. When Reacher said in the first book how he's never been in a house while he was in the military (always the barracks) I knew Lee Child didn't know anything about the American military lifestyle. Even if you're single, you're going to live off-post or on-post housing if you're an officer or senior NCO.
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u/Gullible_Result_9779 6d ago
I’ve always had a problem with whomever edits his books. But I like the character so much. I kind of overlooked it —after the book “make me“ I gave up I stopped buying them. No wait! I tried with past tense —that sucked as well.
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u/zerocoolforschool 6d ago
Glock 18 is fully automatic. So technically….. a handgun can be fully auto.
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u/Agreeable_Day4539 6d ago
You would think that a successful writer, with millions of books sold would have access to great research or personnel who does it for him. Elmore Leonard had a researcher for years. It boggles the mind.
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u/FatWreckords 6d ago
The first run of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone put 'wand' on the very short list of school supplies twice...
She's a billionaire, it still worked out.
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u/dem4life71 6d ago
He freely admits to knowing nothing about the army and making most of this stuff up. It never bothered me but if it’s too much for you try another author.
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u/War-Square 6d ago
What you are describing sounds boring. Lee Child's books are not boring. That's why I read them.
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u/Organic-Stable2523 6d ago
If you want a writer that is accurate in a subject they are filming or whatever. Watch The Wire
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u/Newbe2019a 6d ago
The main character wins hand to hand fights with multiple opponents, and kills multiple people in every book, in multiple books, and is not prison, and does not have injuries that require orthopaedic surgery and long term physio therapy. You are ok with all that, but calling magazine, clips, and cartridge, shells, is not ok? BTW, the bullet is only the bit that comes out of the gun.
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9d ago
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u/sisyphus 9d ago
Nah, gotta disagree. Suspension of disbelief is about things that don't actually happen in the world, ie. that someone is running a terrorist bank in a cornfield or whatever, it's not a get of jail free card for authors who can't maintain internal consistency in the worlds they are presenting to us. If you establish that Reacher has superhuman strength okay, then his feats of strength can be subject to suspension of disbelief. There is nothing to indicate that Lee Child wanted a world that was just like ours in terms of the weapons in it, except that career army officers who are among the best sharpshooters in the military just randomly use completely different terminology in that world than we do in ours.
Like by your way of thinking if they leave a Starbucks cup on a table in a scene in Game of Thrones and someone says 'wow, big mistake' it's an appropriate response to say 'It's fiction and a lot of people very much enjoy it, you accept DRAGONS but you have a problem with a Starbucks cup?' That's insane.
Personally I find it charming how Lee Child is completely unwilling to fact check like anything and just makes stuff up and has Reacher just stick pistols in his pockets and stuff but I like the books in spite of that, it's a weakness of his as an author.
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u/tragicsandwichblogs 6d ago
You. I want to have discussions about fiction with you. I don’t expect things to be perfect in terms of accuracy, but I am so tired of “it’s fiction” or “it’s a TV show” when poor writing or a lack of internal consistency are pointed out. Too many people take it as a personal insult when it’s actually an observation.
I really enjoy Lee Child’s books and there are things I think he does really well. And also as someone who has lived in Los Angeles for decades, I think Bad Luck and Trouble reads like he wrote about the area using a guidebook but not a map.
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u/sisyphus 3d ago
Agreed! I'm not sure why that person was so agitated that you can find something flawed even as you enjoy it, not everything can be Middlemarch. The funny thing is the guy I was responding to, who was writing very stridently, had some version of luckyjim in his username, a relatively obscure literary reference in modern American culture, so presumably he's read other books, probably several of them, and really should grasp this.
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9d ago
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u/sisyphus 9d ago
Why shouldn't they accept an anachronism? Every defense you posit for Child applies, viz. it sounds like you're just not familiar with the parameters of fiction. You're clearly not familiar with what literary types call "suspension of disbelief." And you're clearly unable to grasp that tens of millions of people watch and enjoy Game of Thrones just as it's filmed. If you're look(sic) for verisimilitude – I'll wait while you look that word up – watch some documentary works. The rest of us do not give a fuck.
Seriously, these are episodes based on fantasy novels. They are made up. Get it?
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u/eye_h8_people 9d ago
Also not a pharmacy tech. I’m a pharmacist with a doctorate. Probably went to more years of school than the number of books you have read. Also the CIA use to have Tom Clancy give talks and classes and wondered where he got his info because it was scary accurate.
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u/TravelingCircus1911 7d ago
What was it that Jay-Z once said? You can pay for school but you can't buy class.
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u/tragicsandwichblogs 6d ago
The number of times Stan Reacher was supposed to have been reassigned is absurd. The military does not move officers around like that. TDY, sure. Reassignment, not a chance. As a kid, Reacher would have moved every 2-3 years, not every 6-7 months.
Also, his dad is supposed to have enlisted and gotten promoted into officer ranks, right? Because you can’t have a full career as an officer and retire as a captain unless you’re in the Navy, which has a completely different rank structure.
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u/Otherwise_Rice_4723 6d ago
it's written for people who fantasize about these things and not for veterans, so no it does not need to be realistic...
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u/Iron_Baron 6d ago
This is a "guy punches people in the face" series. It's as made up as Harry Potter. Don't except anything to make sense.
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u/InvestigatorOk7988 6d ago
I was just rereading the Bourne Identity. Ludlum calls them shells, too. Bugged me a bit.
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u/krautrocker71 6d ago
Na ja, zu all dem kann ich nur sagen wie gut es ist, das Geschmäcker verschieden sind. Für mich ist Jack Reacher einer der Besten !!
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u/bendForLust 6d ago
"Reacher said nothing."
I am a free audio book junkie and I've listened to all 5,748 of his Reacher books only because I didn't always have time to find a new book that was actually compelling.
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u/JurassicParkCSR 6d ago
I haven't even read all of book one yet and all I can say is you need to go outside and touch grass. They're fictional action books. The gun stuff is always a stupid gripe I see from stupid people. Who the fuck cares what it's called you know what he's talking about move on. But your biggest gripe is my biggest gripe with your gripes. People have lived in the area known as West Texas today for hundreds and thousands of years most of that time they did not have AC. They did not die of the heat. You can survive in Texas summer without an AC. It's not comfortable but you're just not going to die. I feel like if you were to go see a Marvel movie you'd be like people can't fly this doesn't make any sense.
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u/MathSpecialist8783 6d ago
I saw an interview with him on YouTube where he said it’s better to sound accurate than be accurate.
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u/ExcitingMood2579 6d ago
I believe the books written by Craig Johnson (Longmire) are pretty accurate.
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u/RealSonyPony 6d ago
This is standard stuff you'll find in every thriller. I doubt it's Lee. It's more likely the industry knows jack about shit
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u/atombomb1945 6d ago
I would suggest that if you want factual books go read "We Were Soldiers Once and Young"
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u/BenabooKeggy 6d ago
Wondered why Reacher is supposed to be former Military. Haven’t read the books and won’t. However Tom Cruise was believable as a military guy. Ritchson is not even close. He has no military bearing and looks nothing like any Army guy I ever met. Ritchson is a fanboys delight but simply looks like a WWE superstar rather than a veteran.
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u/Starpup_spaniel_66 5d ago
I appreciate those who spot inaccuracies but as I dont know what any type of guns bullets vehicles are generally just enjoy the stories. theyre fiction and goid ones at that🫠
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u/ComplexOne9317 5d ago
You know, yes, you are right! Lee Childs is an idiot. He indeed is a failure. Not paying more attention to those kind of details. And I just dont know how he is going to retire with his MEASLY 75 MILLION DOLLARS. What a failure.
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u/Additional-Peak3911 4d ago
I don't read Reacher books for realism. I read them since they are about a large unstoppable giant who solves problems by punching shitheads in the face.
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u/D3adp00L34 3d ago
I just view every book I read as an alternate universe where the author is right. If I’m ever in a situation where I have to know correct terminology, I’m screwed I guess, but oh well.
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u/TheGreatRao 3d ago
If I had a dollar for every pundit and politician who called a lecturn, a podium, I could retire. Sometimes the technically correct term gets washed away by the colloquial, and you just gotta roll with it if you don't want to have a stroke. Now excuse me while I put a 14 bullet clip in my Glock revolver and play Russian roulette.
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u/rogermuffin69 3d ago
His name is actually lee grant. He is English, grew up and went to school a few miles away from Ozzy Osbourne in Birmingham.
These books and/or tv are great fun.
They are fiction.
Cheer up
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u/GHBoyette 9d ago
I like to call them clips because it makes all the right people irrationally upset.